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How to Save a City

The details: Friday, May 21 at 7pm, Art Gallery of Windsor.

For the past five months, we’ve been working on a series of events aimed at unfolding the stories, experiences, images, geography, buildings, folkloric histories, people, and places that make Windsor the city that it is. Perhaps you’ve come out to one of our community events in the Broken City Lab: Save the City series, or perhaps you’ve just read about it here, or maybe you’ve meant to come, but you haven’t been able to fit it into your schedule — in an case, this is going to be our final event as part of the project, and you should come.

The things that we’ve learned from working with the community on creating audio documentaries, city-wide maps, sidewalk-parades, and postcards with hand-written letters have changed the way we think about this city, its past, and its future.

So, we would like to cordially invite you to the final part of Save the City on May 21st at the Art Gallery of Windsor. We’ll be in or around the building depending on the weather, but either way, we promise we won’t be hard to find. We would like you to come out to share with us one more time some of the things that shape the way you think about Windsor — we’ll talk about what we’ve learned, we’ll ask you a bunch of questions, we’ll show you hundreds of photographs, and then we’ll ask you to help us come up with a message that we’ll then put up on a billboard (or two) somewhere in Windsor. We’re hoping that this message can say something to the city that needs to be said.

Hope you can make it.

Broken City Lab: Save the City is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

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Playing Catch Up on Save the City

So, we’ve been busy working on the final parts of some of the Save the City projects, in particular, pulling together the postcards for this month’s Things Worth Saving (April 27th, remember?!)

We wound up with around 65 photographs submitted by some fellow Windsorites of the things that they think are worth saving in the city. We’re planning to write a lot of short letters on the back of these postcards and then sending them out to cities across the country (p.s. you’re invited to help!!!)

Danielle and I have also been out finishing up documenting and officially recognizing the Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope across the city.

You should expect a massive post on this soon… visiting 50 sites across the city takes a lot longer than we anticipated! We’re also trying to figure out where to host our final event of the Save the City project in May — any suggestions?

Broken City Lab: Save the City is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

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Thinking About Borders

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 the process of  instigating a formality that addresses one’s existence in a bordered-region that (at least from the outside) imagines itself as one coherent region to attempt to, in the first instance, create an analogy to the way that the border-complex exists here with the increasingly arduous reality of crossing the border between Windsor and Detroit, and in the second instance, imagine that changing this was as simple as creating a one-stop office to attain a regional dual-citizenship card / document / visa of some sort.

This also extends into our increasing focus in unfolding what shapes locality, and perhaps, by overlaying local concerns over other places, we might find new ways of thinking about the way locality is created here in Windsor.

Plus, we’re really interested in building some thing soon.

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SRSI Call for Submissions Closes Today!

TODAY is the last day to submit to the Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation. If you’ve already submitted, rest-assured that we have received your proposal.

We’ll be sending out one big email to acknowledge all submissions sometime tomorrow and then we’ll proceed to go through all of them and narrow them down hopefully within a couple weeks.

If we need any images or your CV or anything like that attached to your email submission as supplementary information — if we need it, we’ll ask you for it in a followup email. We just want your amazingly great ideas at this point!!!

SUBMIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This project is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

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Zeke Moores: Bronze Dumpster

Zeke Moores makes badass metal sculptures from metal. He does this in Windsor; we’re lucky to have him (and his partner, Lucy, who we’ve written about before) in this city.

He has an extensive background in metal fabrication and working in a foundry, and he teaches at the University of Windsor. His work explores the social and cultural economies of everyday objects, and in particular, his Bronze Dumpster is going to be testing some of those economies as it slowly travels to alleyways across the city over the course of the summer.

Hopefully we’ll get to play with Zeke and Lucy sometime soon.

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Things Worth Saving

The details: Sunday, April 11th via email & Tuesday, April 27th at 7pm, at Artspeak Gallery.

As part of the Broken City Lab: Save the City project, Broken City Lab is inviting Windsorites to venture out into the city and take five photographs that showcase what makes our city “worth saving.” These photographs will be turned into a series of postcards that will be mailed out to other cities across the country to prompt a discussion around the differences between how Windsor is viewed by its residents versus how Windsor is viewed by people from outside the city.

