19th Annual Media City Film Festival (May 21-25, 2013)

Image: Film Still by Saul Levine

19th Annual Media City Film Festival (2013)

This Tuesday, May 21st, our friends at Media City will be kicking off the 19th Annual Media City Film Festival with an opening night at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD). Then, on Wednesday, May 22nd, there will be an opening reception at the Capitol Theatre & Arts Centre in Windsor. This year, Media City will be screening more than 60 new artist’s films from 20 countries, presented in 10 programs over 5 days. Dozens of filmmakers and cinema professionals will be in attendance from across Canada and the USA as well as England, France, Palestine, Ecuador, Argentina, South Korea and more.

On Friday, May 24th, Broken City Lab’s own Hiba Abdallah will be presenting Program 5 at the Capitol Theatre & Arts Centre at 9:30pm.

Tuesday, May 21st, 8pm – Opening Night at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) (4454 Woodward Avenue, Detroit)

Live performance by legendary free music orchestra CCMC, featuring distinguished Canadian artists Michael Snow (Companion of the Order of Canada), John Oswald and Al Mattes, and Detroit’s own avant-noise trio Wolf Eyes (on the cover of Wire magazine this month!). Also that night: launch party for the vinyl re-release of CCMC Volume Three, a recording lost for 35 years, now reissued by Media City and MOCAD in a limited edition of 500 LPs.

Wednesday, May 22nd  to Saturday, May 25th – Film Screenings at the Capitol Theatre (121 University West, Windsor)

The best of new artist’s film from around the globe, screened in two or three programs nightly. Highlights include a retrospective screening celebrating the career of US filmmaker Saul Levine, spanning forty years, the Canadian premiere of Stemple Pass, the new film by James Benning, plus new films by Kevin J. Everson, Basma Alsharif, Sergei Loznitsa, David Gatten, Friedl vom Gröller, and many more.

Wednesday, May 22nd, 6:00 pm - Opening Party in Windsor at the Capitol Theatre

The opening party will include a special announcement from Windsor-West MPP Teresa Piruzza and Shannon Prince of the Ontario Trillium Foundation.

Get on the Bus! Sponsored by the Detroit Bus Company, Media City offers a FREE shuttle service for US patrons each night of the festival, with pick-up and return locations in Detroit (MOCAD) and Ann Arbor. Schedules and Reservations through the festival website. Ride the one and only cross-border film shuttle in the world! 

Below is a link to the online catalogue which has more in-depth information about this year’s festival:

Media City Film Festival – Online Catalogue

Media Contacts: Jeremy Rigsby / Oona Mosna, Program Directors
Direct: (519) 973-9368 or mediacity@houseoftoast.ca

Hope to see you there!

Silkscreen Power with Mary Tremonte: This Tuesday, 4pm at Civic Space!

Silkscreen Power: A Printmaking Workshop Hosted by Justseeds Artist Cooperative Member Mary Tremonte

Tuesday, May 7th at 4pm – Civic Space (411 Pelissier Street, Windsor, Ontario)

We are proud to be involved in Windsor Youth Arts Week 2013, this city’s contribution to National Youth Arts Week, a weeklong celebration of creativity in Canada. Windsor Youth Arts Week will provide an opportunity for youth ages 13 to 30 to express and exchange ideas, get excited about creative activity, and celebrate their contributions to their communities and to Canadian culture.

On Tuesday, May 7th, join Mary Tremonte, Justseeds Artist Cooperative member and current Broken City Lab artist in residence, as she reveals the magic of silkscreening, using posters, bandanas, pennants, and t-shirts as canvasses. Also, feel free to bring your own materials for printing (t-shirts, etc.)!

To view a list of the other events happening during Windsor Youth Arts Week, please visit here.

Justseeds Artist Cooperative in Residence for Mayworks 2013

Prints by Shaun Slifer of Justseeds Cooperative

Broken City Lab presents: Justseeds Artist Cooperative in Residence for Mayworks 2013

April 30th – May 17th, 2013 at CIVIC SPACE (411 Pelissier Street, Windsor, Ontario) and Drouillard Park (1247 Drouillard Road, Windsor, Ontario)

Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative is a decentralized network of 24 artists committed to making print and design work that reflects a radical social, environmental, and political stance. With members working from the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, Justseeds operates both as a unified collaboration of similarly minded printmakers and as a loose collection of creative individuals with unique viewpoints and working methods. They believe in the transformative power of personal expression in concert with collective action. To this end, they produce collective portfolios, contribute graphics to grassroots struggles for justice, work collaboratively both in- and outside the co-op, build large sculptural installations in galleries, and wheatpaste on the streets – all while offering each other daily support as allies and friends.

