Announcing CIVIC SPACE (Community Innovation through Vital Interactions & Collaborations)
For more information on CIVIC SPACE and its programming: please visit civicspace.info.
We’re incredibly excited to announce a new initiative that will become the centre of our focus for the next two years.
CIVIC SPACE (Community Innovation through Vital Interaction & Collaboration Space) will launch on Thursday, June 21st at 411 Pelissier Street in downtown Windsor. Supported by the Ontario Trillium Foundation, CIVIC SPACE will serve as a hub for our events, public activities, and research around locality, infrastructure, education, and creative practice as a driver for civic change.
This storefront space (once a textile store and before that a jeweller) will soon host new community projects, artist residencies, DIY workshops, public lectures and a range of other new initiatives for the next 24-months. CIVIC SPACE will aim to engage the public in addressing community challenges through new programming and activities that initiate collaborative creative problem solving.
On June 21st at 7pm, we’ll be kicking things off with the Letter Library (A Collection of Alphabetic Interventions). This open community project invites anyone and everyone to come borrow from our letterset to caption the city around them. With Windsor at the edge of so many transitions, how might we collectively reclaim and create our own public narratives about the future of our city through this playful intervention? Anyone participating will be issued a Letter Library Card and will able to sign out 12″ 3D letters from our collection to create their own temporary installation, document it with one of our single-use cameras, and ultimately help to build an archive of new captions for the city’s build environment.
We’ll also be announcing the rest of our summer programming very soon … stay close.
CIVIC SPACE would not be possible without the incredibly generous support from the Ontario Trillium Foundation.
P.S. If you’re interested in applying for a residency, looking to connect for a new collaborative project, or just interested in (finally) making the trip to Windsor, be in touch.
And below, here’s what’s been keeping us busy over the last six weeks or so…
![Monday night at BCL HQ, going over plans for moving forward on our recently OAC funded project starting in January 2010, Broken City Lab: Save the City (details to follow), using good ol’ fashioned lists and future technologies—it was amazing, in every sense of the word. Not sure how many more times we’ll be meeting [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/IMG_13821-150x150.jpg "Planning (in and) For the Future")
![The Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation invites the radical re-imagining of the possibilities for economic stimulus and process-driven practice, situating those very possibilities in the heart of Windsor in vacant storefronts. Facilitated by Broken City Lab, the Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation will call on artists, writers, designers, entrepreneurs, not-for-profits, hobby shops, restauranteurs, librarians, musicians, architects, archivists, and other [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/SRSI-11x17-3-520px-rgb-150x150.jpg "Call for Proposals: The Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation")
![It’s been an incredible few weeks prepping for the launch of CIVIC SPACE and the Letter Library. Huge props to everyone who helped out, especially Kiki Athanassiadis & Lucy Howe! There’s a few hundred letters strewn about the space, waiting for you to takeout and caption the city. Stop by over the next few weeks — [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/wpid18599-IMG_0310-150x150.jpg "Recap of the Letter Library Opening Event!")
