If you’re in Kitchener on Saturday (or just needed an excuse to check out CAFKA.11), you should consider attending this panel discussion.
Alongside Pedro Reyes and Lucy Howe, I’ll be discussing the installation at CAFKA and BCL’s practice in general in the context of urban interventions.
The details: Saturday, September 24, 2011, 10:30am-12:30pm @ The Museum (10 King Street West, Kitchener)
After months and months of work, we finally installed our project for CAFKA.11. Led by Josh, Hiba, Kevin, and myself, the project took an incredible amount of research and build time, but we were incredibly excited to see our efforts finally in place in front of Kitchener’s City Hall when we wrapped up the installation last night.
Reflect on Here calls on passersby to think on the infrastructure of the city, the attempt to create place with architecture, and the materiality of the text itself. This project was made possible with the generous support from the Ontario Arts Council‘s Exhibition Assistance Program and the incredible team at CAFKA.
It was a beautiful day in Windsor yesterday. Something like 30 degrees fahrenheit cooler than it was just a couple days ago when we were installing at Forest City Gallery.
We started and finished our project for this year’s Windsor Biennial. We’ll have a lot more photos soon. The show opens on September 21, 2011, and it reads, “AS OF 2011.09.21, WE ARE ALIVE & WELL.”
More soon.
We spent the weekend in London, Ontario. We were installing for our upcoming exhibition at Forest City Gallery, while also briefly wondering about what it would be like to not do site specific work. Anyways, you should plan to come to the opening on September 9th!
We’re working on an installation using our “…and then the city” framework for exploring and unfolding the layers of narrative that go into shaping a place. We’ve pulled together some historical overviews of London, but have really enjoyed using an online questionnaire to hear about some of the narratives on the ground here. Huge thanks to Forest City Gallery and London Fuse for helping to spread the word. All of the answers have fed into the installation in some way, so it’s been a really effective way to get to some of the overarching stories about this city.
The show will run until October 21, 2011, and, in the meantime, what’s more fun than a peak of the install process?
After a long wait, we’re very excited to announce the (working) schedule for our upcoming conference, Homework: Infrastructures & Collaboration in Social Practices! We’ll be updating this page with information regarding the venues shortly.
Please note that the following is subject to change, but this is what we’re planning so far:
Introducing Homework: 9am
with Justin A. Langlois, Research Director, Broken City Lab.
Panel #1: Education: 9:30am
Unpacking the artist’s role in education and beyond educational institutions, what art education does and could look like, the changing roles of student and educator, and the dissemination of knowledge through creative praxis.
Heather Davis
Stephanie Springgay
Amber Yared
Elizabeth Underhill & Stacey Sproule
Panel #2: Collaboration: 11am
Examining resistance through collaboration, models for processes and participation, collaborative possibilities across disciplines, and collaborations with communities.
Yael Filipovic
Tim Maly
Markuz Wernli Saito
Labspace Studio
Susan Gold
Panel #3: Artist-Run Infrastructure: 1:30pm
Looking at existing infrastructures accidentally and intentionally support alternative practices, borders creating opportunities and crises, role of artist-run centres as a counter infrastructures, and the motives for working creatively between infrastructures.
Sarah Margolis-Pineo
Anthea Black
Anna Lise Jensen
Panel #4: Cities & Space: 3:00pm
Unfolding spatial pockets of everyday life, the in-betweeness of cities and engagement, uses and misuses of public spaces, the ways in which we understand place, and open-ended landscapes.
Megan Mericle
Ryan Legassicke
Catherine Campbell
Ellyn Walker
Burcu Yigit Turan
Dannys Montes de Oca
Panel #5: Collaboration at Work: 4:30pm
Featuring all Homework artists-in-residence discussing their work together over the course of the four-day residency.
Andrea Carvalho
Brennan Broome and Chloé Womack
Brett Randall Jones & Jack Forinash
Charlie Michaels
Department of Unusual Certainties
Zoe Kreye
Elliott Jocic
Immony Men
Laura Leif
Lea Bucknell
Megan Deal
Nick Tobier Ann
Rodrigo Marti
spmb
Roving Studio
Special Parallel Projects: Ongoing
Amber Landgraff – Revolting Dance Party (see info below)
Allison Rowe & Nancy Nowacek – Crouch, Touch, Engage
Keynote Panel Discussion: 7:00pm at the Art Gallery of Windsor
More details are available on our Keynote Page.
Gregory Sholette
Temporary Services
Marisa Jahn
Revolting Dance Party with Amber Landgraff: 10pm at Villain’s Beastro
The Revolting Dance Party is an ongoing project, based on Group Material’s project of the same name, that engages with music that is focused on social and political issues. Amber Landgraff DJs the event using songs shared on sites like Youtube in order to bring social media as an act of activism back from the imaginary space of the Internet and into a physical community space.
Publication Plans: Saturday am
Homework is a four-day residency, two-day conference, and collaboratively written publication, and as such, we will utilize the morning of Day 2 to start generating content for our book, together. Details about times and locations to participate in this process will be forthcoming. However, as you already know, simply by attending, you have the opportunity to participate in the creation of this book. More soon.
Group Work: 12pm-5:00pm
Large discussion groups led by each keynote to delve into further detail around the issues being addressed throughout Homework. These Group Work sessions will address the following:
How do we support or invent the practices that are needed to respond to the economic, social, and political realities of today? How might we find solutions, inspirations, and models for a way forward through new schools, new byproducts, new practices, and new infrastructures, leading us toward a critical and novel way of integrating art with everyday life.