Members of Justseeds will be coming to Civic Space to host a series of labour-inspired events and an exhibition titled Uprisings: Images of Labour.

JUSTSEEDS’ EVENTS FOR MAYWORKS 2013

April 30th @ 7:00PM (CIVIC SPACE)

Pre-May Day Parade Printing Party: bandanas, penants, and signs will be made for the May Day parade @ BCL Civic Space, 411 Pelissier

May 1st @ 6:30PM (Drouillard Park)

May Day Bandana, Penant, and Sign Distro: after parade @ Drouillard Park

May 10th @ 7:00PM (CIVIC SPACE)

Uprisings: Images of Labour: exhibition opening @ BCL Civic Space, 411 Pelissier

May 17th @ 7:00PM (CIVIC SPACE)

Justseeds Closing Event, w/ DJ Mary Mack @ BCL Civic Space, 411 Pelissier

Photography for Goods: A Skills for Good(s) Event Hosted by Mike DiRisio

Photography for Goods: A Skills for Good(s) Event Hosted by Mike DiRisio

Friday, April 26th, 7pm @ CIVIC SPACE – 411 Pelissier Street, Windsor, Ontario

Photography for Goods, a Skills for Good(s) workshop hosted by University of Windsor MFA Candidate Mike DiRisio, will cover ways to light and shoot objects to white out the photograph’s background – methods similar to those used in product photography. However, we will be using very basic materials, like desk lamps and large sheets of paper, so that you can easily reproduce this at home. We’ll then do some basic edits using Adobe Photoshop software, to completely white out the background and make the photographs as sharp as possible!

Please bring a used object (preferably something no bigger than a microwave) to donate to the Common Goods freestore – we’ll be photographing these for the demo.

Please visit Common Goods to see examples of objects photographed this way, and to learn more about the project Common Goods.

Exit Strategies Panel Discussion: A Letters & Handshakes Event

Image courtesy of LettersandHandshakes.org 

Exit Strategies – Celebrating the launch of TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies (28) “Out of the Ruins, the University to Come,” edited by Bob Hanke and Alison Hearn

Irfan Ali (The Academy of the Impossible) | Maria Alejandrina Coates, Rodrigo Hernandez-Gomez, and Arlan Londoño (Decolonial Aesthetics from the Americas) | Nick Dyer-Witheford (University of Western Ontario) | Sandra Jeppesen (Lakehead University) | Justin Langlois (Broken City Lab) | Maiko Tanaka (The Grand Domestic Revolution)

Sat. April 20, 2013
3:00-5:00pm
Onsite [at] OCAD U
230 Richmond St. West
Toronto, ON

Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/120010221527156/

Accumulation by student debt. Precarization of education workers. Dependence on corporate donations. Emphasis on research commercialization. Intensification of academic managerialism… Neoliberal transformations of the university coincide with growing interest in co-research, free schools, and education-oriented art practice. Bringing together individuals working within and across educational, activist, and artistic fields, Exit Strategies assesses some of the fault lines in universities today—but also links that conversation to a counter-current of experimentation in research, pedagogy, and institution formation occurring at the margins of the university system.

As sites of knowledge production become increasingly enclosed, what new practices of education are unfolding simultaneously in neighbourhoods, in homes, and in classrooms?

How is pedagogical possibility enabled and constrained by the setting in which we teach, learn, and research?

Refusing to romanticize a ‘lost’ university or idealize ‘alternative’ practices, here exit strategies are about evicting neoliberal imperatives from educational institutions; affirming commitments to radical pedagogy, basic research, and critical inquiry that continue to animate the university; constructing autonomous education projects and pursuing disruptive pedagogies that strive to forefront non-capitalist sociality and anti-oppression; amplifying transversal relays across diverse sites for action-oriented research; and sharing insights between those voicing a critique of the university from within and those inventing new institutions and pedagogies from without.

Speakers

Irfan Ali is a writer, educator, and the operations manager of the Academy of the Impossible. The Academy is an open source social enterprise in west-end Toronto that opened in December 2011. Ali works primarily with Impossible Arts, the organization’s arts wing, coordinating and leading writing and art programs for Toronto youth and adults. In just over one year the Academy has become a hub for workshops, events, and groups that focus on innovative educational techniques. Impossible Arts runs four main programs: Toronto Street Writers (a writing group), Sound Poets’ Circle (a hip hop and spoken word workshop), Impossible Words (a literary salon), and Fright Film Academy (a film workshop). Ali’s background is in commerce and education and he has previously worked with organizations such as the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto, Pathways to Education – Regent Park, and the Christie-Ossington Neighbourhood Centre.