Please submit your photographic responses to the following criteria in landscape orientation (your images should be wider than they are taller):

1) Someone you’d hate to see leave
2) Something inspiring
3) Somewhere that made you feel something important
4) Somewhere you know you’ll always find a familiar face
5) Something with potential

Once you’ve captured your images of “things worth saving,” please submit all five to thingsworthsaving@brokencitylab.org by 11:59pm on Sunday, April 11th, 2010. Your submissions will be turned into a series of postcards, so please only submit photographs that you are willing to send out into the world.

Then on April 27th at 7pm, Broken City Lab will host a massive mailout / postcard writing party, at Artspeak Gallery, located at 1942 Wyandotte Street East, where you’re invited to help address all of those postcards and write personalized messages to the rest of the country!

Broken City Lab: Save the City is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

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We Sang to the Streets!

We had an incredible turnout for Sing to the Streets. The response was overwhelming, and despite the cold, we managed to get a great overview of some of the folkloric history of Windsor and Detroit and learn some Francophone folks songs along the way.

The Save the City project is really giving us a lot of insight into the things that make Windsor the city that it is — hyper-localized pronunciations and all. That idea, in particular, spurred a 2-hour conversation on a local radio station, and a great article in the Windsor Star on Monday, which was just a bonus after being able to spend the afternoon immersed in folklore and great company.

We’re a little over halfway through the Save the City project, but there’s still a lot more to come, so if you’ve been meaning to come out, but haven’t had the chance yet, check back soon, as we’ll be posting the date for April’s event any day now.

Continue reading “We Sang to the Streets!”

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Call for Proposals: The Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation

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 interested parties to occupy a space in downtown Windsor for up to one month in June and July 2010.

The residencies will attempt to intervene with the everyday realities of skyrocketing vacancy rates, failing economic strategies, and a population of people who are continually losing hope for their city.

Details: We will provide a space for you to use, some very modest fees and resources to pull off your project, and a lot of enthusiasm. While we are open to proposals from anyone, preference will be given to Ontario-based persons. If you’re an artist working in a socially-engaged practice, we’d be especially interested to hear from you. Any questions: info@brokencitylab.org.

Deadline: April 15, 2010

The residencies will take place here in Windsor, Ontario in June and July 2010.

Please use the form below to make your proposal.

P.S. You don’t need to write a 20-page proposal, but give us the details that are most pertinent. It would be really helpful to know how long you’d like to use the space, what your activity or project will look like, how you think it’s innovative, and why you think it could do some good in our fair city.

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Submissions are now closed.

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This project is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

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Sing to the Streets

The details: Saturday, March 20th at 3pm, meet at the corner of University and Pelissier.

As part of the Broken City Lab: Save the City project, and to better understand the city and its rich and failed history, Broken City Lab researchers will invite the community to learn the Francophone history of Windsor through a collective performance and storytelling of traditional French Folk Songs native to the Detroit River region on Saturday, March 20th at 3pm.

Led by Dr Marcel Beneteau, a professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnology at the University of Sudbury, participants will meet at University Avenue and Pelissier Street to take part in a walking oral history tour and performance, which will stop at the streets along Riverside Drive named after Windsor’s French settlers such as Goyeau, Langlois, Marentette, Louis, Parent and Pierre.

The retelling of the brief oral history at each street will be followed by a collective open performance of the French Folk song led by the local Francophone musician. Video and audio documentation of the performances will subsequently be made available on the Broken City Lab / Save the City website.

Broken City Lab: Save the City is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

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Making Lists: Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope (Part 1)

Just a quick update from Sunday’s Save the City event: Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope … Thanks to the amazing group of people who turned out, we have nearly 50 sites between the two lists (which you can see in progress, above).

A part of this project involves us going around to each and every site on these lists and officially recognizing it as either a site of apology or a site of hope. Since we have 50 sites on our lists, we were beginning to run out of daylight on Sunday afternoon. That means that we only managed to visit about half of those sites, so we’re trying to find a second day to continue with our adventure.

We’ll post all of the photos from the event and a photo of every site we visit as soon as we finish!

The next Save the City event happens on March 20th, 2010 — more details soon.

Broken City Lab: Save the City is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.