Encrypt Your Nudes

The web offers a unique environment for queers, women, and marginalized people to grow and create communities. But these spaces often find themselves under attack from conservative and hateful groups. The purpose of this workshop is to help members of marginalized communities develop self-defense tools to improve their own safety and privacy on the web. This endeavour aims to reclaim agency over those spaces, lives, and communities both online and offline. The workshop will cover basic low-tech security techniques related to one’s online presence as well as techniques to counteract cyber harassment and online attacks (legal recourse, damage-control, self-care). This introductory workshop will not cover deeper cybersecurity concerns such as government surveillance and the gathering of information by corporate entities. This workshop is based on the zine Encrypt Your Nudes!.

Liane Décary-Chen is an artist and activist operating within the fields of digital and interactive media. A common thread which runs through all her projects is the desire to equip women and marginalized people with tools that will allow them to take control over their bodies, lives, and stories. She has worked in numerous fields including wearable computing, games, interactive film making, tech education, and community organizing. Through her Tech Witches project, she runs Encrypt Your Nudes!, a cyber security guide for artists and activists. Additionally, she co-organizes GAMERella and Image+Nation Prolab while also occasionally appearing on Vice Quebec.

Accessibility

4TH SPACE, at Concordia University is located on the ground floor level and is wheelchair accessible. There is one wheelchair accessible, gender-neutral bathroom on the third floor. To raise other accessibility requests or questions please contact 4TH SPACE.

We acknowledge that to be “on site” requires that we question our relationship to the past, present, and future of the site on which we gather - Tiohtià:ke on the unceded lands of the Kanien'kehá: ka Nation. Tiohtià:ke is historically known as a gathering place for many First Nations. Today, it is home to a diverse population of Indigenous and other peoples. If this is not your land, how did you get here? How did your ancestors get here? How does race, gender, sexuality, citizenship, ability, and class affect the ways in which we relate to, move through, and create space? While the exhibition and corresponding programming is free of charge, we will be encouraging and collecting donations for The Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal.

While the act of queering space can point out the limitations of the ways in which the world around us is produced and normalized by and for certain bodies and not others, it is pertinent that we continuously reflect and act on the ways in which settler LGBTQI+ life is complicit in upholding ongoing colonial structures. As a pin on Queering The Map in Honolulu, Hawaii attests: “queer liberation must mean decolonization, and decolonization must mean queer liberation.”

"Queering The Map: ON_SITE" has emerged in collaboration with the Beyond Museum Walls Curatorial Residency program, hosted at the Curating and Public Scholarship Lab.

This project is generously supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council's (SSHRC) Connection Grant, the Sustainability Action Fund and the External and Mobilization Fund at Concordia University, as well as the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture.