Logan Frances, “unthinkable event (calendar)”, 2024, installed at 1386 Queen St West, Toronto, ON.

The Wandering Calendar continued its time-marking interventions with Logan Frances’ “unthinkable event (calendar)”, an edition of seven layered posters, which echo the form of advent holiday calendars. Partly inspired by Haitian-American anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s essay “An Unthinkable History: The Haitian Revolution as a Non-Event”, Frances’ work was on view at 1386 Queen Street West in Toronto, offering fragmentary glimpses at the urgent need for uprising, along the way to reimagining the “impossible” future.

As Logan recalls;
“In the essay, Trouillot explains that the thought that enslaved Black people in Haiti could and would revolt against French slavery and colonialism was unthinkable to the French, because they could not imagine that ‘enslaved Africans and their descendants could…envision freedom — let alone formulate strategies for gaining and securing such freedom…’ (73).”

Reflecting on the rhetoric of “good and evil” widespread in today’s media environment as well as political institutions, Frances points to how the short-circuiting binary obfuscates the lived conditions of realities created under both historical and present-day colonialism.

Many thanks to @brennan_j_kelly for installation and documentation.