We are pleased to announce that Shannon Linde & Edward Birnbaum are the winners of the FEAST Project Grant, and Zack Pearl & April Wong are the winners of the XPACE FEAST Student Grant.
Shannon Linde & Edward Birnbaum proposed the Toronto Sauna Project, which they describe as:
a public installation that takes over an otherwise closed-for-the-season Toronto Parks building in MacGregor Park, transforming the space into a community-accessible sauna for two consecutive weekends in Februrary 2012. Based on the theme of winter solace, the project stems from a reaction to current sauna and bathhouse practices that exist in North America under segregated circumstances, as well a desire to revive unused public space during the long winter months. The goal is to create an authentic sauna experience through the use of electric heat sources and cedar, supplemented by media elements such as sound and light. The Toronto Sauna Project will offer a warm retreat from Toronto’s longest, and often most isolated, season, inviting the community into a comfortable space that is all at once relaxing, reflective, and fun.
Inspired by such high-profile projects as Berlin’s Badeschiff, and Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project, the Toronto Sauna Project aspires to be a cost free facility for use by the general public.
Zack Pearl & April Wong’s winning student grant proposal was for an installation at Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel that reflects on the architectural dissonance resulting from the rapid gentrification of the Queen Street West area where the hotel is found. Through consultation with the public (defined as anyone with a past or present relationship to the area), Wong will develop graphic, pattern-heavy cityscapes and tectonic forms from such materials as mylar, parchment, and plexiglass, to illustrate the neighborhood’s trajectory.
Toronto FEAST would like to thank all the presenters and participating diners for making FEAST 02 a great event. A special thank you is in order to my co-conspirators, Amber Landgraff and Deborah Wang, for bringing me on to help organize this event.
(Susie Husted is a Boston-based social justice activist who acted as a community advisor to Artists in Context’s conference planning. Susie’s been a strategic player in the planning of many Boston-based events including the annual HONK! Festival, 2010 Food not Bombs 30th Anniversary Festival and A People’s Celebration of Howard Zinn, as well as city-wide student teach-ins and regional anti-war demonstrations.)
Hybrid practice is not new, but in Boston, a community of practice around inter-disciplinary, inter-sectional, collaborative and socially engaged art is emerging. In that respect, Boston-based arts organization, Artists in Context, forged new ground this weekend. Over 100 local activists, academics and artists gathered at Artist in Context’s Connected & Consequential conference to witness each other’s work, and begin laying the ground from which to develop and understand the mechanisms, scope, and intentional practice of hybrid art in greater Boston.
Founded by Louisa McCall and Marie Cieri in 2009, AIC seeks to support the research-based, multidisciplinary, embedded practices of contemporary artists and other creative thinkers who seek to invent alternative approaches to existing societal challenges. Connected & Consequential in Boston was AIC’s first large city-wide event to develop a community of practice in New England. Additional gatherings on the same theme are planned for the fall 2011 in Providence, Rhode Island, Massachusetts’ Pioneer Valley and Maine, as well as workshops and community dialogues to further explore the specificity of hybrid practice in greater Boston.
What follows is a summary of the Greater Boston Connected & Consequential events in the participants own words.
“Bearing witness takes a long time, “but is necessary “to let the call from the community be authentic, and our answer be authentic.”
Michael Dowling, Medicine
Wheel Productions, Stories from
the Field panel
“The question from the community wasn’t ‘what will [the project] look like?’, but ‘what will it say?’”
Gavin Kroeber & Dan Borelli
Case Study: Crossing the Rubicon, a project-in-progress with the community of Ashland, MA about the Nyanza Superfund Site.“I don’t want to be a ‘parachute’ artist.”
John Osorio-Buck
Stories from the Field panel
Kelly Dobson’s “Blendie Diagram” (2003-2004). Dobson joined Artistic Director of Artlink, Edinburgh, Alison Stirling, and artists Steve Hollingsworth and Wendy Jacob on AIC’s Ideas Team case study.
We sought to “make machines with the agency of care.”
Kelly Dobson, Case Study: Ideas Team
“We reached organizational overwhelm. We said, ‘we’re doing a lot of stuff – but is it effective?”
