2024

Material Stargazer: community projects

A curatorial and performance project that bridges community work and experimental art practices.

Description

Material Stargazer is an experimental arts project in which aesthetics and process are designed around community dynamics, testing the boundaries of authorship, creative practice and activism. Facilitating the projects are five artists and community organizers between the ages of 20 and 87 years old. They organize pop up residencies in collaboration with community centers around the island of Montreal. Each residency is open to locals and extended community to casually engage in a collaborative and performative installation project. In conversation with experimental art lineages and interactive community methods, Material Stargazer uses creative media, time-based art practices (performance, sound, voice, etc.) as well as material culture and everyday interests redefined and showcased as art, story and social engagement. Through a semi-facilitated process involving unstructured play, sensitive dialogue, writing prompts, crafting, sound-making and guided movement, the residencies propose ways of gathering that are eccentric and unruly favoring expansive and oblique future oriented thinking and feeling. 

Iteration #1

In collaboration with the community center Suspicious Fish, a storytelling organization in Verdun, Montréal, Québec.

Here, we will be making a Story Blob: an awkward and gently anarchic soft sculpture made of varied objects and fabrics, poetry, manifestos, odes as well as sound, voice, projections and performance. The Story Blob can hold many perspectives and visions at the same time allowing us to explore, get lost, contemplate, play and find surprising and multiple ways of making and thinking together.

The week culminates in a “vernissage” in which the Story Blob made over the course of the week is randomly activated by improvised performances.

Exhibited works by Future Fish elders

Caroline Filler, Wendy Allen, Wanda Potrykus, Ramsay, Mario Coverini, Marlene Chan, Anne and Donna Davis.

**

We see this project as a way to tackle through art the sense that "the world has already been played out". Our wager is that small acts of imagination, especially when experienced collectively, have a big impact and that gathering in creative ways is a tried and tested medicine as well as a tool for moving forward in better ways.

Our goals:

- Offer a chance to collaborate and share that honors different groups of all ages but with particular care to older adults who may feel left out of artistic community projects.

- Unstructured play within the Material Stargazer frame that allows for collaborative creation of a performance and set while building confidence for everyone, especially school aged participants who's day to day life is immersed in structured education.

- Emphasizing creativity as a key factor in future success on an individual, community and society wide level.

- Opportunities for mentorship in practical set design and digital skills.