Category Archives: Series: A Potential Toronto

A Potential Toronto

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A Potential Toronto (APT) was an event series and exhibition spotlighting alternative economies, minor spaces, and organizing strategies. It was a preliminary step in a longer-term counter-cartography project which aims to render currents of radical energy visible, audible, and tactile.

APT’s full project description can be read here.

For APT’s launch event, go here.

For APT’s October 2007 events and exhibition, go here.

For APT’s November 2007 events and exhibition, go here.

For APT’s reading group on the commons, go here.

A Potential Toronto │November Event Schedule

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Toronto Free Gallery
660 Queen Street East (w. of Broadview)

Thursday, Nov. 1, 7:30pm
Organizing Strategies
Actualizing potential requires practicing the art of organization. How do we do what needs to get done? What strategies for mobilization and community involvement work? What blocks the flows of these strategies and diminishes the potential to get things done? Anarchist Free University, Multistory Complex, and Planning Action talk about how they organize and why they do it the way they do it.

Friday, Nov. 9, 7:30pm
Queer Publics
What creative potentials for redefining intersubjectivity emerge through the formation of queer publics, and counter-publics? How does the production of minor spaces and practices change the life of the city? And when these spaces are subsumed by dominant practices and politics, how can queer publics re-politicize themselves? Local curators, artists and educators Paul Couillard, Deirdre Logue, John Paul Ricco and Jason St-Laurent talk about the erotic, aesthetic, ethical, and political potential of queer publics.

Thursday, Nov. 15
A Conversation About Worker Co-operatives, 7:30pm
A Potential Toronto Exhibition and Event Series Closing Party, 9:30pm
Music, a website, a vibrator, a bicycle and coffee: these are just a few essentials that can be bought in Toronto at a worker co-op—a worker-owned and democratically controlled organization. How are worker co-ops different from traditional workplaces? To what extent does this alternative business model escape, subvert, or resist capitalist conventions of competition, hierarchy, and growth? Join co-op activist and academic J.J. McMurtry and members of Blocks Recording Club, Come as You Are, The Big Carrot, and Planet Bean in a conversation about the possibilities and challenges of the worker co-op as an alternative to conventional business models and workplaces. A closing party will follow!

Thursday, Nov. 29, 7:30pm
Tools for Transversality w/ Gary Genosko
Room 103, Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design [Building], U of T
230 College Street
Democratizing space, cracking constraints, and co-operating differently involves producing situations, tools and modes of operation. The APT event series and exhibition brought different people together to begin to make visible, audible and tactile the forces at work in creating A Potential Toronto. But what connects them? How can these heterogeneous practices, fields, and organisations be held together without either homogenising them or randomly stringing them together? In this talk, Gary Genosko revisits the concept of transversality developed by Félix Guattari. Transversality insists on the “trans” (across, or dynamic movement of crossing). A transversal is a line that cuts across other lines or fields to create new fields. Guattari developed the term transversal to introduce open collective practices that work across the hierarchies of the psychiatric institution, creatively producing new forms of collective subjectivity. Genosko will map the development of the term from Guattari’s clinical work to its subsequent deployments as a force of resistance in other aspects of society.

IN THE GALLERY – October 27 – November 17

24 Hour Gallery (window):
‘Common Sense Revolution’ – Scott Sorli

Lower Level:
‘Toronto’s Urban Unconscious’ – Adrian Blackwell, Tina Chung, Andrea Gaus, Davide Gianforcaro, Kim Ligers, Andrea Macecek, Graeme Stewart, and Geoffrey Thun. Projects from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design.

Upper Level:
A Potential Toronto info-shop and library.

A Potential Toronto │October Event Schedule

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Toronto Free Gallery
660 Queen Street East (w. of Broadview)

Thurs., Oct., 11, 7:30pm
Housing Rights, Safe Spaces, Creative Actions
Exposing the connections between poverty, violence and homelessness in women’s lives, Shiri Pasternak talks with Jennifer Plyler (Women Against Poverty Collective) about their campaigns and direct actions to create safe, controlled housing for women at risk in Toronto. WAPC believe that in order for housing to be sustainable, it must be safe, and in order for housing to be safe, it must be controlled by women for women. WAPC will screen their film “Women’s Housing Takeover,” which documents the June 3rd 2007 takeover of a long-abandoned downtown house by WAPC members and allies.

Thurs., Oct., 18, 7:30pm
Youth Generated Autonomous Spaces
Catch da Flava Youth Magazine, E.Y.E. Video, Transmission Zine, and Handy Trans are just a few of the creative projects, programs and services created by and for youth at Regent Park Focus Youth Media Arts Centre and Trans_Fusion Crew (Supporting Our Youth). These youth-driven centres are autonomous spaces for racialized and marginalized youth to explore their identities, voice their experiences and create their own narratives of self. Coordinators and participants of these programs will join Sue Ruddick (University of Toronto) to talk about the possibilities and challenges youth encounter in acts of self-representation. Catch da Flava will launch the September/October Election’s Issue of their Youth Magazine.

Tues. Oct. 23, 7:30pm
Migrants, Borders, Citizenship
How are politicized groups of non-status migrants transforming established norms of citizenship? How are regularization campaigns addressing human rights and migrant safety? What networks of affinity are emerging between self-organising non-status migrants? How are municipal legalization campaigns like Don’t Ask Don’t Tell contributing to a new security for Toronto’s non-status residents? Peter Nyers (McMaster University, Citizenship Studies Media Lab), Cynthia Wright (York University), Patricia Díaz Barrero (Colombian Forced Migration Project), and members of No One Is Illegal (Toronto) open a collective conversation about how citizenship is being rethought.

Mon. Oct. 29, 7:00pm
Abandonment Issues
Join a group of Toronto activists in a panel discussion about mapping the wasted and abandoned buildings, lots, and spaces in the city. Their maps and research support a campaign for a ‘Use It or Lose It’ bylaw that would push for abandoned buildings and underutilized public spaces to be expropriated by the City and redeveloped as badly needed affordable housing and social centres. For more information see Abandonment Issues.

IN THE GALLERY – October 27 – November 10, 12-5pm Wednesday to Saturday

24 Hour Gallery (window):
‘Common Sense Revolution’ – Scott Sorli

Lower Level:
‘Toronto’s Urban Unconscious’ – Adrian Blackwell, Tina Chung, Andrea Gaus, – Davide Gianforcaro, Kim Ligers, Andrea Macecek, Graeme Stewart, and Geoffrey Thun. Projects from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design.

Upper Level:
A Potential Toronto info-shop and library.

Commons | Reading Group

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Call for Participation
Part of A Potential Toronto

Mondays, 8-10pm, Oct. 1 to Dec. 3, 2007
Location TBC

Copies of readings provided.

Facilitated by Shiri Pasternak

What are the commons and why has the idea emerged again, everywhere, in popular culture and political theory? What kinds of questions does the concept of commons seem to answer amidst the clamour of social and environmental crisis today? This reading group will approach the commons by asking questions about the nature and histories of enclosure. We will be asking: How do property regimes affect social order; how do they foreclose or fuel commons and common space? What is the relationship between sovereignty, property, and the commons? We will also look at the way the concept of the commons is being co-opted by neo-liberalism and competing hegemonic regimes and explore the relationships between information commons and place-based commons.

Week 1
Cole Harris. “How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire” (2004), Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 94:1, 165-182.

Nicholas Blomley. “Law, Property, and the Spaces of Violence: The Frontier, the Survey, and the Grid” (2003), Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 93:1, March 2003, 121-141.

Week 2
Farshad Araghi. “The Great Global Enclosure of Our Times: Peasants and the Agrarian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century,” Chapter 8 in Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment, eds. Fred Magdoff, John Bellamy Foster and Frederick H. Buttel. Monthly Review Press Books, 2000.

Week 3
Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite. Information Feudalism. “Introduction.” Earthscan Publications Ltd., 2002.

Watch, if you can: Sonic Outlaws – documentary film by Craig Baldwin

Week 4
John Willinsky. “The unacknowledged convergence of open source, open access, and open science,” First Monday, volume 10, number 8 (August 2005).

Week 5
Margaret E.I. Kipp. “Software and seeds: Open source methods,” First Monday, 10:9, (September 2005).

Week 6
Anthony McCann. “Enclosure Without and Within the ‘Information Commons.'” Information and Communications Technology Law 14(3):217-240 (October 2005).

Week 7
Constantine Caffentzis. “A Tale of Two Conferences: Globalization, the Crisis of Neoliberalism and Question of the Commons.” Borderlands, 11:2 (2012).

Michael Goldman. Privatizing Nature: Political struggles for the global commons. Chapter 1. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998.

Week 8
Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen and Maria Mies. The Subsistence Perspective. Chapter 6, “Defending, Reclaiming, and Reinventing the Commons.” Zed Books, 1999.

James McCarthy. “Commons as Counter-Hegemonic Project.” Capitalism Nature Socialism, 16:1 (March 2005).

Week 9
J.K. Gibson-Graham. A Postcapitalist Politics. Chapter 5, “The Community Economy.” University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

A Potential Toronto | Launch: Thurs. 27 Sept. 2007

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A Potential Toronto
Initiated by Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry (TSCI)

27 Sept. – 10 Nov. 2007
Toronto Free Gallery
660 Queen Street East [map]

Fear disciplines. Capital divides. States order. Creativity sells. Cynicism saturates. Against the persisting ethos of the ‘Common Sense Revolution’ are dots that puncture the city’s territory. Where are they? A Potential Toronto is an event series and exhibition spotlighting alternative economies, minor spaces, and organizing strategies. What experiments and proposals are out there for democratizing space, cracking constraints, and co-operating differently? What works, and why? What blocks an alternative from flourishing? What concepts help us think through it? Exploring these questions, A Potential Toronto is a preliminary step in a longer-term counter-cartography project which would render currents of radical energy visible, audible, and tactile.

LAUNCH: Thurs. 27 Sept. 2007
6:30pm: Opening for ‘Common Sense Revolution’ / ‘Toronto’s Urban Unconscious’
7:30pm: ‘A Potential Commonism’ – A talk by Nick Dyer-Witheford
PARTY TO FOLLOW

‘A Potential Commonism’ – A talk by Nick Dyer-Witheford [author of Cyber-Marx]
It has been said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Does the widespread interest in ‘commons’ by environmental, labour, and open-source activists draw a new line of fight and flight pointing beyond capital? Nick Dyer-Witheford presents a talk on the concept of commonism.

‘Common Sense Revolution’ – Scott Sorli
This information graphic tracks Ontario welfare income for a single person against the number of homeless who have died on the streets of Toronto over the past two decades. The year 1995 is particularly striking, the year that welfare income begins to plummet, the year that homeless deaths begin to jump, the year that the Harris Conservatives were first elected.

‘Toronto’s Urban Unconscious’ – Adrian Blackwell, Tina Chung, Andrea Gaus, Davide Gianforcaro, Kim Ligers, Andrea Macecek, Graeme Stewart, and Geoffrey Thun. Projects from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design
This design research project focuses on Toronto’s Western Rail triangle, an area of urban fabric that suffers from both social and physical isolation from the rest of the city. We argue that this territory acts as Toronto’s urban unconscious, divided from other spaces by ravines, railways, highways, and industrial fabric. These seven architecture and urban design projects make use of the area’s existing potential to imagine useful and pleasurable spaces for daily life.

