Border Cultures: Part One (homes, land)
With artists Broken City Lab (Canada), Campus in Camps (Palestine), Iftikhar and Elizabeth Dadi (Pakistan/USA), Willie Doherty (Ireland), Marcos Ramirez Erre(Mexico/USA), Sanaz Mazinani (Canada), Christopher McNamara (Canada/USA), Dylan Miner (USA/Canada), Ed Pien (Canada), Leila Sujir/Maria Lantin (Canada) Border Cultures is a three-part annual exhibition that brings together regional, national and international artists to examine the complex and shifting notions of national boundaries. It is an exhibition-in-progress, conceptualized as a research-based platform for artists and cultural producers [...]
Tuesday Afternoon: Work continues, now with Postcards and the Library Cards
Lucy stopped by this morning to keep cutting. Hiba and I painted the letters. White it is. We had a lot of leftover wall paint, which means we not only have more than enough paint, but the letter faces will gain a bit of rigidity and protection since it’s epoxy paint. Hiba paints. After trying [...]
Border Town Design Jam
One of our dear friends (and Homework presenter), Tim Maly, from the great city of Toronto is hosting an event continuing off of the work he did with the Border Town Design Studio last year. Here’s the details, if you’re in the area (and here’s more detailed information): BORDER TOWN DESIGN JAM From Friday March [...]
Windsor-Detroit Border Crossing Micro Grant
Broken City Lab is launching a new micro-grant program and we need you to apply. As a part of our upcoming publication, How to Forget the Border Completely, The Windsor-Detroit Border Crossing Micro Grant gives you the opportunity to cross the Windsor-Detroit border. We’re looking for a variety of experiences gained from crossing the border, [...]
Mid-Week Work Period
Yesterday a group of us met at the School of Visual Arts building to work on completing the sub-projects which will appear in our How to Forget the Border Completely publication. It is exciting to see our ideas come to fruition and our publication take shape. We are now at the stage of roughly laying [...]
Working at & on (forgetting) the Border, Next Week is Show & Tell
Meeting outside is the greatest. There’s talk of building some kind of mobile table / bistro to make this possible in other locations, but I suppose that’s further down on the to-do list. For now, we’re immersed in bringing together research and inventions around our How to Forget the Border Completely project to pull into [...]
BCL Report: May 5, 2011 (Big Books & Small Letters)
We met twice on Thursday, and those meetings were after Michelle and I headed over to SB Contemporary Art to finally check out “On Your Mark” (a great exhibition featuring work by many of our friends) and talk about how we could partner in some way on Homework: Infrastructures & Collaboration in Social Practices. Back [...]
The Creation of Place in Abandoned Railway Cuts in Windsor: 1/4 Intro
Lee Rodney teaches one of the best courses at the University of Windsor, Border Culture. I took the course in the fall of 2010 and wrote a book: The Creation of Place in Abandoned Railway Cuts in Windsor. The book serves as documentation and comparative analysis of three specific forgotten spaces in downtown Windsor, Ontario, [...]
BCL Report: April 11, 2011 (oh, the logistics)
It was Monday night and Karlyn’s Birthday, so Hiba and Kevin brought a fun cake. Other things happened as well, and strangely, or maybe expectedly, now that the semester’s done and since we didn’t meet at the very end of the week, we had a marathon five hour meeting. It was so great!!!
Borderlands Symposium: University of Maine
Next week, I’ll be headed to the University of Maine at Farmington to present at the Borderlands Symposium, assembled by our friends, TUG Collective. Here’s the brief on the symposium: A series of talks, workshops, performances, and films that will illuminate some of the social, economic, political and ecological nuances along North America’s borders, and [...]
