This fourth proposal in the Possible Awakenings series encourages new interconnections, inviting the public to gather around artificial settings where real spaces - Ottawa Street and the Bar-Terrace - are superimposed with imagined spaces. With How to connect? (easy urbanism for busy people), Roxa Hy and Nien Tzu Weng explore the paradoxical and poetical dimensions of urban environments, while questioning the diverse actions and habits they condition in us. The Party, an entity formed by artists Layla Marcelle Mrozowski and Kyla Gardiner, presents The Space Bar, a speculative fiction offering the public access to an alternative dimension informed by feminist and critical science fiction narratives.
Various stories are thus staged by the artists, through a participatory scenography that allows random meetings between earthly and heavenly creatures, between the objects of everyday life and those from another galaxy. The artistic proposals thus question the incoherence of certain social constructions, related to urbanity, social links, heteronormativity or anthropocentrism.
This evening will also be the time to unveil the artwork The People’s Parliament, a semi-permanent sculptural and sound installation by Nigerian artist Ayò Akínwándé, laureate 2019 of the Residence Place Publique.
6:30 PM: Roxa Hy and Nien Tzu Weng - How to connect? (easy urbanism for busy people)
How to create a public space in 23 minutes? Responding to the imperative of rethinking the city in the context of the climate crisis, Roxa Hy and Nien Tzu Weng revisit a few main guidelines of urban planning and social ties. 23 minutes, it's just enough time for a performance that regroups business owners, neighbors and their pets for a moment of being together, concise and efficient. In relation to their immediate environment, the performers ask (themselves) the following questions: is a smart city magical? how do you connect with nature when you grew up surrounded by concrete? is there wifi?
Come early! The audience will be invited to interact with an installation of everyday objects and sound recordings collected in the neighborhood before the performance. The artists will activate the installation at 18:58 for a duration of 23 min.
A phone charging station will be made available by the artists, in collaboration with the Darling Foundry and Hydro-Québec, throughout the evening.
Roxa Hy works with installation, performance, video, and sound, primarily in the field of arts vivants. Between humor and auto-commentary, she uses the collage of sounds, objects, and images to explore artificial spaces and urban environments. She presented works at OFFTA, ZH Festival, RIPA, Eastern Bloc and Tangente, and is supported by LA SERRE – arts vivants as part of the collective project Ça a l’air synthétique bonjour hi. Roxa is also one of the coordinators of Studio XX, a feminist artist-run center dedicated to media arts.
Nien Tzu Weng is a Taiwanese-Canadian interdisciplinary dance artist. She aims to build bridges between disciplines, pursuing an experimental approach to contemporary dance. Her projects have been presented at OFFTA, ZH Festival, Art Crush, TaiwanFest (Harbourfront Center, Toronto), and 1-Act Theatre Festival (SHIFT Theatre, Vancouver). She has performed at Ars Electronica, Akousma, and Tangente. Weng is the recipient of the James Saya Award, and The Contemporary Dance Prize at Concordia University. She is currently an artist-in-residence at Studio 303, and a resident artist at the Topological Media Lab.
7:30 PM: Layla Marcelle Mrozowski and Kyla Gardiner - The Space Bar
A Letter from Beta Pink:
Dear Lovetrons and other earthly bodies,
I couldn’t help but notice the last time I visited your planet that you’re having a bit of trouble connecting. Do your romantic encounters seem like empty shadows from a parallel reality? Have you ever felt alone in a vast unknowable universe? Are you tired of the constant reduction to “being yourself”? It happens to the best of us. There have been epochs in my life where it seemed that everything was either going through heat death or a wave-particle duality crises.
I love love. That’s why I started OK Object, the earth’s first and only intergalactic anthropo-inclusive boutique matchmaking site. Whether you are looking for friendship, osmosis, or some weak nuclear force manifestation, I will divine match you and provide both online and in-person occasions for assembly.
To celebrate three years of success, my friends The Party are hosting my Space Bar on 25-07-2019 at the Darling Foundry in Montreal for Place Publique.
Hope to see you there! Xoxo.
Beta Pink
Beta Pink is a character developed in 2016 by Layla Marcelle Mrozowski and Kyla Gardiner. Beta Pink owns a bar that occasionally materializes in Vancouver. The Space Bar is an ever-changing performance lounge, an assemblage of humans, pet-sized foam objects, and fake rocks where Beta Pink gives relationship advice and reads fortunes.
Kyla Gardiner is a designer and performance creator based in Vancouver BC. She teaches in the Production and Design program at the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. Layla Marcelle Mrozowski is an interdisciplinary artist engaged with the body, choreography, writing, image-making, object-making, antagonism, synesthetic logic, materialism, realness, homonyms and other doubles, maps, and the aesthetics of pleasure. Their artistic practice as The Party includes Imaginary Theatre, co-authored writing, new media, and performance. Their work has been performed and presented in Vancouver, Amsterdam, Bruges, and Philadelphia. They embrace bad grammar, puns, platonic ideals, lists, ultraisms, and impossible tasks undertaken with absolute conviction. In 2015 they published a shiny, esoteric manual on their research and in 2016 they received a joint MFA from Simon Fraser University.
Starting at 5:30 PM, come and enjoy the Darling Foundry's Second Nature Bar and enjoy local craft beer from our generous sponsor, the microbrewery 4 Origins Brewing Co.'s!
