Our current reality: We’re Trystan (artist name: Azrai) & Lou, the queer artist duo behind StarWhispers, Asunderland, and now: Escape to The Last Threshold. Unsafe housing, immigration uncertainty, and medical fallout have trapped us deep in survival mode. Until recently, we were living full time in Airbnbs. We are currently in safe, temporary housing and need to secure long-term housing, urgent medical care and legal assistance.

As transgender immigrants, we face barriers that make the impact of these setbacks hit much harder than they should.

Above: The mold-riddled basement, AKA, A portal to the Upside Down in our Montreal rental of 2 years.

Chapter 1 – $26,000 CAD

This goal covered escape from the Moldlord's rental, a storage unit to save our belongings, urgent medical bills, and introductory legal costs tied to malpractice and housing injustice.

Chapter 2 – $102,000 CAD grand total

This goal covers the full mid-term medical and legal costs and the purchase / remodel remodel of an RV for interim safe housing. This amount gets us healthy, immigrated and out of temporary housing so we can build our bigger dream!

Directly, this GoFundMe covers costs like:

A few more details:

Costs we had no way of predicting have piled up to a point that we cannot unbury ourselves, such as rapidly changing Canadian immigration requirements. Landlords have repeatedly demanded a deposit of over $14,000.00 (6+ months of rent) upfront, illegally, because of our immigrant status and lack of Canadian credit history- regardless of proof of income. (We are in a poor position to negotiate or enforce our rights as we have been turned away from even viewing properties due to our immigrant status, and landlords are known to look up tribunal/legal records of prospective tenants.) Because of this, our goal is to live full-time in a mobile home so that we can save.

A dentist gave Trystan extensive dental injuries shortly after arriving in Canada. These have severely impacted his ability to work- work which his immigration depends upon entirely. These injuries frequently cost thousands of dollars in treatments in order to avoid relapse of potentially life threatening infections, and will cost tens of thousands more to fully repair. We are barred from healthcare access for a prolonged period due to these immigration setbacks, keeping costs of even our daily medications for ADHD and our hormone therapy in the hundreds per month. These are just a few pieces of the pileup.

Above: medical imaging of a section of Trystan's teeth with several areas circled in red, and text that reads: "various emergencies- all from things like "Defective restorations!" Note: Some of these pictured restorations have already been re-treated, however these defective restorations span Trystan's entire mouth. And the "sinus spike," pictured below, remains permanently embedded in his maxillary sinuses from the ordeal.)

Being able to make it through this rough patch and pay the associated legal costs opens much needed doors for us.

This is the foundation that allows us to begin what we’re really working toward: a permanent refuge and community art space, wherever we're able to build it, documented and shared through our show. That's the next chapter for us.

Above: Garden Founder's Stone Concept by Trystan

Every gifter will be represented by a founder’s rune in this space: your name and/or a rune of your choice, carved, burned, or sculpted into a real physical spot on the refuge itself. A sculpture in the garden, stones in the walking paths, or wooden fences at our threshold. Your rune becomes part of the story, visible to everyone who crosses it.

More information about us, and our work, can be found on our website; StarWhispers