Life of a Craphead

Podcast

Staying out of Trouble – Reading the $100 Bill, written by Chris Lee and read by Kama La Mackerel.

As an accompaniment to Dazibao Satellite’s recently installed public art work $100 Bill With South Asian Scientist Added Back In by Life of a Craphead, Dazibao is pleased to offer a podcast for your listening enjoyment while you walk from one Satellite billboard to the next.

Mapping out a critical account of the controversial $100 bill featured on the billboards, the podcast looks at history and design, exploring how liberalism and legitimacy work hand in hand as a means to secure power and colonial processes.

Billboards are located on the facades of Café Cherrier (3635 St-Denis St.) and Bonsecours Market (350 St-Paul St. E). Go to either of the billboards and scan the Dazibao QR code to be taken directly to the podcast on this page.

Text written by Chris Lee

Translated by Colette Tougas

Read by Kama La Mackarel

Sound by Marie-Josée Archambault

Chris Lee is a graphic designer and educator based in Buffalo and Brooklyn (NY), and Toronto (ON). He is a graduate of OCADU (Toronto) and the Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam). His studio-based research explores graphic design’s entanglement with power, standards, and the question of what makes something legitimate. Chris is an Assistant Professor at the Pratt Institute.

Kama La Mackerel is a multi-disciplinary artist, writer, educator and cultural mediator who hails from Mauritius and now lives in Montréal. Their work is grounded in the exploration of justice, love, healing, decoloniality, and self- and collective-empowerment. Kama’s artistic practice spans across textile, visual, digital, poetic and performative work, and is at once narrative and theoretical, at once personal and political. A firm believer that aesthetic practices have the power to build resilience, to heal, and to act as forms of resistance to the status quo, Kama articulates an anticolonial praxis through cultural production.