Marked for Disposal: Vector Festival Flagship Performance

Marked for Disposal is a performance and sound composition by SA Smythe that stages encounters through the anarchival—a somatic meditation on what cannot or should not be kept, and the pain and power in being mis/remembered. Smythe sifts through archival detritus, analogue decay, and ghostly transmissions as a live index of refusal, reflecting on lingering presence and kinship underneath institutional conditions.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

SA Smythe is a transmedia storyteller, composer, critical theorist, and educator. They currently live in Tkarón:to, where they also work as associate professor of "Black Studies and the Archive" at UofT. Smythe was a 2024–25 artist-in-residence at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Leighton Studios), a 2023–24 MacDowell Fellow in Multimedia Installation, and a 2022 recipient of the Rome Prize. Across poetry, performance, nonfiction, film, and sound, Smythe’s work traces ancestral and ongoing struggles against dispossession, trans antagonism, and towards black trans and migrant liberation and belonging. They can be found in international exhibitions including the 2024 Toronto Biennial, films, anthologies, protests, lit festivals, therapy sofas, and dance floors. Rooted in the Caribbean bush, the Mediterranean, and Central American cordillera, Smythe moves with clarity of principle and a commitment to collective liberation—from every river to every sea.

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Dallas Fellini is a curator and writer living and working in Toronto. Their research is situated at the intersection of trans studies and archival studies. Dallas is a co-director of the arts publication Silverfish and has curated exhibitions and screenings for the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, the Art Gallery of Guelph, Gallery 44, Vtape, Trinity Square Video, Libby Leshgold Gallery, Xpace Cultural Centre, Hearth, Riverdale Hub Gallery, and the Jackman Humanities Institute. Dallas holds a Master of Visual Studies in Curatorial Studies from the University of Toronto and is the recipient of the 2024 Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators.

Image: SA Smythe, proclivity (2022), p.c.: for Sediments. After Memory exhibition, Mattatoio Museum, Rome