Artist Digital Residency 2022

When we bring together art, climate and biodiversity crises, most people will think the role of arts is to either expose the problems or help us to imagine solutions. This digital residency takes a radically different approach as it works from the understanding that a different future depends less on the accuracy of visions and ideas that are projected ahead than on the quality of relations that are woven in the present. With the intention to develop stamina and resiliency for the slow and challenging work that needs to be done in the long term, the focus of this program is to address the difficult ethical and practical complexities of repairing relations as we collectively face the Climate and Nature Emergency.

During this residency, the 12 catalyst artists, who are active in the arts sector in Canada and internationally, will collaboratively reflect on how art can help us to “stay with the trouble” and face the complexities of our current times: to not turn our back to the turmoil of difficult things, while remaining grounded and attentive to what it means to be human within a wider web of relations.

Drawing from their multi-disciplinary practices which include theatre, puppetry, dance, music, clowning and visual arts, the artists are working on how to activate different modes of feeling, thinking, relating and acting as forces of social change that may open up not-yet-imaginable possibilities for co-existence in the future.

Led and facilitated by artist Dani d’Emilia.