About Broken City Lab

The Ideas

Broken City Lab is an artist-led interdisciplinary collective and non-profit organization working to explore and unfold curiosities around locality, infrastructures, education, and creative practice leading towards civic change.

Our projects, events, workshops, performances, and interventions offer a sometimes momentary, sometimes extended, injection of creativity into a situation, surface, place, or community. These projects continually connect various disciplines through research and social practice, generating works and interventionist tactics that adjust, critique, annotate, and re-imagine the city that we encounter.

Much of our activity has been focused on Windsor, Ontario, a once-collapsing, now gradually stabilizing post-industrial city at the edge of Canada. We believe that Windsor provides an exemplary vantage point from which to consider the role of artists in challenged communities, but we have also worked on various interventions, installations, and other creative endeavours in cities across Canada. Our work has been created across media – from temporary interventions to large-scale community events and from gallery exhibitions to various workshops and publications – but we also often take on the role of organizing and facilitating the activity of other artists and creative practitioners through residencies, conferences, and writing projects. We aim to creatively respond to the issues we directly experience in a community, while also negotiating the ways in which other community members experience the same issues, differently.

Over the past four years, we have worked with the City of Windsor’s Transit Authority to install community-created text-based art in its buses, generated an interactive projection performance detailing 100 ideas for saving the city of Windsor onto a building in its downtown core, designed and distributed removable micro-gardens made from recycled plastic bags and rare-earth magnets, written interactive text-based performance software, told thousands of Windsorites that “you are amazing,” projected large-scale messages visible across an international border, hosted 25 artists from across Canada for an interdisciplinary storefront residency project, painted a 350 foot long message on a parking lot, visible from planes and satellites, and led numerous psychogeographic walks, DIY workshops, and community brainstorming sessions in cities across Canada.

Our projects and research have been featured in Fuse Magazine, Public Journal, C Magazine, Creative Time’s Social Practice Archive, Next American City, Alternatives, GOOD, the National Post, the Toronto Star, NPR (WDET, NPHR), CBC Radio One, CBC television, Le Téléjournal, The Windsor Star, the A-Channel, Wooster Collective, PSFK, and Tree Hugger, presented and exhibited across North America including the Art Gallery of Windsor, TRUCK Gallery, Forest City Gallery, Propeller Centre, Open Engagement, Hamilton Artists Inc., and CAFKA, and have been supported by the Ontario Arts Council’s Multidisciplinary Arts, Integrated Arts, Artists in the Community/Workplace, and Media Arts programmes, the University of Windsor Humanities Research Group, OPIRG Windsor, and the City of Windsor.

Since 2008, we have worked as an ad-hoc collective and we received our letters of incorporation in July 2011.

The People

Senior Research Fellows

Justin A. Langlois is an artist working in integrated media and social practice. He has an MFA in Visual Arts and a BA (Hons) in Communication Studies from the University of Windsor. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including grants from The Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Windsor.

Danielle Sabelli has a BA (Hons) in Visual Arts and Communications Studies, an MA in Communications and Social Justice, and is pursuing her JD in the Faculty of Law at the University of Windsor. She immigrated to Windsor from Leamington Ontario. She hopes to stay in Windsor Ontario, (if Windsor will let her) to witness and aid in the revolución.

Michelle Soulliere is an artist working in Windsor, Ontario and recent BFA graduate from University of Windsor. She has a strong heritage connected to the Windsor area and has always been motivated by her surroundings in the city. She draws her inspiration from the Detroit River and the things in it, biking, alleys and the things in them, train tracks, metal boxes, dumpsters, spray paint, thrift stores, dancing and dance floors. Michelle works with the street, concrete, paint, markers, spray, duct tape and photocopies in the form of social practice. She is currently conducting research around the Windsor area under the alias Citynoise.

Joshua Babcock is a multidisciplinary visual artist from Windsor, Ontario. Joshua creates works that relate to themes such as environmental aesthetics, human traits in consumer products, death and its usage in marketing, societal violence, biological processes, human curiosity, and class identification. With a particular interest in scientific forms of presentation, he spends the majority of his time working with paint, ink, graphite, found objects, and photography. Joshua’s work is often a response, literally or figuratively, to the materials with which he works. He holds a B.A. in Visual Arts from the University of Windsor and is currently living and working in Windsor.

Cristina Naccarato holds a BA (Hons) in English from the University of Windsor, an MA in Literatures of Modernity from Ryerson University and is currently working toward her masters in Library and Information Science with a focus on archival studies, from the University of Western Ontario. Interested in the archive, the photograph as documentary object, and how these can be combined to create and preserve stories, she has actively spent the last several years photographing and documenting the cities she occupies. She has also been involved in many grassroots initiatives, hosting shows on community radio stations, organizing shows and music festivals, organizing symposiums and conferences, curating exhibitions and writing/editing numerous free-lance journals, zines and newspapers.

Rosina Riccardo is currently working towards her Bachelor of Arts in Communications and Visual Arts at the University of Windsor. She is constantly striving to grow as an artist through various endevours and mediums the city has to offer. As well, she is particularly fascinated with things relating to popular culture, Canadian music and history.

Junior Research Fellows

Hiba Abdallah is a multidisciplinary artist working towards her BFA at the University of Windsor. Her work analyzes and interprets the connections between identity, culture, history, and the political environments in which we live. Based mainly in sculpture and drawing, she recreates settings that confront sociopolitical spaces that protest against the notion of reality. She is constantly reminding herself and those around her to explore and consider why things the way they are.

Kevin Echlin is currently a BFA student at the University of Windsor. He strives for a multi-disciplinary art practice. His sculptures utilize natural objects (highlighting what they are in nature), and manufactured items (highlighting their function within society). He likes to emphasize a stark contrast by fusing these two separate concepts together. Hand drawings and ink washes are also inspired in the same light, as well as lyric writing for his aspiring music practice.

Sara Howie is currently working towards her degree in Fine Arts and Art History at the University of Windsor. She is interested in art as a form of documentation as well as the interactivity between art and the viewer. Her work often reflects her curiosities as she continues to explore the city and all the great things it has to offer. Sara is also investigating her role as an activist, and writes about it.