A Smile Split by the Stars: An Experiment by Katherine McKittrick is an exhibition that brings m. nourbeSe philip's poem "Meditation on the Declension of Beauty with the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones" into two gallery spaces. Co-produced by the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, Revolutionary Demand for Happiness, and Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre, the exhibition began with a conversation with Katherine McKittrick—Professor of Gender Studies and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies at Queen's University—during a rideshare in Kingston on our way back to campus where Katherine shared with me her love for the poem. Katherine is the author of Dear Science and Other Stories and the foundational Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, as well as editor and contributor to Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Beyond her scholarly work, Katherine loves bookmaking and often collaborates with artist and designer Cristian Ordóñez, most recently creating the limited-edition boxset Trick Not Telos (2023) and the hand-made Twenty Dreams (2024). Ordóñez also spearheaded the exhibition design for A Smile Split by the Stars. At the heart of this project is Katherine's approach to practice and scholarship. As she writes in Dear Science, "Seeking liberation is rebellious," emphasizing that the goal is not to find liberation, but to seek it out. This process of seeking, what Katherine calls "method-making," generates the gathering of ideas and creates space where we can feel possibility together.

In this conversation, I speak with Danielle Vogel—poet, interdisciplinary artist, practicing herbalist, ceremonialist, and professor at Wesleyan University. Over the past 20 years, Vogel has written and published four poetry books that engage embodied poetics, feminist ecologies, somatics and ceremony. Our focus here is her most recent work, A Library of Light, published in 2024, which I first read in 2025, during one of the most intense winters in Montreal. It arrived at a time when I was seeking something I couldn’t quite name.  I was so moved by the way Vogel writes through grief—not around it, not away from it, but through it. For many of us diasporic Palestinians, as we continue to witness the genocide of our people, the grief is more than unbearable—grief is more than what language can bear. I was searching for a way to stay connected to that grief that didn’t close me off—a way that felt like an opening, something grounded, more integrated with what is.

The conversation that follows below began in the fall of 2024, shortly after I saw Razan AlSalah’s film 'A Stone’s Throw' at Prismatic Ground, an annual festival dedicated to expanded documentary and avant-garde film, curated and run by Inney Prakash. AlSalah is a filmmaker and teacher based in Montreal. What I am drawn to with AlSalah’s work is her ability to pull us into an image, or have the image spatialize our cinematic experience in a way that feels tactile, immersive, moving, and expansive. Her work engages the material implications of image-making, particularly through the layering of multiple narratives and the branching pathways that gesture toward a relational movement of diasporic living. At its core, there is an anti-colonial vision—one that insists on the resurgence of life on Indigenous lands while rupturing the colonial image. Her films often operate as “ghostly trespasses,” bypassing the seemingly fortified map of colonial borders. For AlSalah, filmmaking is a form of collective memory-making, unfolding in relation with others, with place, and with the unknown.