What is Slut Island?

Slut Island is a Montreal music and arts festival “reserved for marginalized bodies/voices/artists seeking a non-judgemental and encouraging platform to showcase their work”. Festival co-founder Sultana Bambino opens up about the festival’s fourth edition, currently running in Montreal.


AnneMarie: In the current political context, Slut Island actively seeks to showcase fems, queers, freaks, people from BIPOC communities and under represented folx. As a performer, how would you describe your experience in this city, and why you and co-founder DJ Frankie Teardrop came to create this festival?

Sultana: Throughout my time as a performer in Montreal, I have experienced varying degrees of aggressions as a cis-gendered, white-passing lesbian/queer femme (bla bla bla).  I have also born witness to musicians and artists with more marginal identities than my own facing either more overtly severe or insidious instances of aggression and violence.  In my experience with promoters, sound techs, other bands on the bills, bloggers/reporters/reviewers, audiences and record labels, I have seldom had the comfort of collaborating/interacting with people who had even base level knowledge of the politics I live by. When I thought about how my experiences in the Montreal music scene were often barely tolerable and left me feeling demoralized, unsafe or forced into situations I wasn’t comfortable with, I was also thinking about my privilege, and how much more unbearable (impossible, actually) this would all be if I wasn’t cis or if I didn’t look white or if I had more (dis)ability/ies.  

 

When Slut Island had its debut, Frankie and I were thinking pretty small: we simply wanted our friends and community members to make up the whole show, and not simply be the token band thrown on cis/het/white dude bills to pay lip service to the increasingly popular “phenomenons” of diversity and inclusivity. The festival’s first edition was so enthusiastically received that it demonstrated the need for this kind of initiative – even though it was far from perfectly executed, and presented us with a handful of public call outs that we are ~eternally grateful~ for (ie: being inherently ableist by not hosting the festival in wheelchair accessible venues). We’re continuing to live and learn and thrive, and this year’s been feeling really good.  

 

The festival is in its 4th edition: what have you learnt throughout the years,  and what are you bringing to the 2017 edition?

Every year of the festival is such a significant learning experience and we just keep getting better at filling gaps from previous editions, updating our rhetoric and addressing needs as they come up. We received funding for the first time in 2016, which brought the whole operation to another level.  Being able to make payment guarantees to our performers legitimized our cause, in a way, because it afforded us the ability to properly compensate performers living on the margins.

 

In preparation for our 2017 edition, Frankie and I made sure to reserve a small fund dedicated to hiring a curatorial jury, the most significant difference between this and previous years where we held the curatorial power. Our jury consisted of 9 people (including Frankie and I) who have experience with marginalization in music and art scenes, who have worked with local anti-oppression organizations or who have been on other curatorial boards for festivals, galleries or publications. The diversity of opinions and perspectives enriched the curatorial process, and it was really inspiring for us to have other people on board who had stakes in this edition and who cared about the future of the festival.  

The Slut Island statement is clear about the need for safer spaces, something that could never be guaranteed but definitely worked on. In the past year, people inside and around the fest survived violent attacks based on gender expression and race. What do you see working well in Montreal in terms of creating safer space/accessibility from a physical and mental health point of view? What is not working?

 

This is the most important and complex layer of the festival and organizing for the public in general.  I think a huge issue is the fact that “Queer” is trending, meaning that people who do not give thought to anti-oppressive politics in their day to day life still want to participate in events that are intended for queer or otherwise marginalized people, without actually thinking about the spaces they are entering.  Entitled cis-gendered hetero white people are abundant, and want to access these parties/events without actually challenging their internalized (and often just overt and externalized) [trans]misogyny, racism, ableism, transphobia, fatphobia, homophobia, serophobia, and other socially normalized oppressive thoughts/behaviours/”phobias” and this puts our intended participants at risk.

 

Due to our privilege, we were pretty naive for a long time, thinking that making disclaimers and posting non-violence policies on our event pages, at the door and all over the walls would ward off potential perpetrators of violence. We have had a significant number of wakeup calls after seeing people with marginal identities be victims of varying degrees of aggression, (either at Slut Island parties or at local parties that promote themselves in a similar way) as well as Frankie experiencing an extremely violent attack that left them permanently injured right in the venue where we’re hosting the festival.  

 

It is terrifying not to have control over the safety of the people we’re trying to carve space for. While we only have the resources to host parties in public accessible venues, we cannot control who hears about the events or who is passing by and decides to come in, etc. Our funding is precarious and not guaranteed, so we rely on door sales to pay our performers; we put our posters and pamphlets around the city which brings in so much of our target audiences, but can also contribute to unwanted/entitled attendees.  

 

At this moment, we continue to honour our zero tolerance policy; we have removed people from events several times, with many abusers on permanent ban. We have security present on site, we have naloxone kits and identifiable active listeners at every show who are trained in de-escalation and harm reduction tactics.  

