Free City Radio
Tuesday August 12th, 2025 with Stefan Christoff
Jordan Arseneault on the Voices beyond lockdown zine

This edition of Free City Radio features the second in a set of programs focused on hearing community voices from Montreal who engaged with the Voices beyond lockdown zine project of Free City Radio. The zine was launched in the fall of 2024 and focuses on the ways that community activists and artists responded to the pandemic lockdowns of 2020, particularly people directly from, or directly working with, communities that were already experiencing systemic persecution or discrimination before the pandemic began. This interview set is an opportunity to hear reflections in the current context, in 2025, on the sustaining relevance and importance of understanding how this period impacts the present. Also the ways that focusing on activist and artist voices in regards to how to both conceptualize and frame the sustaining relevance of this period, is important. On this edition Jordan Arseneault, researcher, performer, musician and community activist shares their reflections on the zine. Jordan underlines the ways that the realities of the pandemic lockdowns in the winter 2020 were driven by neoliberal policies. Jordan also underlines that the pandemic can be considered a topic that was is over discussed while still certain realities were excluded from those discussions, like those faced by undocumented workers. Jordan references historian Mary Beard's work as interesting because this period of lockdowns, again pushed us toward the local, while different from past periods where only the local context mattered, in 2020 it was a local that was globalized. Jordan references Joyce Wieland's work as an interesting way to understand the layers involved in this presentation, with both the obvious political conclusions being present while there also existing multiple layers of meaning when we take the time to reflect and discuss. Learn more about the zine and / or download a PDF via Justseeds: justseeds.org/voices-beyond-lockdown-zine