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Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope: the Map

Not exhaustive, nor complete, this map is a work-in-progress, documenting a community in-transition. For one afternoon in February 2010, we gathered together with a group of community members to create two distinct lists: Sites of Apology and Sites of Hope.

The locations identified as part of these two lists were noted as being places for which we, as a community, might need to apologize to future generations, or places for which we might hold some particular hope of their role in creating a better city for future generations.

Over the following weeks and months, we gradually visited every site on the list to (un)officially recognize it, demarcating it with a large ribbon and saying a few words about its designation. We encourage you to make your own visit to these sites.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to the list and had such an incredible and engaged conversation with us that day. This map is long overdue, but we hope it was worth the wait.

You can download the Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope Map (11″x17″).

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Drifting Around Downtown Windsor: Exploring the City Slowly

We’ve been lucky over the last week or so with some surprisingly agreeable weather. The had humidity lifted and with it, the temperature scaled back considerably. So, it’s been pretty much the best time all summer to do some exploring on foot (and sometimes on bicycle) at a pace that really allows for a different kind of engagement with space.

Now armed with an iPhone 4 for an upcoming project, it’s easier than ever to take pictures on a casual exploration. Something like a dérive, though admittedly a little more aimed at looking for some new potential project spaces than a completely free drift, last night was a perfect time to play with thinking about a variety of spaces, slowly.

These slow explorations really give the time to notice and attempt to unfold the curiosities all around the city. A sign like the one above, “PUBLIC STAIRWELL,” notifies passersby that this space is publicly accessible and annotates something unseen, behind the door. I wonder what else we might be able to annotate with the same authority as this sign that could be suggested as being both public and understood as normally hidden (at least in terms of its use by a public).

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Listen to the City: an Overview

Back in January, we asked nearly 40 people two questions: Why did you first come to Windsor? and Why are you still here? We asked those questions at an event called, Listen to the City, which was the first part of the five-month long project, Save the City. It was an incredible night.

The answers we got over the hour and a half we spent together at Phog Lounge in downtown Windsor presented not just answers to those two questions, but sprawling conversations about what it means to live in Windsor, how we’ve shaped this city, and how it’s shaped us.

The five-minute edit you can listen to below is just a slice of everything that was talked about that night. Initially, we thought we might be able to cut a lengthier audio documentary together, but there were pragmatic implications that kept us from doing that. Hours of audio with conversations that covered more ground than we could have ever imagined meant that it was a lot more difficult to piece something much larger together.

There were many voices that we unfortunately couldn’t include in the edit below, but only because of the amazing conversations those folks had, which in turn didn’t offer the kind of brief samples similar to those that we cut together. We added some music and tried to capture a general direction of conversation that we gathered from gradually listening to all of the conversations (Danielle took on the considerable task of doing just that and creating the assembly edit of this excerpt– hours and hours and hours of work, but we’re so excited to finally be able to share this).

So, while this excerpt in no way does justice to the range of conversations that we had that night, we hope it might be a good introduction, or a good marker in time, of what a group of 40 Windsorites thought about this city at the start of 2010.

Listen to the five-minute excerpt: (updated – thanks to Stephen Surlin for finessing our mix)

[audio:http://www.brokencitylab.org/audio/ListenToTheCity-20100826-SurlinMix.mp3]

Or you can also download the MP3 of Listen to the City.

For good measure, we can also provide the original recordings in their entirety in a zip file if you’re interested. We make no promises about the audibility/legibility of every minute of these recordings, but if you have the time, they’re worth listening to as a whole. However, the zip file is over 700mb and so not easily uploaded to our servers. However, as promised, we will be officially handing over a copy of the five-minute excerpt and the raw audio files to the Windsor Archives soon.

We need to sincerely thank everyone who came out that night and shared with us.

Broken City Lab: Save the City was generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

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Mid-August: Maps, Writing & Cardboard

We’ve been quiet on the blog, but not because we haven’t been busy. I’ve been working away at the final touches for the maps for Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope, which while taking longer than I had anticipated, was well worth it. The map looks great, we’ll be posting it on here soon and distributing physical copies.

Meanwhile, work continues on our cardboard letters…

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Maps + Final Cut

I’ll be spending most of the week finishing up a couple lingering parts of Save the City: assembling the maps for Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope and putting the final touches on the edit from Listen to the City that Danielle assembled.

The audio documentary is going to be an overview, or maybe like a trailer — it’s about 5 or 6 minutes long and will only sample bits and pieces of conversations from the hours of recorded audio from Listen to the City. However, we’ll be posting the unedited clips for download alongside the trailer as well as submitting the trailer and unedited clips on CD to the Windsor Archives.

As well, some very preliminary test maps for Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope. These will actually be 22″ x 17″, but also made available for download. Above are just some sketches, but I showed some of these to Danielle and Cristina — they liked the red map, but I think we’ll go with something like numbered dots to demarcate the sites. Or, potentially, there will be two maps.

Work like this is fun, but a bit of a long road. I suppose I’m being overly cautious to make sure that these are moving in the right direction before committing and doing a complete version, but ultimately, patience now will make it worthwhile not having to redo it later.