Maria Alejandrina Coates, Rodrigo Hernandez-Gomez, and Arlan Londoño are the organizers of Decolonial Aesthetics from the Americas, a multidisciplinary and collaborative symposium for artists and scholars of the Americas and the Caribbean, featuring performances, artist presentations, workshops, online components, and papers. In collaboration with FUSE Magazine, a special issue, to be published in September 2013, will serve as a reader for this event.

Nick Dyer-Witheford is Associate Professor and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at University of Western Ontario. He is author of Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism (University of Illinois, 1999), and co-author, with Stephen Kline and Greig de Peuter, of Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing (McGill-Queen’s, 2003), and with Greig de Peuter of Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). He is currently working on a manuscript provisionally titled The Global Worker and the Digital Front.

Sandra Jeppesen is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies, and the creator of the new Media Studies for Social Change program in the Interdisciplinary Studies Department at Lakehead University in Orillia. With Holly Nazar, she contributed the essay “Beyond Academic Freedom: Canadian Neoliberal Universities in the Global Context” to TOPIA (28).

Justin Langlois is the co-founder and research director of Broken City Lab, and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Windsor. In the fall, he will join the Faculty of Culture and Community at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

Maiko Tanaka collaborates on curatorial projects at the intersections of art, pedagogy, and collective action. Since 2010 she’s been working on The Grand Domestic Revolution with Casco (Utrecht) where she co-curated projects with ASK!, a collective of art workers in affinity with domestic workers, Our Autonomous Life?, a cooperatively produced sitcom on the Dutch squatting movement, and Read-in, a nomadic reading group that goes door to door searching for hosts for their reading sessions. During her residency at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery she organized Extra-curricular, an international conference presenting lectures, workshops and architectures that mobilize radical pedagogical art practices. Currently Maiko writes a column for FUSE on the political economies of public programming and serves as a board member of Gendai.

Acknowledgements

Letters & Handshakes gratefully recognizes support from the Cultural Studies Program, Wilfrid Laurier University | Onsite [at] OCAD U | TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies

Spirit of Windsor: An Outsider’s Guide by NICOLE LAVELLE & SARAH BAUGH Opens April 18 at 6:00pm

Image courtesy of Nicole & Sarah’s blog – blog.sincerelyinterested.com

If you haven’t checked out our recent video of Nicole Lavelle and Sarah Baugh interviewing one another about their residency and project here in Windsor, then you’re missing out on all the interesting ideas and experiences framing their new project, Spirit of Windsor: An Outsider’s Guide.

This new project is quickly coming together (and officially launching here at CIVIC SPACE on Thursday, April 18th at 6pm), and you can check out more of their process in the meantime on their awesome project blog!

Please join us for a publication release party and a celebration of the city!

Spirit of Windsor: An Outsider’s Guide is a project from Portland-based artists Sarah Baugh and Nicole Lavelle. Arriving in Windsor with absolutely no previous knowledge of the place, the two spent one week investigating. They responded to their status as visitors to the city of Windsor by creating a guide based on walking, wandering and chance. The resulting publication is a cursory glimpse of this place, intended to act as a jumping-off point for locals and visitors alike.

Copies of the guide will be available, as well as refreshments and door prizes from local eateries and businesses. Select excerpts from the guide will be exhibited in the space.

When: Thursday, April 18, 6-8pm

Where: Civic Space, 411 Pelissier Street, Windsor ON

All are welcome!

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Also on April 18th from 7:30pm to 9pm…

SB Contemporary Art is pleased to present a group exhibition titled, Survey featuring the work of four artists completing the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Windsor; Amanda Dudnik, Michael Marcon, Allen Matrosov, and Pearl Van Geest.

Blog Party: A New Biweekly Get-together

Blog Party

We’re very excited to announce a new biweekly blogging night, Blog Party, starting Thursday, April 11th here at CIVIC SPACE! Blog Party aims to bring together local bloggers to discuss ideas, inspiration, and issues in the city and beyond, providing a time and space for writing, learning, and creating together, regardless of skill level.

Hosted by Sara and Josh, Blog Party is both an opportunity to learn and teach, and ultimately make great blogs. Blog Party works like a pot luck — you bring something you know how to do, and everyone else gets to sample it — together, we’ll learn how to blog better, faster, and smarter.

