Mary Tremonte of Justseeds Artist Cooperative Printing at the Windsor May Day Parade in Drouillard Park.
Sing to the Streets
The details: Saturday, March 20th at 3pm, meet at the corner of University and Pelissier.
As part of the Broken City Lab: Save the City project, and to better understand the city and its rich and failed history, Broken City Lab researchers will invite the community to learn the Francophone history of Windsor through a collective performance and storytelling of traditional French Folk Songs native to the Detroit River region on Saturday, March 20th at 3pm.
Led by Dr Marcel Beneteau, a professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnology at the University of Sudbury, participants will meet at University Avenue and Pelissier Street to take part in a walking oral history tour and performance, which will stop at the streets along Riverside Drive named after Windsor’s French settlers such as Goyeau, Langlois, Marentette, Louis, Parent and Pierre.
The retelling of the brief oral history at each street will be followed by a collective open performance of the French Folk song led by the local Francophone musician. Video and audio documentation of the performances will subsequently be made available on the Broken City Lab / Save the City website.
Broken City Lab: Save the City is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.
Plasticiens Volants’ “O Estrangeiro”
In keeping with our ongoing research about creating a Windsor parade, I thought I’d share some photos of Plasticiens Volants‘ “O Estrangeiro” parade in Sao Paulo. This parade, presented by Lost Art, gloriously displayed public art in the form of inflatable plastic floats and gathered thousands of people into the city streets. Besides funding, there aren’t many reasons why we couldn’t pull something like this off (possibly on a smaller scale). There are a few more excellent photos of the parade after the jump.
Pierre Huyghe’s Streamside Day
I was watching Season 4 of Art21 today and was reminded of this work by Pierre Huyghe, who creates films, installations, interventions, and public events.
Streamside Day was a work in which Huyghe scripted a celebration for a small town named Streamside, which included costumes, deserts, songs, speeches, parades, and decorations. You can read more about the project in the interview, and there’s also a video there of the project.
So, I have to wonder, when will we begin our plans for a Windsor-based parade? A “Windsor Day”, a celebration of everything that makes this city what it is (which will by definition have to include the numerous things wrong with the city), a parade with small floats, inflatable sculptures, and marching bands. We’ve talked about it before, maybe we should plan one for next summer.
Os Gemeos Parade Balloons
We’ve talked many times in the past about the need to do a parade of one kind or another here in Windsor, so when I saw this latest work by the Brazilian street art duo, Os Gemeos, and Plasticiens Volants, I had to post it.
The entire outdoor festival / parade entitled, LOST ART: ESTRANGEIRO looked incredible!
Leave it to a city like São Paulo to pull this off. Shouldn’t we be passing inflatable balloon sculptures back and forth across the Detroit River? Or at least across EC Row?
[via PSFK]