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Over the past year, C has examined themes that have included Exhibition Practices, Memory, Men, and now, in this issue, Participation. However, our interest in these topics never ends once each respective issue has gone to press. For instance, in her short text in this issue, "Venus in Transit," Corrine Fitzpatrick responds to the Men issue in describing the ongoing "rethinking and refraining" of masculinity: "A conclusion is a comma, not a full stop. A comma begets a new clause." While Fitzpatrick refers here to masculinity, and more broadly to gender, she could also be describing our own evolving editorial strategy in relationship to thematic issues. In various ways, ideas from previous issues continue on or reemerge, evolving in conversation with our contributors and readers.
In this issue, several feature essays look at art practices that model, enact or represent forms of social or political participation. In "The Vancouver Occupations of 1971," Leah Modigliani looks at how Ken Lum, Stan Douglas and Mark Tribe take the history of the New Left and 60s and 70s radical subcultures as subject matter for their work, through installations such as hums from shangri-la to shangrila (2010), Douglas' Abbott & Cordova, y August, IÇ71 (2008), and Tribe's Port Huron Project (2006-2009). Contrasting the actual Vancouver Occupations of 1971 with their contemporary representation by artists, Modigliani employs Walter Benjamin's idea of Left-Wing Melancholy to raise important questions about how these artworks engage viewers as political agents.
In "Communities...