Posted on

New Publication Out Now: Invented Emergency (For Small Cities & Big Towns)

wpid23368-IMG_3063.jpg

We just received a few boxes of our newest publication, INVENTED EMERGENCY (For Small Cities & Big Towns), published through White Water Gallery. They look so good, we can’t wait to give them out!

INVENTED EMERGENCY is built on the research developed for Surviving North Bay, a residency and exhibition by Broken City Lab, hosted by White Water Gallery in the summer and fall of 2012. Surviving North Bay developed as a series of exploratory public interventions, micro-gestures, and tactical responses to North Bay. Each of these exploratory initiatives called on public participation to engage with North Bay, its infrastructures, and its communities. Throughout the residency, we collected research on the city in support of an exhibition that aimed to not only examine the practice and production of a northern locality, but also present a range of resistive tactics that can help the community survive, or help one survive the community. Emergencies became shorthand for this series of resistive tactics and gestures and INVENTED EMERGENCY extends these ideas towards developing a series of starting points and positions for new (and revisited) radical practices.

Pick up your copy at CIVIC SPACE, or let us know if you want one, and I’m sure we can arrange getting one in the mail to you!

Huge thanks to Clayton and Robyn and everyone at White Water Gallery for making this possible!

This project was generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

Posted on

Exploring North Bay (prep for Surviving North Bay)

We’re in North Bay for a residency in preparation of an upcoming exhibition. White Water Gallery is our gracious host (and for the first half of the day, our introduction to North Bay).

Much of the day is on foot, with cameras.

We record what we can about the city’s history and get a read of the direction the city moves towards — though this movement, or lack thereof, already feels central to the things we want to take up here.

We break at the edge of Lake Nipissing.

Throughout our roaming, we documented a lot of the signage around the (very tidy) downtown core — trying to get a read of how residents, business owners, and the municipality itself negotiates communication strategies — and certainly, what they’re trying to communicate.

And on that note, the night winds down with some very preliminary sketching around ideas of emergencies (or, again, lack thereof) in North Bay. Tomorrow, more exploring as we prepare for the evening’s psychogeographic walk, starting at 8pm. It’s feeling late, but it’s early in the project — much more tomorrow.