“We want to address huge issues and how they trickle down into our neighborhoods,” but by silo-ing our different practices (cultural organizing, arts and activism), “we structurally set ourselves up to not meet our goals. We have to think more deeply about how we connect these issues.”
Mariamma White-Hammond, Project HIP HOP,
Stories from the Field panel
We “embrace complexity and find a container that creates connections”
Andi Sutton, National Bitter Melon Council
Stories from the Field panel
Video clips, conference findings and future programs will be posted at the Artists in Context website this summer.
Boston’s Design Studio for Social Intervention (DS4SI) recently joined with local youth to co-design Let’s Flip It, a campaign to interrupt social patterns that contribute to youth violence, specifically the violence that can occur when youth wear hats with team logos to rep their blocks.
Now in phase two of the project, DS4SI is seeking two artists or artist teams interested in flipping the dynamic of block-vs-block violence in Boston. Two separate commissions have been established for this summer, both of which involve designing interventions in direct collaboration and consultation with youth, the results from which will be deployed in public. Each commission will be awarded at $3,000, and the deadline for applications is June 20th, 2011.
Click the image above left to download DS4SI’s call for interventions performing or investigating a gesture, an idea, or a feeling that youth use, yet inherited from somewhere or someone else. Click the image above right to download the call for work that reimagines the message behind Letʼs Flip It.
Disclosure: The Studio is one of our closest allies in Boston, and we’ve worked together on many projects.
American-born Afghan artist Aman Mojadidi has caught the attention of Afghanistan’s art scene, and Western eyes as powerful as the Wall Street Journal. His work intends to provoke, using his dual cultural heritage, and the hefty subject of jihad to satirize contemporary Afghan politics and social mores. Below is a selection from his A Day in the Life of a Jihadi Gangster Foto Series, which builds on his Conflict Bling installation from the year prior. Both meld stereotypical images of American gangsters with Afghan mujahedeen, and caught the attention and ire of Kabul censors. More of Mojadidi’s work is at wearyourrespirator.com.
After a Long Day’s Work (A Day in the Life of a Jihadi Gangster Foto Series)
Phone Negotiations (A Day in the Life of a Jihadi Gangster Foto Series)
In Montreal, fifty public space activists known as ARTUNG! have successfully taken back hundreds of spaces owned by the advertising companies Pattison, CBS Outdoor and Astral Media, filling the space instead with community artwork.
The Beehive Collective’s No Fences, No Borders for ARTUNG
Plateau Mont-Royal, the borough where the action was staged, recently voted to ban 45 billboards from the area. The advertising giants responded with a legal threat to reverse this democratically made decision, favored by 78% of residents. Their aggression inspired ARTUNG! to take direct action. Vanessa Moraless, an ARTUNG! campaigner offers this explanation in a press release:
Today, we transformed Montreal’s outdoor ads into public works of art to send a message to advertising giants: to stop threatening residents of the Plateau with an unnecessary legal battle and immediately remove their visual pollution from the whole of Montreal’s cityscape.
Rayures Horizontales Duct Tape by François Lalumière for ARTUNG!
Differing from the recent ad takeover in Madrid, ARTUNG! organizers invited artists to contribute handmade works, stencils, or stickers, or to leave the visual art materials at home and create a flashmob or performance art piece in the space. The goal was a “collage. . . a wonderful surprise to the community,” augmented by the participation of bloggers, community groups, and more.
ARTUNG! contributor Jordan Seiler’s Pink Earrings
In total, the action successfully removed 250 ads, and opened 110 boxes to install art. Many of the contributing artists will be familiar to Groundswell readers from past coverage of NYSAT and MaSAT, as well as the more recent planter installations in Toronto.
Now that the action is complete, ARTUNG! has opened the doors for further collaboration, making their website a platform for tracking guerrilla public space reclamation in Montreal, past and present. Residents and transients are encouraged to input their work, or their favorite piece they spotted at street-level.
Disclosure: Groundswell supported ARTUNG! by providing coverage and collaborators. All of the above photos are taken from cecinestpasunepub.net, where a full gallery of images from the action is hosted.
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