Animating Historic Sites recipients: 2016
Toronto Arts Council has partnered with City of Toronto Museum Services and the Evergreen Brick Works on an initiative intended to create opportunities for Toronto artists to animate historic sites within the City of Toronto. The goals of the program are to serve as a catalyst for people to see and think about historic places differently, and to provide alternatives to traditional methods of historic understanding and interpretation. This program will create avenues for positioning historic sites and museums as vital public spaces of social interaction, where the past provides creative context for the future.
Two types of grants are offered through Animating Historic Sites. Programming Grants provide opportunities for curators/producers to present a series of programs and events at selected sites and Evergreen Brick Works. Exploration Grants are smaller grants that provide the opportunity for curators/producers to engage with community, landscape, volunteers and the site staff to explore ideas for future projects.
Animating Historic Sites recipients (2016):
Programming Grants
Alias Dance Project Inc.
Site: Todmorden Mills
Alias Dance Project will present site-specific dance installation tours at Todmorden Mills. Site-specific vignettes, placed throughout the nineteenth-century buildings and the surrounding areas will narrate stories of the people who lived there.
Bluejays Dancing Together
Site: Spadina Museum
Bluejays Dancing Together will present Living Legacies, an intergenerational, re-remembering and resurging skillshare and art project. Bluejays Collective invite Indigenous kin and guests into collaborative space, creating and animating new work as catalyst for increased understandings. Working along the historic Davenport trade route between Wanscotanach (Don) and Cobechenonka (Humber) Rivers at Spadina Museum is part of re-storying how we know Indigenous and settler histories.
Expect Theatre
Site: Zion Schoolhouse
Expect Theatre will present PlayME Past, a live radio play recording and podcast that will be inspired by and recorded in the Historic Zion Schoolhouse. The plays/podcasts will be attended by and created with a live audience over and listened to by an international audience on PlayME Podcast - Canada's National Digital Theatre.
FIXT POINT Arts and Media
Site: Gibson House Museum
FIXT POINT Arts and Media will present The Living Archive/L'Archive Vivante: HWY 11 at Gibson House Museum. The project is designed to engage the community in local history by collecting personal stories and memories of the neighbourhood. With their Storymobile (a recording studio on wheels) artists will gather stories from community members and unveil them during a community celebration event that connects local memories with the history of Gibson House. The project will become part of Story Portal – an online archive of Canadian oral histories.
Mike Ormsby
Site: Evergreen Brickworks
Mike Ormsby will present Wiigwaasi-Jiimaan (Birch Bark Canoe): The Culture and Tradition of the Canoe...and Its Sustainability, a birch bark canoe build at Evergreen Brick Works. Through the culture and the traditions involved, the canoe can be a means to understanding much more about both Native and non-Native peoples, our shared histories, and where we can go from here.
Subtle Technologies
Site: Evergreen Brickworks
Subtle Technologies will present Wild City at Evergreen Brickworks. Part installation, part foraging expedition, part food sharing ceremony; Wild City is a multi-faceted, interdisciplinary project aimed to animate the Evergreen Brick Works as both an historic and contemporary hub of ethno- and bio-diversity. Over the course of three weekends in June 2017, visitors will experience interactive, technologically driven artworks that educate them about the wildlife and cultures native to the Don River Valley while extending Evergreen’s mission of “placemaking” by illuminating the 5,000 year history of the basin and connecting its stories to the diverse, urban landscape that surrounds it today.
Exploration Grants
Aisle 4
Site: Scarborough Museum
Aisle 4 will undertake In the Kitchen, an experimental, collaborative, and socially engaged research program deconstructing Toronto’s institutionalized impression of legacy, heritage, and tangible history through the lens of shifting culinary traditions with a focus on the historic Cornell House kitchen.
Rita Camacho Lomeli
Site: Scarborough Museum
Rita Camacho Lomeli will research Here & There, Now & Then at Scarborough Museum. Rita will explore issues of colonialism and cultural hybridity in the context of this historical museum and how the local community, particularly youth and newcomers, is using its existing infrastructures. She will produce a book (hard copy and digital) of shared research.
Hilary Martin
Site: Evergreen Brickworks
Hilary Martin will create an evidence and resource base for an outdoor, site-specific installation, Using Watercraft to Animate History Through Interactive Sculpture and Sound Installation: Applying the Stone Song model at The Evergreen Brickworks.
Amanda McCavour
Site: Montgomery's Inn
Amanda McCavour will research Lost Objects, Drawn Images. The goal of the project is to investigate the objects within Montgomery’s Inn and look closely at their patterns, textures and formal qualities while also considering their history. Embroidered objects, ghostly and floating will be inserted into the existing rooms within the Inn. This Exploration Project will create work that actively engages with ideas around site and architecture while thinking about concepts related to the home and domestic vs. public spaces.
Ronald Taylor
Site: Todmorden Mills
Ronald Taylor will research PSYCHOSIS, a new choreographic work exploring the secret German Prisoner of War camp at Todmorden Mills. Exploring how his own story intersects with those POWs, this new work will pull into the present the awareness of adversity, reconciliation and resilience, where the past informs the future.
UnSpun Theatre
Site: Montgomery's Inn
UnSpun Theatre will research Footnotes (Working Title) at Montgomery’s Inn. The proposed performance and audio installation will ask audiences to consider the women running Toronto’s early inns, their central role in 19th century social life, and how their lives and labour can be extracted, imagined and included in contemporary narratives.
Yan Wu
Site: Spadina Museum
Yan Wu will research (Speculative) Online Wallpaper Lexicon, an online and site-specific study for a contemporary remark of historic wallpapers at the Spadina Museum. Instead of dwelling in the archives of past, the aim of the Lexicon is to create a living archive of the present, through offering alternative interpretations, associations, and imaginations to the wallpapers and related archival materials at the Spadina Museum.