![Kevin and Josh ventured out with a single-use camera to test what the temporary installations would look like, as we continue to prep for Thursday’s launch of the Letter Library here at CIVIC SPACE. Also, film is fun. The letters look great and the photos aren’t too bad either. They definitely have a colder tone [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/43390001-150x150.jpg "Single-Use Camera Tests: Captioning the City")
![The holidays flew by, but here’s a quick look at how we spent part of it — amazingly, we almost all got together at one point or another. It’s been way too long! Right before everyone arrived home, Hiba reviews the t-shirt project … already changed again from the image above. Rosina and Hiba took [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/wpid20903-IMG_1914-150x150.jpg "Scattered Notes from the end of the year")
![Meeting twice in a week can make such a difference in terms of how much we can get done. We’re still in the thick of planning for the first event of Save the City. We met earlier last week to go over the basics of finalizing our adjusted budget, put together the first round of [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/IMG_6407-150x150.jpg "How We Spend Friday Nights: Planning, Writing, and Mapping")
![It might seem a bit quiet around here as of late, but rest assured we’re keeping busy. We’re in the thick of paperwork — grant reports, project proposals, etc. However, we’re also quickly approaching the start of a new project that you’ll see unfold here likely over the next month or two. Danielle is working [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/IMG_2398-150x150.jpg "Keeping Busy")
![We spent Friday back at Lebel, reminding us of the meetings we used to have a couple years ago when all this was just starting up. Given the size of the school and the resources readily available (like tools, multiple desks, ample light), we split up into smaller groups to tackle some “next steps” for [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/IMG_8817-150x150.jpg "BCL Report: February 24, 2011 (back to Lebel)")
![Sorry — it’s late, this documentation is rushed, but I just received a few copies of Public, issue 41, Gardens, edited by Erin Despard and Monika Kin Gagnon, which features our Removable Garden project on the cover, and as a nice spread inside! We wrote the text, which outlines some of process and ideas behind the research developing [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/public1-150x150.jpg "Public 41: Gardens")
![Sunday night was the first event of our Save the City project: Listen to the City, and it was incredible!!! We had an amazingly generous crowd of old friends and new faces come out to share their stories of Windsor with us and we recorded close to 8 hours of their hopes, concerns, and personal [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/IMG_9288-150x150.jpg "Listen to the City: Discovering the Histories of Windsor through Conversation")
![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 [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/IMG_0359-150x150.jpg "A Look at Process: building for CAFKA & designing for HFBC")
![On Friday night we played with some new things that Rosina brought over — retroreflective glass beads to be exact. We also made it through another three letters doing papier maché! And, we selected a colour for the letters, again thanks to Rosina doing some recon on paint chips. So, we now have two bags [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/IMG_3821-150x150.jpg "Retroreflective Glass Beads Have Arrived, Weeks of Work Ahead!")
![As we continue to paint the letters, we’re now moving onto some exhibition design for the launch of the Letter Library. Really preliminary ideas here … but the gist of it is around wanting the work to feel open… Not sure that we’ll go with tape on top of the photos like this. 4×6 photos [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_9965-150x150.jpg "Exhibition Design (in progress)")
![Danielle and I will head to Portland State University this weekend to participate in Open Engagement, the conference that asks questions like, “Does socially engaged art have a responsibility to create public good? Can there be transdisciplinary approaches to contemporary art making that would contribute to issues such as urban planning and sustainability?” We’ll be [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/openengagement-150x150.jpg "Open Engagement, Group Work: The Collective Impetus")
![Tuesday night’s Broken City Lab Office Hours were successful, but as usual, all too short. Spending the majority of the time in Lebel’s wood shop, we started working on our LED sign, but still have a long ways to go with it. We cut plexiglass, drilled holes, and started soldering—I think we’ll continue next Monday [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/img_2074-150x150.jpg "LED Sign Construction")
![Broken City Lab is heading up to Peterborough, Ontario for all of next week (October 12 – 17, 2009) for an extended field trip to collaborate with Artspace for a series of community and inter-city research initiatives, workshops, and interventions to understand the city of Peterborough, its infrastructures, and its communities. We’ll be blogging extensively [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/peterboroughmap3-150x150.jpg "Extended Field Trip #001: Artspace in Peterborough")
” Announcing CIVIC SPACE (Community Innovation through Vital Interactions & Collaborations) ” — http://t.co/LJR1pXz2
Kind of like Patron Shack! http://t.co/0NIavuNc
congrats w/ new space! @BrokenCityLab: You should keep June 21st open … http://t.co/Pops3nZO
Great news! @BrokenCityLab got Trillium Foundation funds for CIVIC SPACE http://t.co/DmS5Y1cf Worth a visit to the border cities.
CIVIC SPACE today from 11am-4pm. Planning & prepping for the Letter Library (A Collection of Alphabetic Interventions) http://t.co/kYokUFTP
The good folks at ‘Broken City Lab’ inspire us. http://t.co/4MnekvMd
CIVIC SPACE from 11am – 4pm today. Writing & making today, while we prep for launch! If you’re in the hood, stop by! http://t.co/kYokUFTP
sw ontario boy watching from the west… awesome job and congrats on the new space! excited to visit one day.
Thanks, Jason, let us know if you’re ever in the area. We’d love to play host.