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?
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 working with Truck Gallery’s CAMPER Urban Discovery project, doing a residency based on our “…and then the city…” (ATTC) research. Developed after a six-month community research project back in Windsor called, Save the City, ATTC was initially realized as two billboards in Windsor and an accompanying publication that looked at the cyclical nature of city narratives — the things that we’re told and the things we tell ourselves about the places we live.
We’re here for 10 days working to develop a practice that can begin to unfold the complexities of Calgary and how the people, architecture, infrastructure, planning policies, and connections shape this city. We’re interested in the largest sense in understanding locality in both its reading and practice, and Calgary is already proving to be a wonderfully curious research site.
If you’re in Calgary, you can catch us at CAMPER by taking a look at our schedule, and if you’re away, you can expect posts everyday on our process.
Continue reading “ATTC Calgary Day 1: Shortcuts for Urban Resistance & Algorithmic Walks”
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.
We’re playing catchup. Between vacations, short hiatuses, and our summer schedules, we’ve been busy. However, getting back together, working together again on a more regular basis, and starting up on these projects again has been so great and incredibly rewarding. Our to-do list above is a small start to all of the projects we have on the go.
We’re working to finish up our How to Forget the Border Completely research publication (if you want to participate, check out our micro-grant), we’re planning the logistics of Homework (consider attending!), and we’re in the early stages of the final build for CAFKA.
Continue reading “A Look at Process: building for CAFKA & designing for HFBC”
We are very pleased to announce the following artists in residence for our upcoming Homework: Infrastructures & Collaboration in Social Practices project.
These artists were selected from over 120 applicants and represent an incredibly diverse range of practices, interests, and backgrounds:
We’ll be announcing our keynotes and conference participants soon, followed by further details on the entire project in the coming weeks. In the meantime, you should consider registering to attend the conference (ps. it’s free).
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 on October 21 and October 22, 2011.
