Every Tuesday night during 2010 was a night that basekamp, Philadelphia’s collaboration-driven art/organizing space, lit up screens and filled bellies with their Plausible Artworlds potluck series. While that series served as a way to share knowledge about alternative models of creative practice, it concluded after its 52-week run, and it seems that basekamp’s 2011 chats won’t be held under the same umbrella. The extended schedule is yet to be announced, but the chats kick off tonight with Doug Paulson of Flux Factory discussing the upcoming Congress of the Collectives.
Congress of the Collectives is an interlocking series of events intended to unite art collectives, collectivized spaces, and audiences, so that we may discuss, connect, and collaborate with each other. Like many efforts before it, this Congress intends to be a venue for addressing key concepts, frameworks, and problems of working collectively; for sharing strategies; and for creating new platforms for future projects. Perhaps most importantly, the Congress will continue previous endeavors by others along similar lines – in particular it will work to promote enduring relationships between participants, and join existing efforts to formalize an international exchange program between collectives.
Tune in this (and every) Tuesday night at 6PM – in person, with a dish for the potluck, or via Skype. The basekamp space is at 723 Chestnut St, 2nd floor, Philadelphia, USA. The virtual basekamp chat space can be found by messaging the user basekamp on Skype via the button above.
Planter box intervention designed by Sean Martindale, photo courtesy of the artist
FEAST Toronto grant recipient Sean Martindale and a team of about a dozen urban interventionists took part in a weekend-long installation of Outside the Planter Boxes, intended to highlight some of the neglected city tree planter boxes that line our busy streets by staging a number of creative interventions.
Planter box intervention designed by Martin Reis, hot on the heels on Jan Voorman, photo courtesy of the artist
Planter box installation designed by Karen Abel, photo by the Torontoist
Planter box intervention designed by Hyein Lee, photo courtesy of the artist
Planter box intervention designed by James Calderone, photo courtesy of the artist
Torontoist and BlogTO have more; we will have more photos and a full documentation site up later this week.
Disclosure: Groundswell lent this project a hand, and I’m helping to coordinate Toronto FEAST 02.
Still from Paths Through Utopias. More can be seen here.
Earlier this year, Paths Through Utopias was released in France. Described previously on Groundswell as “a brilliant speculative fiction, a look at the crisis folklores of tomorrow through the lens of today’s post-crash resistant spaces,” the film toured a small circuit of Paris’s urban gardens and squatted art labs.
Blurring the fluid boundaries between present and future, documentary and fiction, Paths Through Utopias is a utopian road movie exploring a post-capitalist Europe. Shot during a 7 month journey in 2008 visiting ten utopian experiments, the film is half of the book-film project published in France by Editions Zones. From the direct action Climate Camp set up illegally besides Heathrow airport to a hamlet squatted by French art punks, occupied self-managed Serbian factories to a free love commune in an ex Stasi base, this magicorealist travelogue transports us to a parallel universe where money is worthless and private property has been abolished.
Now, the filmmakers and organizers are bringing the project to multiple European cities for a variety of screenings and festivals. Their schedule for May-June, 2011 follows.
UPDATE: Tickets to FEAST 02 are now available!
Toronto’s second FEAST will be held at XPACE Cultural Centre on Wednesday, June 15, 2011. Artists who are interested in presenting their work for a chance to be awarded the night’s grant money – which includes both the money raised from the dinner and a dedicated $300 student award – should submit their proposals now.
FEAST 02 proposals should include:
A Project Summary (1), and the answers to the following questions:
(2) How will you use funding to realize your project?
(3) Why is this project critical to the FEAST community (e.g. why would the FEAST community be interested in supporting your project)?
(4) The names and contact information for all of your presenters
Read the full call for proposals on the FEAST website.
Disclosure: I’ve joined up with Toronto FEAST co-founders Amber Landgraff and Deborah Wang to help organize FEAST 02.
For the 25th year, next week Mayworks will gather class-conscious artists in Toronto for a week-long festival that aims to mainline working-class culture into the city’s cultural activities. The festival addresses and includes audiences and artists who are systematically disadvantaged with works ranging from film to cabaret. Appropriately, Canada’s largest and oldest labour arts festival was founded by the local labor council, and flipping through the Mayworks catalog exposes you to more sympathetic voices – unions, radical media outfits, and more – than listings of the works. We’ve sifted through the eight-day schedule to highlight a few of the events.
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