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Panel Discussion: What is our Urban Imaginary?

On Thursday, Justin heads up the 401 for WHAT IS OUR URBAN IMAGINARY?

Thursday | December 6 | 7 – 9pm at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery

Join the conversation as we consider how building design, urban spaces, and creative interventions in the city shape our collective experiences and imagination. Guest panelists include artist Justin Langlois, co-founder and research director of Broken City Lab; architect and independent curator Scott Sorli, who teaches at the University of Waterloo and is co-founder of Toronto’s street window gallery convenience; and writer Steven Logan, a member of The Visible City Project that seeks to understand the different roles that artists play in imagining and helping to design 21st century cities. The discussion is moderated by KW|AG Executive Director Shirley Madill, an active proponent of art as a key strategy for urban renewal.

The panel features:

Shirley Madill: moderator, executive director of the Kitchener- Waterloo Art Gallery

Scott Sorli: architect, curator and co-founder of Toronto’s street window gallery convenience

Steven Logan: academic, urban researcher and member of The Visible City Project

Justin Langlois: artist, co-founder and research director of Broken City Lab

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Panel Discussion: Intervention: Contemporary Artists in the Urban Space

If you’re in Kitchener on Saturday (or just needed an excuse to check out CAFKA.11), you should consider attending this panel discussion.

Alongside Pedro Reyes and Lucy Howe, I’ll be discussing the installation at CAFKA and BCL’s practice in general in the context of urban interventions.

The details: Saturday, September 24, 2011, 10:30am-12:30pm @ The Museum (10 King Street West, Kitchener)

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CAKFA.11: Reflect on Here

Reflect on Here, text installation at CAFKA by Broken City Lab

Reflect on Here, text installation at CAFKA by Broken City Lab

After months and months of work, we finally installed our project for CAFKA.11. Led by Josh, Hiba, Kevin, and myself, the project took an incredible amount of research and build time, but we were incredibly excited to see our efforts finally in place in front of Kitchener’s City Hall when we wrapped up the installation last night.

Reflect on Here calls on passersby to think on the infrastructure of the city, the attempt to create place with architecture, and the materiality of the text itself. This project was made possible with the generous support from the Ontario Arts Council‘s Exhibition Assistance Program and the incredible team at CAFKA.

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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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Imagining Borders in Other Places

Friday night meetings have been hard to pull together over the last little while. Managing to fit together six different schedules can seem next to impossible sometimes, so it’s all the more fun when we can actually pull it off and all be in the same room at the same time.

We caught up on the recently launched Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation, the upcoming Save the City event, and some ideas for the proposal we’re hoping to put together for CAFKA.

Josh and Rosina had been working on some ideas for our proposal, the idea of looking at the border-zone, so to speak, between Kitchener and Waterloo. They had been looking up the role of embassies.

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Sometimes Planning Means Drawing

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 Apology / Sites of Hope event, we’re looking into CAFKA and the ANTI 2010 festival, both of which could be a lot of fun and give us a chance to go and play in other cities.

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