Group Work #1: Marisa Jahn: 12pm
Practices that embed themselves in existing infrastructures.
Group Work #2: Temporary Services: 1:30pm
Practices that invent infrastructures and infrastructural services.
Group Work #3: Gregory Sholette: 3pm
Practices that collectivize against and alongside new, old, and unimagined infrastructures.
Closing Remarks: 5pm
with Broken City Lab.
Group Rates
We have secured a group rate for anyone attending Homework to stay at one of three hotels in Windsor’s downtown core. If you book the room, please note that you would like the Broken City Lab Homework Conference rate. This group rate is only valid until September 19th, 2011.
Hilton Windsor: $115 per room, per night, $11 self parking per car, per night or $21 valet parking per car, per night.
Windsor Riverside Inn (formerly the Radisson): $105 per room, per night, $10 self parking per car, per night.
Travelodge Hotel: $89 per room, per night, $10 self parking per car, per night.
We want to know about London, Ontario.
We’re doing an exhibition at Forest City Gallery, opening in September, and we’re looking into the wide range of narratives that go into constructing a place — the architecture, the headlines, the people, the memories, the relationships, the rumours — and we’re hoping you can help us out.
Whether you’re a longtime resident, someone who just moved in, or even if you’ve only ever visited London, Ontario, we want to hear about it all.
So, just fill out the form below, tell us some stories, and we’ll work with all of this for our exhibition.
Continue reading “A Set of Informal Questions about London, Ontario”
HOMEWORK: Infrastructures & Collaboration in Social Practices is four-day residency, two-day conference, and collaboratively-written publication aimed at generating conversation around the following:
Facilitated by Broken City Lab, HOMEWORK calls on artists, scholars, writers, thinkers, and doers interested in any of the above to join us in Windsor, Ontario for the conference on October 21 and October 22, 2011.
Registration to attend the conference is free and by attending you will be participating in the creation of a collaboratively written publication of the proceedings from the conference.
REGISTER TO ATTEND THE HOMEWORK CONFERENCE BELOW:
On Day 3 of our ATTC Calgary with Truck Gallery’s CAMPER Urban Discovery project, it rained, and so we planned. We planned and discussed and reviewed some of the answers we had received from our activities on Day 2 — glimpses of the state of Calgary, from a ground-level perspective.
For Day 4, we had to condense our planned events into an single afternoon, collecting answers to a series of fill-in-the-blank statements and eventually creating a CAMPER-wide chalkboard to collect a timeline of Calgary.
Working to understand Calgary through these gestures provides insights to a city in between many things — a military fort and a sprawling urban centre, a longtime home and a temporary situation,the site of the first roadhouse and the place that Tim Hortons amalgamated with a small coffee shop, a celebrated Olympic site and the place of someone’s first concert. All of these experiences, memories, and invented histories create a space for dialogue around the narratives that create the social shape of the city and not only how we interact with it, but how we interact with one another.
Continue reading “ATTC Calgary Day 3 & 4: the Tales & Timelines of a City”
On Day 2 of our ATTC Calgary with Truck Gallery’s CAMPER Urban Discovery project, our ongoing work finds us asking questions about a city that we’re still just getting to know.
The questions are, necessarily, basic and straight forward. We’re not conducting deep sociological or statistical research, but rather trying to tease out a series of narratives that we know we haven’t yet heard about this place. Over the course of the residency, we’re aiming to develop a practice, a series of tactics that aim to unfold a way to get to know a place and the things that go about shaping the things we can know about a place. Cities are continually enacted through the narratives that we hear, create, and tear apart through daily practice, and we’re interested in both the narratives and that daily practice.
Over the course of a few hours on Thursday afternoon, we hear about many parts of the city that are worth loving, and worth changing. Somehow, an impression is made upon us that aligns with what we felt during our algorithmic walk — that is, Calgary is a city that isn’t readily touchable. It feels distant even when it’s right in front of you, and somehow the things we heard about the city from lifelong residents and people on holiday were the things that are legible from a distance, but in some instances, distanced from lived experience.
Continue reading “ATTC Calgary Day 2: Stories of a Distanced City”
We’re in Calgary for 9 days as part of Truck Gallery’s CAMPER 2011 Urban Discovery Project.
Here’s what’s going to be keeping us busy for the next week:
July 21 (Thurs): CAMPER Day 1: Exploding Calgary (interviews & storytelling) (12pm-3pm) 222 8 Avenue SW
July 22 (Fri): CAMPER Day 2: Spatial & Temporal Narratives of Calgary (public mapping) (3pm-7pm) 222 8 Avenue SW
July 23 (Sat): CAMPER Day 3: DIY Publication Workshop, Planning & Making Day (10am-2:30pm) 222 8 Avenue SW
July 25 (Mon): Map Making & Distro (various small maps created and distributed)
July 26 (Tues): Projection Night (Tweets & Transcripts from Citywide encounters projected from CAMPER) (9:30pm-11pm) Central Memorial Park
July 27 (Wed): CAMPER Day 4: Finding “Urban sophistication and warm western hospitality” (10am-1pm) Central Memorial Park
July 28 (Thurs): “…and then the city” publication launch (7pm) Central Memorial Park
We’re basing all of this activity off an extension of our “…and then the city” project to unfold and uncover the multiple narratives that go into shaping locality and our experience of it. If you’re in Calgary, stop by. If you’re not, check back each day, we’ll be making epic posts.