Public 41: Gardens
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 [...]
Tactical Gardening Workshop in Guelph
Danielle, Rosina, Michelle, and I were up in Guelph over the weekend as part of the Kazoo festival, leading a workshop on making those magnetic planters we were working on last summer . The workshop was a lot of fun and I thought I’d post a few photos of some of the more abitious designs [...]
Field Tests & Exampling: Moving the Planters
I hope you’ll forgive us for the lack of posts lately. I’ve been on a film shoot all day, everyday for the last few weeks, while other BCL folks have been traveling, moving, working, and studying, and so meeting even once a week has been a challenge. Thankfully, school is literally a couple days away [...]
Magnetic Planters Finished!
Our magnetic planters have finally been finished and installed (temporarily) along the alley that runs behind our headquarters. Consider yourself cordially invited to take a planter or two and move them to some other space in the city in need of a micro-garden.
Field Tests!
We’re doing some field tests of our magnetic planters with some plants in them. Basically, we want to test to make sure the soil isn’t drying out too quickly and we’re also checking to see how well some plants respond to transplants. Above, you can see there’s a wire around the planter that helps it [...]
Magnets Installed!
Another day at BCL HQ and some more progress on this ongoing magnetic planters project. Michelle and I finished putting in the remainder of our magnets into our plastic bag planters, but there are still some more planters left over. So, with more rare-earth magnets now on the way, we’ll finish up the rest when [...]
Embedding Magnets
As summer rolls on, we’re continuing our work with the magnetic planters, though we now have the benefit of a front porch to enjoy the evening weather while doing so. Michelle, Josh, and I spent Monday night working on embedding the magnets into the plastic bag planters along with some more writing. We also moved [...]
Learning to Transplant
Josh and I spent some of the day in the heat collecting some interesting flowers and plants to transplant for our magnetic planters project. Overall, it was fairly successful, as we did learn quite a lot about transplanting, but we’re still going to be looking for some more plants to finish up this stage of [...]
102 Planters so far
Michelle and I spent the afternoon at 406 Pelissier working on more planters. We’ve made 102 planters so far, though we’re hoping to reach 150 before we launch the project sometime in August. I need to order some more magnets.
Refining and Reworking the Planters
Another week and another day in 406 Pelissier, which as it continues is now part of Windsor’s Visual Fringe. It’s tough to find time to get down there, but I think we made the best of a few hours last Tuesday. We’re continuing work with the planters, which is (as they always seems to be) [...]
![We got up early and headed down to the EC Row pedestrian overpass between the Dominion and Huron Church exits to install YOU ARE AMAZING! It’s hard to describe what it felt like to do this—taking on this project gave us all a genuine excitement about participating in changing a part of Windsor and the way [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/img_1471-150x150.jpg "Installing YOU ARE AMAZING")
![Our project for the 2011 Windsor Biennial, Alive & Well, was created with the hope that it would be captured on Google Maps to make a monument or announcement of sorts to the rest of the world about Windsor as we near the end of the year and ahead of being torn up for the new Aquatic [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/aliveandWellscreenshot-2-150x150.jpg "“Alive & Well” viewable on Google Maps")
![Over the last week or so, we’ve added a few new things to our little website here. It’s funny because there’s a lot of research that goes on in the background, in terms of things we come across and don’t blog about, ideas that we email to one another, and documenting our process and posting [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/bcl-sidebar-dec09-150x150.jpg "How we use this site for research (in-part)")
![HOMEWORK: Infrastructures & Collaboration in Social Practices is four-day residency, two-day conference, and collaboratively-written publication aimed at generating conversation around the following: alternative infrastructures, radical collaboration, social practice, art implicated in social change, neighbourhood-level activities, city-wide imaginations, site-specific curiosities, tactical resistance, new models for art education and research. Facilitated by Broken City Lab, HOMEWORK calls on artists, scholars, writers, thinkers, [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/register1-150x150.jpg "Attending Homework is Free!")