![Yesterday was the second day of our Making Things Happen (For a Week Straight) show—where we worked in the gallery and travelled to Vincent Massey secondary school to start working with some physics students on another large-scale project we’re planning. We also worked a bit more on the hanging baskets and planned for Thursday’s event. Danielle [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/img_9449-150x150.jpg "Making Things Happen, Day 2")
![We’re on to priming the letters now, in anticipation of the bright red coat we’ll be giving them in the coming weeks. Things are moving ahead at a good pace, and hopefully will continue to, as we’d love to not be working with these finished letters in snow. While we do get together every week, [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/IMG_4165-150x150.jpg "Primer: Another Friday Night’s Worth of Collectively Making Things Happen")
![We’ve noted before that we’re working on a proposal for CAFKA, as we’re interested in the border between Kitchener and Waterloo. Though certainly every place is bordered with another, it’s the kind of K-W relationship that intrigues us, as we’re wondering about the potential possibilities in thinking about Windsor and Detroit as D-W. We’re wondering about examining [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/IMG_8680-ps-150x150.jpg "Thinking About Borders")
![Last night, in front of city hall, we had a conversation about the ways we want to shape our city. In the midst of rising tensions around existing city services and new infrastructures, there seems to be a renewed wish for not just more public dialogue with the city, but a dialogue based on transparency [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/IMG_0088-150x150.jpg "City Counseling (Session #1)")
![While we’re still moving along on our Save the City project in the background, we’re also continuing to look ahead to other projects and deadlines coming up. Tuesday mornings are always a really good productive time, and this week was no exception. While we wait for our ribbons and postcards to arrive for the upcoming Sites of [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/IMG_7135-150x150.jpg "Sometimes Planning Means Drawing")
![From what I understand, Google Maps updates once a year or so (I’d guess even less than that). So, I think now would be a good time to start on a project like this, as according to these maps, Caesar’s Windsor is still under construction. That parking garage on the corner of Park and Pelissier [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/parkinggarage-web-textroof-150x150.jpg "Annotating Windsor")
![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")
![Following up on our How to Forget the Border Completely project from last year, collaborator Tom Provost continues to work on ideas around pedestrian border crossings (which you can read all about in the HFBC book!) Photos and text by Tom Provost In the summer of 2011, I was in dialogue with Broken City Lab [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/03_707px_provost_640-trim-150x150.jpg "How to Forget the Border Completely, continued: 707PX")
![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)")
![I haven’t posted for a while, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on the ongoing Arduino + LCD project, which is moving along towards connecting external data to be displayed on the LCD screen. The last bit of time I’ve put into the project has been focused on printing text to the LCD [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/IMG_8060-150x150.jpg "Working on the PHP Backend of the Arduino + LCD Project")
![We spent a couple hours on Monday exploring some specific sites around the city to start planning some upcoming projects. Getting out and documenting and talking about these places really helped to solidify how important it is for some creative intervention/interaction with the city and how excited we are to do it. The clear view [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/Welcome-to-Windsor-sign-on-Dougall-just-off-the-401-150x150.jpg "BCL Report – Sept 29, 2008")
![We’re packing up and heading down to Chattanooga, Tennessee tomorrow to attend CreateHere‘s City Share Mini Conference. What the conference is all about: “City Share is a conference for seeding innovative projects.We bring great minds from across disciplines together in Chattanooga, Tennessee to teach, share, plan, and change. The result? International knowledge-sharing; a growing network [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Screen-shot-2010-02-16-at-11.50.51-AM-sm-150x150.jpg "City Share Conference in Chattanooga")
![I’m starting a new project in creating a series of iPhone applications for Surviving Windsor. Some of these applications will be absurd, some useful, but all will be focused primarily on the specific conditions and realities found here in South Detroit. This suite of applications takes the city as its conceptual backing, generating a set of small [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/IMG_3934-150x150.jpg "iPhone app development (on paper)")
![I’m not sure why we didn’t start doing this earlier, but here’s the first report of our weekly activities. We’ve been meeting on Fridays for almost half the summer, trying to make, plan, and do events/projects/demos/awesome. Today involved us revisiting our seed bomb recipe, beginning the stenciling for posters for our upcoming Dance Party (details [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/Broken-City-Lab-Friday-August-22-2008-Stenciling-%2B-seed-bombs-150x150.jpg "BCL Report – August 22, 2008")
![We’ve updated our imaginary campaign post to reflect some recent (positive) changes: Our projects try to work around the realities that we encounter in Windsor on a daily basis. We address these realities creatively, and so the ways in which we address them don’t always translate to solutions. We usually try to suggest the change [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/IMG_2877-3-150x150.jpg "An Imaginary Platform: 2010 Municipal Elections in Windsor")
![Not that we don’t already have our hands full, but seeing as it’s nearly March, we’re starting to look ahead to summer time activities. These activities might be somewhat related to this ongoing conversation we’ve been having on the blog. We’ll be posting more information soon, but for now, just know that if you’ve been [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/srsi-screenshot-poster-150x150.jpg "New Project Soon (Keep Your July Open)")
![We want to know about London, Ontario. We’re doing an exhibition at Forest City Gallery, opening in September, and we’re looking into the wide range of narratives that go into constructing a place — the architecture, the headlines, the people, the memories, the relationships, the rumours — and we’re hoping you can help us out. Whether you’re [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/ATTC-London-150x150.jpg "A Set of Informal Questions about London, Ontario")