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Cardboard Letters Continued

We were only about half strong this week, but Josh, Rosina and I plowed ahead on the letters, this time focusing on just the front and back faces of the letters K, A, E, T, and I. We figured that since we had the projector set up anyways, it was worth doing as many faces as we could. Filling in cardboard with extrusions later wouldn’t be so hard.

We’ll continue those adventures next week.

Meanwhile, we’re doing some visual research into new sites for projection and trying to figure out how best to turn our Imaginary Platform into something very distributable. More soon.

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A New Project Begins: Cardboard, a projector, and lots of editing

In what feels like the first time in months, we got together and worked on making something (that is, as opposed to planning something). We’re getting started on what is going to be an epic project, time-wise. We’re making a bunch of large 3D cardboard letters.

Collaborative Apartment Studio is very fun.

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Keeping Track of the Archives

Here it is, or at least, here’s part of the physical archive, the scannable stuff anyways, from 2008-2009. It’s been hanging out in my filing cabinet for a long time, but finally with the help of Miranda Fay during her off-hours, it’s been gradually scanned in page by page.

Archives are crucial for taking stock, for remembering, for understanding a history. Given the pace with which we work, it’s rare to find the time to actually reflect on what we’ve done. Usually, this happens, in a way, when compiling images for an artist talk or presentation, but inevitably, even that process is limited by what was created by a digital source already.

331 scans from about a year and a half of work, early stencils, poster designs, and lots of hand-written notes. I can’t wait to find the time to look at all of it. And now Miranda has started on the 2010 archive. It’s so awesome to know that there’s now another copy (even if it just a digital scan) of these things.

We seem to always talk about compiling this archive into something legible, now that it’s digital, maybe we’ll be that much more convinced to attempt that process … but I doubt it. The fallout from Save the City and SRSI alone are still on our plates, to go even further back than that seems daunting to say the least.

Meanwhile, we’re planning to meet Wednesday night, and I’m really looking forward to this. It will be one of the first times that we’ll have all been together for a while and not have to talk about some aspect of admin-type stuff. Though inevitably, that will be in the mix too. Above, I’m thinking on a post-it note.

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Keeping Busy

It might seem a bit quiet around here as of late, but rest assured we’re keeping busy. We’re in the thick of paperwork — grant reports, project proposals, etc. However, we’re also quickly approaching the start of a new project that you’ll see unfold here likely over the next month or two.

Danielle is working away on the audio documentary from Listen to the City, and Michelle and Rosina cleaned up our workspace at the Ecohouse and decorated (as you can see above) by putting up some of the remaining parts of Lea Bucknell‘s installation as part of SRSI (which if I remember correctly was put together by Thea Jones).

In the meantime, you can check out the interview Michelle and I did with Amy Miller on the Craig Fahle Show on Detroit’s NPR affiliate, WDET 101.9fm on Thursday. If you’re in Windsor/Detroit and not listening to this show on a regular basis, you’re really missing out. Below is an edited version of the show with just our interview, but here’s the link to check out the entire episode.

[audio:CFS_7-22-BCL-edit.mp3]
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How to Briefly Describe Amazing Things: A Recap of 30 Days of SRSI

We’ve been really lucky.

For a couple of years now, we’ve been able to do the work that we’ve wanted to do, make the kinds of changes that we want to see, and create a set of projects that have kept us interested in staying in Windsor.

The Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation wrapped up a couple weeks ago. For 30 days, we hosted 25 amazing artists and artist collectives, all of whom worked in downtown Windsor and generated a huge number of new ideas, initiatives, and relationships.

For 30 days, we were very, very lucky.

From June 11th to July 11th, we saw projects that redefined the idea of what BIAs could do, generated new models for micro-economies by exchanging food for stories, unravelled and reassembled long lost sweaters, and introduced an unprecedented level of investigation into the personal histories found in homes (and gardens) across the city.

Projects that openly played with urban infrastructures, investigated the potential for utilizing the postal service for remembering forgotten places, and made many, many, many kinds of maps will all have a lasting impact on the people who were lucky enough to encounter them.

Workshops for children and adults made real and impacting use of open spaces, stories around our border realities were eagerly shared, and many delicious pies, meals and snacks were collaboratively prepared and enjoyed over insightful conversations using fresh and local ingredients.

Installations lit up and animated storefronts, interrupted the social experience of public spaces, and imagined the collapse of municipalities generated a new way to look at materials and architecture.

Performative works demonstrated DIY surveillance methodologies, actively spent time in marginalized spaces, infused the local economy with gambling earnings from the casino, and generated a factory from social media technologies.

All of these things happened here in Windsor in just 30 days.

SRSI created a concentrated series of activities that demonstrated the potential in rethinking how we attribute value to space, changed how we might think about creative activity impacting a community, and looked at the possibility to forget about a set of economic development strategies that haven’t worked for quite some time.

The things that we’ve felt about Windsor — its potential, its frustrations, and the novel possibility for generating creative work that can only happen here — were all reinforced through this residency project. We have to admit that we’ll probably do it again, in some fashion, because we believe that the projects we saw unfold are only the beginning of the incredible things that can happen in this city.

We want to thank everyone who participated in this project — without you, this would not have been possible. Your work made an impact on us, and we might argue, the entire city. Thank you.

This project was generously supported by the City of Windsor: Cultural Affairs Office, Arts Council Windsor & Region, Windsor Pride, and the Ontario Arts Council.