** EVENT SERIES DETAILS TO FOLLOW:

COMMONS READING GROUP [begins 1 oct.]
WOMEN AGAINST POVERTY COLLECTIVE [11 oct.]
YOUTH [18 oct.]
BORDERS + MIGRATION [23 oct.]
ABANDONED HOUSING: USE IT OR LOSE IT [29 oct.]
ORGANIZING STRATEGIES [1 nov.]
QUEER PUBLICS [9 nov.]
WORKER CO-OPS [10 nov.]
TOOLS FOR TRANSVERSAL ORGANIZING [29 nov.]

A Potential Toronto [CFC]

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A Potential Toronto (working title)
A Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry series

CALL FOR COLLABORATION and PROJECT DESCRIPTION

14 September – 27 October, 2007
Toronto Free Gallery and various sites throughout the city.

Another city is possible. But what is to be done? Better, what is being done? How are individuals and groups organizing themselves to do it?

A Potential Toronto is the working title of a 6-week event series. We invite you to join us in conceiving, refining, organizing, and animating the series. It is a preliminary step in what we hope will be a more long-term counter-cartography initiative. Researching and mapping some of the city’s alternative economies and minor spaces is the substance of this project: wild spaces, free services, co-operatives, community currencies, off-grid housing, informal systems of mutual aid… Where are they? How do they work? Do they connect? How might we map them as a local area network?

In order to map sites and tactics of difference, dissent, deviance, and refusal it is necessary to invent concepts and create ways of working. This requires cooperation of minds and bodies engaged in the self-organization of a collective event. The process of mapping, or of cartography, we are proposing to mobilize does not just mean surveying a territory from above, or representing a process that has unfolded in the past, but instead, effectively fleshing out the contours of a living social dynamic, of an event which bears the future, of potential.

Each of the six weeks will traverse a series of shared concerns: work, housing, ecology, health, sexuality, creativity, mobility, space, history… Every Friday evening we will gather at Toronto Free Gallery for a collaboratively generated event. Event formats could range from walking tours to collective dinners to informal conversations. Gatherings will involve participants in and theorists of alternative economies and minor spaces.

At each event we invite participants and guests to leave behind a trace—an image, a tip, a guide, directions, a piece of writing, a web link, a recommended resource… These will be added in the gallery to a collaborative emergent map of another Toronto.

Every Monday night throughout the series there will be concurrent reading groups addressing the commons, migration, counter-cartography, dynamic networks, and the art of organization.

A Potential Toronto is motivated by our desire to learn more about and raise the profile of various alternative social, economic, and subjective experiments underway locally. Our practical hope is to increase the use of these alternatives so that in our everyday lives more of us might reproduce what we value rather than what we oppose. From this, a counter-network may become visible, and, we hope, lay some groundwork for next steps towards a counter-cartography of Toronto.

Call for Collaboration [CFC]

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Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry is in the midst of mobilizing a counter-cartography initiative and we need you! A Potential Toronto is a first-step towards mapping alternative economies and minor spaces within Toronto. It begins this fall with a 6-week event series and we invite you to join us in conceiving, organizing and animating the event series.

Join us at an Open Assembly to learn more and become involved:

Open Assembly #5:
Monday 17 September
8:00 – 10:00
Tequila Bookworm
512 Queen West

Open Assembly #4:
Park, Potluck, Plan
Wednesday 15 August
7:00 – 9:00
Scadding Court / Alexander Park (Bathurst & Dundas)

Open Assembly #3:
Tuesday 31 July
6:30 – 8:30
Alterna Room (large boardroom on 4th floor)
Centre for Social Innovation
215 Spadina Ave, Suite 120

We will be looking at examples of counter-cartography that have been points of inspiration. Bring yours to share over a potluck dinner.

Open Assembly #2:
Tuesday 17 July
6:00 (potluck dinner)
Toronto Free Gallery
660 Queen Street East

Open Assembly #1:
Moderated by Darren O’Donnell
Sunday 8 July
2:00-5:00
Toronto Free Gallery
660 Queen Street East

Come out and share what you are doing with your hearts and minds, your bodies and organs, your spaces and flows and how you are living in your neighbourhoods, in your city, in your corporeal and technical networks.

[Go here for project description.]