Broken City Lab: Micro-Residencies
We’ll give you a place to stay and resources for 72 hours. You’ll help us fix the city.
For the last year, we’ve been working away on a number of initiatives that have come out of our very specific examinations of Windsor, Ontario. The ways in which we see, experience, and move through the city have defined our tactical investigations and have, by design, been based on our deeply embedded concerns about our city.
We’re now looking to expand our research and our understanding of our city by inviting other artists, designers, writers, curators, architects, filmmakers, philosophers, musicians, mathematicians, scientists, and students to come stay with us for 72 hours. We’re looking for collaborators who are generous, energetic, and interested in understanding Windsor. We’re not necessarily looking for completed ideas, but rather general concerns you would like to investigate and workshop over three days.
We can’t offer any money, but we can offer a bed.
We won’t do anything illegal, but we will give you our energy and ideas.
If you can get to Windsor, we can make this happen.
Should this opportunity interest you, please apply using the Micro-Residency Submission Form.
![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")
![To get a jump start on laying the groundwork for our upcoming How to Forget the Border Completely project, we have decided to interview a small group of individuals who may be considered “experts” of the Windsor-Detroit border in some way. Kero, a musician/graphic designer/video artist, was our first candidate for a video interview. He [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/04-copy-150x150.jpg "Border Interviews: Kero")
![Thursday night was a night of decisions and tests. We’ve spent the last couple of weeks just trying to get caught up generally with projects and Thursday marked the beginning of the deciding how to start wrapping up How to Forget the Border Completely and what direction to move in to make some more progress on [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/IMG_9596-150x150.jpg "BCL Report: April 21, 2011 (making decisions)")
![Yesterday was just lovely! Andrea Carvalho did a parking garage performance as part of her study of Non-Places, Kero set up his interactive installation, and a lot of familiar local friends rolled through The People’s Museum to contribute to the giant map. Andrea has been trying to perform in this space for a few days [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/IMG_0449-150x150.jpg "SRSI, Day 8: Rethinking Parking Garages")
![Yesterday morning Rosina and I went to the Art Gallery of Windsor for the install of BCL’s piece that is going in the Border Cultures: Part One (Homes, Land) along with some other great artists. The show is opening next week on January 25th. We spent the majority of the remainder of day planning for the [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/wpid21140-IMG_2187-150x150.jpg "Regret/Resolve: Exhibition Planning")
![As we gear up for the first event of our Save the City project, Listen to the City, we’re also planning ahead for the February event: Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope. Another Friday night at HQ trying our best to get as much work done as we could before heading out to the [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/IMG_6648-150x150.jpg "Already Looking Ahead to February’s Save the City Event!")
![The last Friday we had before the upcoming Dance Party and Seedbomb Demo… We now have flyers, seedbomb containers, seedbomb germination (in the wild), and tea container labels. Michelle begins the process of spraying 50-something flyers after expertly cutting out the detailed info of the party. Many, many flyers (I like the silver ones the [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/Broken-City-Lab-Friday-August-29-2008-stenciling-origami-seedbombs-150x150.jpg "BCL Report – August 29, 2008")
![Last Monday night, a small group of us gathered around the table to talk about All Tomorrow’s Problems. This is an open event that invites anyone to attend and think of this as a very loosely organized group to discuss and exercise your ideas on a specific topic. We may not actually make anything, but [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/wpid20092-IMG_1471-150x150.jpg "Last Week & Tonight: All Tomorrow’s Problems")
![A week ago, on an incredibly cold, rainy, snowy evening, we headed out on an exploration of Windsor’s downtown guided by a randomly assembled algorithm for Scavenge The City. We only made it through the first 20 steps (we stopped checking them off though), plus a couple others we skipped to by the end, but for [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/algorithm-original-used2-150x150.jpg "Scavenge the City Recap")
![Thursday night, our last night in North Bay as part of our residency, we did a large-scale public projection as a kind of summary of our conversations, and as a bit of a starting point for where we see the exhibition going. Almost next door to the White Water Gallery is this huge blank wall — [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/wpid19048-MG_1594-150x150.jpg "100 Emergencies for North Bay (Projections in Downtown)")