![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")
![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")
![Read Tom Lucier’s recent blog post. He spells out nearly everything he does in this city, for free. He draws on examples of other talented people in this city who continue to try to stick it out for who knows what reasons. He makes a compelling case for having to give up some of these [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/realisticExpectations-150x150.jpg "For Windsor, Realistic Expectations and Imaginative Solutions")
![Michelle Wybenga is asking people for love letters to Windsor. As part of her ongoing micro-residency, she’s requesting from a number of people that she knows in the city for a contribution to an eventual publication of sorts containing these letters among many others. She spent the weekend at BCL HQ working towards the beginnings [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Juniper-Books-150x150.jpg "Michelle Wybenga’s Micro-Residency: Love Letters to the City")
![Today, a very brief summary of some things that I’ve been thinking about and noted over the last few weeks… Above, a portal. Perhaps a cross-border portal. An under-used, long forgotten relic of a portal prototype. Cordoned off, waiting for a new route. Partington and Wyandotte on our side, where’s the related neighbourhood in Detroit? [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/portals-150x150.jpg "A Summary of Things I’ve Been Thinking About")
![So … the book we created from our research project, How to Forget the Border Completely, finally showed up!!! I’m really happy with how it looks and I can’t wait to have some time to read through it all. After this week’s activities, we should plan some kind of launch for the book. Tom’s renderings [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/IMG_5370-150x150.jpg "Guess what showed up today?")
![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")
![Monday night we spent a couple hours working over some new ideas with some new friends. Mostly, these ideas have been in the “meaning to do that” category, mostly opening up new collaborations in which new projects will unfold. Two main project frameworks came out of our brainstorm session—a floating sculpture project with the Green [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/IMG_5402-150x150.jpg "New Project Mondays: Week 1")
![Monday night marked the last Broken City Lab meeting of the year!!! We’ll be taking a brief break over the holidays and then gearing up for a series of events starting at the end of January. For anyone who has been wondering how to get involved or if we’d ever hold open office hours again, [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/IMG_72891-150x150.jpg "Last Meeting for 2009!")
![Broken City Lab is heading up to Hamilton on Friday, November 20th, 2009 to run a workshop/event on communicating through intervention in urban spaces. The workshop is being held at the Workers Arts & Heritage Centre as part of their Labour Lounge series, this time in partnership with the Hamilton Youth Arts Network. This has [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/wahc-map-150x150.jpg "Labour Lounge @ WAHC in Hamilton")
![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, [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/cuts-150x150.jpg "The Creation of Place in Abandoned Railway Cuts in Windsor: 1/4 Intro")
![Alive & Well, our 350 ft long message painted on the city-owned parking lot for the 2011 AGW Biennial and recently captured by Google Maps, is in the process of being torn up to make way for an Aquatic Centre. We’ll be actively looking for a new parking lot, field, or rooftop to do another [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/IMG_7252-bw-150x150.jpg "Deinstallation of Alive & Well")
![We recently decided to demarcate some of many accidental meadows across Windsor with these Naturalized Area signs. In hopes that these signs might momentarily allow residents of Windsor to look at these naturalized spaces for what they are—that is, wonderful additions to our urban landscape—instead of the result of a politically-charged issue, we spent the [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/IMG_3023-150x150.jpg "Making the Signs for Naturalized Areas")
![Though we’ve received a few of the postcards back because of a faulty address, for the most part, the 150 postcards sent out for Things Worth Saving, as part of our ongoing Save the City project, have likely now arrived to their destinations. I must admit that when I first laid eyes on the stacks [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/IMG_4651-150x150.jpg "Things Worth Saving Recap")
![To continue the progress of our cardboard letter project, I took the remaining pieces home on the weekend to finish T, E, and R. Though the first stage may be over, there’s still plenty left to work on in terms of researching and experimenting with various materials which I looked into as well. After constructing [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/IMG_3279-150x150.jpg "Fun with Cardboard Letters")
![Over three days this week, we got a lot done. And, as I write this, stuff is still getting done. This is why collaboration is such a valuable model for art practice. But, it’s not just about getting stuff done, it’s the challenges, the insights, the novel perspectives that can be brought up around a [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/IMG_9628-150x150.jpg "BCL Report: End of April, 2011 (the Art of Planning & Collaboration)")