 

During our recent collaboration with Suoni Per Il Popolo, there was a person in the audience that was taking pictures of my legs and it really disturbed me. I asked him to stop and he proceeded to show me the images he took and said that “my camel toe was amazing”. The fact that this was a Slut Island event gave me the power to remove this person from the space, leaving no room for someone to diminish how it felt, to defend this person or to make me have to explain the humiliation and violation that I felt in hopes of validating my experience enough for someone to take it seriously.  My friend Bita was present for this interaction and said “hey this is one of those rare times where the bitches have the power, there’s a 0 tolerance policy for this here, you’re out” and it was a significant moment for me, where I was like “oh hey, that’s true.” He didn’t back down, because he obviously didn’t respect me or women in general, and eventually one of my masc friends had to physically remove him, but it felt good that the final call was mine and that people made sure it was honoured.  

 

We’re ready to exercise this power and use it to remove anyone from our events who crosses the boundaries of people who don’t usually get to have a say in what happens but this DOES NOT prevent situations like this, or any that are far more severe, from happening. We do not want to present a utopia that doesn’t exist or promise a false sense of security to attendees who feel vulnerable in public spheres because of their race or gender presentation. However, we promise to do everything we can to try and avoid it or make it better by listening to (hearing, believing) the experiences of disempowered people and learning more with each edition of the festival. I want to get to a place we feel proud of in terms of safety, and we’re not there.  I think to answer the end of your question, what DOESN’T work is presenting a false sense of security to people who can end up being really harmed by attending events they understood to be ‘safer,’ and we’ve found a few things that help, but we don’t really know what “works well” yet.

 

This year is the first time you worked with a board of curators to create the lineup. Could you talk a bit about why and how the process worked?

We did a call for curators, received a handful of CVs and made a final selections of 7 curators (including one Skype-in from New Orleans) . The  curators have a lot of different experience relating to festival/event organizing and working within organizations. The 9 of us got together in April and had a long, grueling day of going through the festival submissions (there were approximately 150), sharing opinions about who could/should be featured in the festival and why, and sharing top picks. After this process was over, we listened to suggestions about acts we weren’t aware of in Montreal and surrounding areas and learned about some really amazing acts, a few of which (such as Witch Prophet) we’re so excited to present.  With all the notes and direction of the curatorial jury, Frankie and I constructed the final lineups.

 

Tell me which performances of the past years has left a super posi mark with you and what you are excited to see this year? What should people be excited about?

We’ve been so moved by the performances over the years, and they are the reason we continue to do copious amounts of unpaid labour.  A really remarkable night for me last year was our cousins collaboration with Tommy Genesis– Delish from New Orleans was scheduled to play but wasn’t able to make her flight was such a huge disappointment (I’m still waiting and hoping for the make-up performance from that night), but Star Amerasu jumped on the bill last minute for her second performance of that edition of Slut Island and she saved the night and she was a Goddess and it turned into a dance party where even the bartenders were having a good time (this means a lot to me as a very grumpy bartender) and it just felt like everything was aligned that night.  

 

In our 2015 edition, Local Honey, who now performs under the name Oblivia (back this year!!) had the entire audience in a frenzy with her hypnotic hard as fuck frantic hard femme performance; I can’t wait to see what she has up her sleeve for July 28th! I have no doubt the whole festival line up will leave a lasting impression on attendees.

Sam, your graphics are beautiful and meaningful, you design every posters for the events. What does it mean to you?

Thank you for saying that. You’re right, the visual component of Slut Island is extremely meaningful to me. This project has helped me tap into digital illustration and graphic design, which I had only loosely dabbled in before, and I feel so lucky to have something fueling this productivity outside of academia, which never really held me.  Institutionalized art left me feeling pretty constipated, and it’s been really rewarding to have a platform to make work that has a function.  

 

I’m a Leo (big surprise) so making work that glorifies the people in my community or artists who I think are remarkable and important comes really naturally to me as a deep labour of love.  That being said, I think as Slut Island continues to grow and we have more funds available to us, I would like to start hiring featured artists from QTBIPOC communities to make the show posters.  Having an established platform to lend proper exposure and the funds to pay them well feels like something attainable in the next couple of years.  

 

I need to make a shout out to Frankie here too; while I spend all that time coming up with the designs, they single handedly wheat paste 700 posters around the city and are the reason this work is SEEN. We’re a really good team, and we definitely don’t have an easy history. We did the first two years of Slut Island as a couple, the third while we were going through a break-up and this year while we’re finally on the other side. The resilience of our relationship is a real factor in this whole production.

 

Frankie’s ability to hold it together while I fall apart every single year is the only way this partnership could ever function, and also I think they’re the only person who can match my willingness to do so much unpaid work. We’re a serious fire sign duo who feel fulfilled by the sheer satisfaction of making shit happen. Our friends, volunteers, community and all festival participants have provided such a huge amount of support and encouragement and providing this platform and carving space in the music scene for an entire festival of non cis het white dudes makes every grueling step of this worth it. Sorry this interview has been so cheesy, I’d rather make a poster about all these feelings, tbh.  Thank you for this interview and for caring about what we do.


The second and last weekend of this year’s edition is running July 27th to 30th at Bar le Ritz PDB and Le Cagibi. Catch the list of events here. Slut Island as well as the interviewer acknowledges that the festival takes place on stolen land, on the traditional territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka. The Kanien’kehá:ka are the keepers of the Eastern Door of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. The island called “Montreal” is known as Tiotia:ke in the language of the Kanien’kehá:ka, and it has historically been a meeting place for other Indigenous nations, including the Algonquin people.