What do you get when you mix a postindustrial urban mess with a group of artists who want to make it better? In Windsor, the answer is Broken City Lab, a post-avant-garde art project whose object is the city itself and the social relations necessary to transform urban blight into community and prosperity.
Broken City Lab (BCL) is the brainchild of artists Justin Langlois and Danielle Sabelli that quickly attracted the interests of a handful of other artists – Josh Babcock, Michelle Soulliere, Cristina Naccarato, and Rosina Riccardo. The idea was to find a new way – other than protest, that is – to use art for social change. What they came up with is a fascinating series of public interventions rooted in art practices intended to energize and mobilize local interest in reimagining Windsor’s future.
The two exhibitions that are currently at Saskatoon’s AKA Gallery and Paved Arts and New Media share a conceptual focus. Going with the idea that there’s no such thing as coincidence, I’m going to speak of them as one entity.
Robin Moody’s Power and Shelly Rahme’s Crude: Sublime Scuptural Landscapes overlap and enhance each other, both in form and function. Both are sculptural, though one is more “interactive” while the other is more “silent.” In their respective manners, both work very well.
I came across a fascinating art project taking place in Windsor, Ontario called the Broken City Lab, an artist collective’s response to the economically and socially plundered remains of yet another post-industrial North American city.
Broken City Lab describes what they do as a mix of social practice, performance, and activism. From the website: “The lab attempts to generate a new dialogue surrounding public participation and community engagement in the creative process, with a focus on the city as both a research site and workspace”. Their goal? To find new and creative solutions to Windsor’s economic and social miasma now that the industrial party has moved on.
Their projects are often technology based, which they use to bring in wider communities of participation. For example, the Talking to Walls intervention projected short fill-in-the-blank questionnaires and statements into public spaces that addressed issues of public and private concern — statements like:
Tear down all the _________ but leave up all the ____________.
The consumer is supposed to do what they’re told, no? It is an old and well practiced arrangement. They make the stuff, and the rest of us buy it, eat it and use it. Especially, it seems, with technology where few of us have the know-how or courage for that matter to repurpose and reinvent the complicated digital gak that increasingly defines our lives.
Even the fun machines like video games and computers come to us with built in assumptions about how we are expected to behave with them, what we will do with them, and how our lives will be altered to integrate these objects into daily practices. We listen to radios. We play video games. We watch televisions. Just like we’re told.
But there are those among us who do it differently. Hardware-hacking is a growing movement to reclaim creative control of our relationships with technology. “Shape your tools, or you will be shaped by them”, so their motto goes. Televisions become oscilloscopes. Radios become synthesizers. Outdated video games become means of composing unique musical scores.
A Review of Cape Farewell’s SHIFT Festival at the London South Bank Centre and the exhibition Earth: Art of a Changing World at the Royal Academy, London.
There has been a centuries old tradition for artists to act as the handmaidens of the powerful and the wealthy, commissioned to celebrate victories in battle, coronations of potentates or vanity portraits. In our relatively more democratic age the link between artists and patrons has become more problematic, allowing artists a greater freedom to plough their own furrows towards indigence or fortune, to indulge their own interests or, stepping outside of their private bubbles, to respond to the issues of the day.
It was the supreme narcissist, Pablo Picasso, who, in the nineteen-thirties, most spectacularly confronted the issue of his day, the danger from the rise of militarism and fascism, in his monumental work Guernica. Now, in our own perilous times, Guernica seems to have replaced the polar bear1 as the creative community’s icon of preference, a template with which to confront our own Armageddon, the threat to the planet from climate change and global warming.
If anything is making its slow way out of the Downtown East Side (DTES) and into mainstream Olympic news flows, it is the issue of homelessness. The Red Tent Campaign, the Tent City Squat on a VANOC parking lot, the homeless banner strung from the Cambie Bridge (for a VANOC sanctioned 20 minutes, and time immemorial photo-op), Saturday’s national housing rally …
This was the topic of conversation at last Sunday’s Safe Assembly Newscast at the VIVO studios. Safe Assembly is a gesture to protect the critical conversation about the Olympic games. Hosted by VIVO, a media arts collective who chose not to participate in the Cultural Olympiad, the Newscasts are opportunities for those critical of the Olympics to come together and reflect on the events of protest and dissent taking place in Vancouver.
What follows is a brief summary of the gathering — topics of discussion included the housing protest at the Vancouver Art Gallery last Saturday, update from the Tent City squat, a look at the growing phenomena of Olympic fans protesting against protesters, and the potential effects of university students as shock troops of gentrification in the DTES.
When local homeless and under-housed residents of the Downtown East Side (DTES) were asked what they wanted during the Vancouver Olympic games, they said a safe place to hang out, get some food and coffee, relax and listen to music. And they wanted this without the invasive scrutiny of the media and without feeling like they were a problem to be solved with charity. The Homeground Festival was born, a festival of sustenance and sanctuary specifically for those struggling with poverty, substance dependency, homelessness and physical and mental health challenges.
The dates of the festival are not publicized. The only way to find out about it is word of mouth or if you happen to see a poster which only appear in the DTES. And with one exception, media is not allowed on site – no cameras or recording devices of any kind. It is a place where DTES residents can go and feel comfortable among themselves without the invasive gaze of outsiders.
What do you get when you mix a postindustrial urban mess with a group of artists who want to make it better? In Windsor, the answer is Broken City Lab, a post-avant-garde art project whose object is the city itself and the social relations necessary to transform urban blight into community and prosperity.
A Review of Cape Farewell’s SHIFT Festival at the London South Bank Centre and the exhibition Earth: Art of a Changing World at the Royal Academy, London.
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