It's been a while since we hosted a lecture, so here we are. Musician and community activist Stefan Christoff of Anarchist Mountains fame is coming to Bulgaria and we cannot wait to hear his presentation on the crossing points between art and anarchism at our favorite Fabrika Avtonomia. See you there.
A presentation on multiple intersections of art and activism by Stefan Christoff, a longtime community organizer and musician living in Montréal / Tiohtià:ke. This presentation will highlight various fronts of expression of the arts within social movements against systemic oppression, injustice and for collective liberation, from street art collaborations with the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative, to music programming collaborations with the Suoni per il Popolo festival surrounding building support for Palestinian human rights and the global Boycott, Divestment and Sancations (BDS) movement. Also Stefan will highlight active collaborations with the Immigrant Workers Centre (IWC) and efforts to build support within networks of artists and cultural workers for efforts to defend the rights of precarious workers within the context of the pandemic who are holding down frontline positions. Stefan has collaborated with artists and activists globally and this talk will focus on the intersections of Stefan's work within this sphere.
Stefan Christoff is a community organizer, writer and musician living in Tiohtià:ke / Montréal. Stefan is a longtime community radio show host on CKUT 90.3fm and produces the program Free City Radio that explores the intersections between the arts and social activism. As a community organizer, Stefan is on the board of the Immigrant Workers Centre (IWC) in the city and has been deeply involved in migrant justice movements over the last two decades. In activism Stefan has worked to explore the intersections between struggles for justice locally and globally, working toward the mobilizations of the anti-corporate globalization movement in Québec City in 2001 to oppose the now defeated Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) agreement and also the World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial meeting in Montréal in 2003. Stefan has a longstanding connection to anti-colonial struggles of Indigenous communities, having spent time on the frontlines with Indigenous land defenders in the Algonquin community Grassy Narrows, the Mohawk communities of Kanehsatà:ke, Akwesasne and Kanesatake, as well as with the Secwépemc people fighting colonial land expropriation by the Canadian colonial state. Stefan has been a longtime organizer within the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement in support of Palestinian liberation globally and helped to coordinate programming around the Palestinian freedom struggle at both the World Education Forum in Ramallah, Palestine, in 2010 and the World Social Forum in Dakar, Senegal in 2011. Stefan is a musician who has collaborated widely with musicians both locally and globally having released numerous albums in collaboration with various art and music collectives globally. As a writer Stefan has contributed to many publications both locally and globally, including Al Jazeera.