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Upcoming Dates

April 11th & 25th

May 9th & 23rd

June 6th & 20th

@7pm, Civic Space – 411 Pelissier Street, Windsor

All Tomorrow’s Problems Meets All Tomorrow’s Preserves, An Evening to Jam on March 25th @ 7PM

Introducing: All Tomorrow’s Preserves, a special version of All Tomorrow’s Problems happening this Monday, March 25th at 7pm! (CIVIC SPACE, 411 Pelissier)

We’re pleased to announce that tomorrow, March 25th at 7pm, Jen Delos Reyes is teaming up with All Tomorrow’s Problems and this time we’re making jam. This idea came out of an exercise included in her current exhibition up at CIVIC SPACE, The Social Practice Workbook, wherein the Fallen Fruit collective suggested jam-making as a practice for changing the way you see the world (and making new friends along the way).

The All Tomorrow’s Preserves jam theme of the evening is as follows:

It’s About Thyme! Strawberry Jam!

We’re starting with a simple but delicious natural-pectin strawberry jam, made with fresh thyme and your loving hands. This thyme it’s personal, so bring your friends and come jam with us and talk about the ideas whose time have come for the City of Windsor.

We have the ingredients covered, but if you’re attending, consider bringing along an apron or two! See you Monday, March 25th at 7pm!

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All Tomorrow’s Problems (ATP), a weekly Design Night focused on creative and speculative problem solving. ATP focuses on collaborative, Windsor-focused problem solving and project making, informed by weekly discussion and design nights. We’re looking for collaborative critical thinkers, problem solvers, and action-takers with an eye on the future of this city.

Upcoming Exhibition & Artist Talk: The Art and Social Practice Workbook with Jen Delos Reyes + Many More!

Introducing: The Art and Social Practice Workbook (March 20 – April 7, 2013 @ CIVIC SPACE)

A new exhibition featuring the Art and Social Practice Workbook; an edited volume of assignments from students, faculty, visiting artists, and alumni of Portland State University’s Art and Social Practice MFA Program, comes to CIVIC SPACE!

Visitors of the exhibition will be able to assemble their own workbook from printouts of the text designed by students of the program, Erin Charpentier and Travis Neel. Visitors will also be invited to submit their own assignments for possible use in the workbook. This exhibition will accompany a lecture by Professor and Co-director of the program Jen Delos Reyes, regarding the topic of education and Art and Social Practice. Also on display, a collective bibliography and relevant framing questions by Paul Ramirez-Jonas, a visiting professor in the program.

Also, with the support of the University of Windsor’s School for Arts and Creative Innovation, Jen Delos Reyes will be giving an artist talk on Thursday, March 21 at 12pm in Room 115, Lebel, followed by an open house at CIVIC SPACE from 7pm-10pm (also on March 21).

Participating Artists:

Erin Charpentier

Jen Delos Reyes

Heather Donahue

Fallen Fruit

Farm School

Harrell Fletcher

Zachary Gough

Alexi Hudon

Grace Hwang

Betty Marin

Mario Mesquita

Adam Moser

Travis Neel

Carmen Papalia

Douglas Paulson

Paul Ramirez Jonas

Sean Schumacher

Alysha Shaw

Molly Sherman

Temporary Services

Transformazium

Lexa Walsh

Caroline Woolard

Book Launch: The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit

Book Launch: The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit

FRIDAY MARCH 15, 7:30 PM

Broken City Lab’s Civic Space, 411 Pelisser Street, Windsor

Please join us for the Canadian book launch of Andrew Herscher’s Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit at Broken City Lab’s Civic Space. Rather than seeing Detroit as an urban problem that needs to be solved, Andrew Herscher suggests that we regard Detroit as a “novel urban formation” and a site “where new ways of imagining, inhabiting, and constructing the contemporary city are being invented, tested, and advanced.” Andrew Herscher is a writer and theorist whose work considers architectural and urban forms of political violence; his research has focused on locations as seemingly disparate as the Former Yugoslavia and more recently, Detroit. He teaches at the University of Michigan where he is cross appointed between the School of Architecture and Slavic Languages and Literatures. Between 2005 – 2009 he chaired the Rackham Interdisciplinary Seminar on Human Rights.

A discussion between Andrew Herscher, Grant Yocom (Lecturer in Philosophy, Oakland University) and Justin Langlois (Director, Broken City Lab) will take place on critical responses to urban crisis in this region and others.

This event is organized by Lee Rodney of the Windsor-Detroit Border Bookmobile and co-hosted by IN/TERMINUS: Media, Art, and Urban Ecologies.