Centre

Mojeanne Behzadi

Mojeanne Behzadi is a curator and poet based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. She is currently the director of Art Speaks, an international contemporary art lecture series and the curator of research and programs at Artexte. Mojeanne holds an MA in Art History from Concordia University and works as an independent curator on numerous projects. She recently developed and hosted the Trajectories podcast for the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and she curated the Spillover Love exhibition at the Stewart Hall Art Gallery in Pointe-Claire in 2021. Her current curatorial research focuses on love as a radical tool for resistance, mobilisation, and social transformation.

Joséphine Bacon
Innu poet 

Poet, director, documentary filmmaker, lyricist, translator, storyteller and Innu-Aimun teacher, Joséphine Bacon is an Innu from Pessamit. She is a leading Quebec author of international acclaim and a great ambassador of First Nations culture in Quebec and abroad. Very involved in the Indigenous literary and artistic scene, she inspires the younger generations to be proud of being Indigenous and to defend their language and culture. Translator-interpreter and teacher of Innu-aimun (the Innu language) for 40 years, Joséphine Bacon has dedicated her life to listening to and passing on the knowledge of the elders. She writes by travelling the kilometres of her memory where the stories of the ancestors to whom she served as interpreter are recorded. By enriching literature with works written in Innu and transposed into French, she has written a new page in Quebec poetry while contributing to the perpetuation of the Innu language.

Joséphine's poetry is currently on display outside of the PHI Centre as part of Water Road, a free interactive multimedia installation visible from the building’s exterior windows on St. Pierre Street.

Jeremy Dutcher
Performer, composer, activist and musicologist

Performer, composer, activist, musicologist — these roles are all infused into Jeremy Dutcher's art and way of life. His music, too, transcends boundaries: unapologetically playful in its incorporation of classical influences, full of reverence for the traditional songs of his home,and teeming with the urgency of modern-day struggles of resistance.

A member of Tobique First Nation in New Brunswick, Jeremy first did music studies in Halifax before taking a chance to work in the archives at the Canadian Museum of History, painstakingly transcribing Wolastoq songs from 1907 wax cylinders. “Many of the songs I’d never heard before, because our musical tradition on the East Coast was suppressed by the Canadian Government’s Indian Act.” Jeremy heard ancestral voices singing forgotten songs and stories that had been taken from the Wolastoqiyik generations ago.

As he listened to each recording, he felt his own musical impulses stirring from deep within. Long days at the archives turned into long nights at the piano, feeling out melodies and phrases, deep in dialogue with the voices of his ancestors. These “collaborative”compositions, collected together on his debut LP Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, are like nothing you’ve ever heard. Delicate, sublime vocal melodies ring out atop piano lines that cascade through a vibrant range of emotions. The anguish and joy of the past erupt fervently into the present through Jeremy’s bold approach to composition and raw, affective performances enhanced by his outstanding tenor techniques.

“I’m doing this work because there’s only about a hundred Wolastoqey speakers left,” he says. “It’s crucial for us to make sure that we’re using our language and passing it on to the next generation. If you lose the language, you’re not just losing words; you’re losing an entire way of seeing and experiencing the world from a distinctly indigenous perspective.”