![Though we have a lot more to say about Save the City than I’ll attempt right now, you should know that we put together a toolkit that describes the processes we figured out throughout the last five months. We put together a nice one-page fold up list of instructions, so to speak, for how one [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/IMG_9640-150x150.jpg "A Toolkit for Saving a City")
![We had another great Friday night meeting, even though Josh was sick, and even though we underestimated two things. First, we struggled again thinking through this second residency/conference idea, and the letters took way longer than anticipated to papier mâché. At any rate, with the autumn weather firmly setting in, it’s looking like we’ll be [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/IMG_3581-150x150.jpg "Getting Closer Every Week: Big Letters and New Titles")
![We are already nearing the end of our priming process for our letters after only beginning last week! While we got to painting the rest of the letters on Friday, I prepared a few things earlier in the week for our next step, painting the letters in a fabulous bright red. After deciding on a [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/leadRosinaPic-150x150.jpg "Finishing Phase Three and Experimenting with Colour")
![We’ll give you a place to stay and resources for 72 hours. You’ll help us fix the city. For the last year, we’ve been working away on a number of initiatives that have come out of our very specific examinations of Windsor, Ontario. The ways in which we see, experience, and move through the city [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/BCL_microresidency3-150x150.jpg "Broken City Lab: Micro-Residencies")
![I’ll write a full post when it isn’t nearly three in the morning, but I just wanted to toss out this thing that I started working on tonight. A couple of us are trying to come up with any number of actions that might serve the dual purpose of helping to stave off (or at [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/postoffice-colouring-150x150.png "Community coloring")
![Not exhaustive, nor complete, this map is a work-in-progress, documenting a community in-transition. For one afternoon in February 2010, we gathered together with a group of community members to create two distinct lists: Sites of Apology and Sites of Hope. The locations identified as part of these two lists were noted as being places for which [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/IMG_3444-150x150.jpg "Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope: the Map")
![Danielle and I spent the better part of the afternoon a couple days ago going through wheatpaste recipes, ultimately going with the simplest. We had wanted to avoid having to use a hot plate to make it, and after 4 different recipes requiring varying amounts of heat, we were successful. Flour. Flour + cold water. [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/the-setup-150x150.jpg "Wheatpaste Research")
![Friday night was especially fun. With next week being our first research report for How to Forget the Border Completely, we basically spent the evening casually going over some preliminary research, planning out some new directions, and getting more acquainted with the collection of border books next door. Michelle brought a tourism Detroit magazine she [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/IMG_8505-150x150.jpg "Quality Time with Books & Imaginary Spaces")
new BCL office downtown = amazing!
i’m extremely excited about the prospect of fulfilling a micro residency for bcl this autumn! however, in my zealous application i mis-typed my personal info, and have likely directed you to a blog that doesn’t exist or isn’t mine! the website with this reply is accurate, but e-mail is my ideal mode of communication. i hope my ideas aren’t compromised by my hasty posting of erroneous contact info!
thanks for the awesome opportunity (for everyone),
michelle wybenga
Michelle, no worries about the mis-type, we got your application and we’ll get back to you ASAP!
a little (more) sumthin’ sumthin’ from (surely) your most prolific poster of corrective/superfluous information :) as per my micro-residency application, i wonder if/where i might submit an addendum/amendment – in the instance that here is as good a spot as any, i’d like to mention [1] that i realize 72 hours and my proposed 3,000 to 5,000 word performance piece vis a vis the writing project i’ve outlined does not shake down mathematically perfectly; i’d be polishing a pre-proposal already substantial in its scope and size…but not without all the sweat and tears that may make it fun to watch/more fun to enact :) thanks again for the shot :D
Michelle, feel free just to send another email with Micro-Residency in the subject with any additional information you’d like to provide!