HOW WE CARED
Saroja Ponnambalam & Rupali Morzaria

How can we create our own architectures of liberation? How we cared (3-channel video installation) is a return to Pandi Kumaraswamy’s archives, reinterpreting the multiple systems of care in his life, over which he had varying levels of autonomy. This expanded schematic of forced care, natural forms of care and creative care. The three sites operate within a fluid and undetermined ecosystem spanning the healthcare/medical world to the spiritual/natural based on family experiences. The schematic attempts to move away from finite solutions to healing medically diagnosed disorders. It prompts viewers to take a step back from conventional architectural practices that use speculative methods to conjure up imaginary built environments for those receiving mental health care.

Saroja Ponnambalam is an Ontario-based filmmaker. Her art practice involves working with a variety of documentary mediums – animation, photographs, family video archives and interviews. Her more recent work explores intergenerational mental health experiences through an intersectional lens.

Rupali Morzaria is a designer and film programmer currently based in Tiohti:áke/ Montreal. She is moved by storytelling and movement—in film, dance, and advertising—and uses design as a way to indulge in this fascination. Her work is based in traditional forms of print media and finding new forms of expression within contemporary media arts.

Keywords: BIPOC Experience | Bipolar Disorder(s)| Depression | Family | Psychiatry

Made with funding support from Toronto Arts Council and Ontario Arts Council

GREEN GAZING
Ashley Bowa & Lesley Marshall

Green Gazing is an immersive multimedia installation that includes interactivity, sound, image and biofeedback. In a room of plants, the audience/participants will experience guided movement amidst ambient sound and video rooted in ecological elements. Surround sound and multi walled projections are altered through live manipulation and using bio data gathered  from the plants in the room. The ambient electronic sound and videoscape becomes a co-creation between plant, participant and artist.

Funded by the Ontario Arts Council for research and creation in 2018-2019

Ashley Bowa is an emerging filmmaker, media artist, and arts educator based in Toronto. She is also trained as a yoga, pilates, and outdoor education instructor.

Lesley Marshall / LES666 is an award-winning filmmaker and intermedia artist. Projection art by Lesley has been exhibited at the National Art Centre, Montreal Jazz Fest, and Centre PHI.

Keywords: Anxiety | Community

SZEPTY/WHISPERS: DIALOGUE

Through the voices of various artists, this web-based experience explores the relationship between mental health, language, and lineage. Many awareness campaigns urge us to “break the silence”. But the question of whether – or how – to speak is complicated. Mental health discourses are shaped by particular histories, which reverberate in the present. By juxtaposing multiple perspectives, Szepty/Whispers: Dialogue aims to expand the possibilities for how we communicate about madness, trauma, and neurodivergence. The content is offered in the form of audio files, transcripts, and ASL videos.

The process for Szepty/Whispers: Dialogue began when artist Veronique West invited seven collaborators to make audio recordings in response to open-ended questions about mental health, language and lineage. The collaborators were: mia susan amir, Kagan Goh, Maya Jones, Constantin Lozitsky, Jivesh Parasram, Kendra Place, and Manuel Axel Strain. A digital platform was developed to host the recordings, through collaboration between the Cultch Digital Storytelling Team, Sound Designer David Mesiha, Inclusive Designer JD Derbyshire, Dramaturg Kathleen Flaherty, Deaf Interpreter Ladan Sahraei, Production Coordinator Brian Postalian and Veronique West. Szepty/Whispers: Dialogue was first presented at the 2021 rEvolver Festival.

Consultants: Amy Amantea, June Fukumura, Simran Gill, and MariFer Rios.

For a full list of the Szepty/Whispers: Dialogue team’s biographies, please follow the link below:

CREATIVE TEAM BIOGRAPHIES

Keywords: 2SLGBTQIA+ | BIPOC Experience | Community | Disability | Family

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Digital Platform Realization by: The Cultch Digital Storytelling Team

Developed at Playwrights Theatre Centre as part of the Associates program.

The project has also been supported by:
Upintheair Theatre’s rEvolver Festival
The National Theatre School of Canada’s Art Apart initiative

The parallel in-person performance has been supported by:
the Canada Council for the Arts
the BC Arts Council
the Province of British Columbia
Playwrights Theatre Centre
Rumble Theatre
Progress Lab 1422
Chimerik似不像 Collective
Boca del Lupo and Rice & Beans Theatre’s DBLSPK series
Mentorship with Boca del Lupo’s Artistic Director Sherry J. Yoon
Universal Limited’s Horizontal Help program
The Arts Club Theatre Company’s LEAP Playwriting Intensive

The Cultch Digital Storytelling Team would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts

COAL MINES AND TREE TOPS
Dani Crosby

This body of work titled Coal Mines and Tree Tops follows the main character, a canary through different scenarios meant to represent an autistic experience. These images represent the experiences of the artist, Dani. However, they are meant to be related to by anyone who finds a connection to the work. This body of work discusses Dani’s personal experiences as an autistic person. Dani chose the canary as a visual metaphor for strength, sensitivity, vulnerability, and perceived expendability. Each piece explores a different experience and their creation has helped Dani process these experiences, some for the first time. In this series, Dani visually discusses subject matter such as: positive connection, strengths, relationships, abuse, sensory management and overwhelm, vulnerability to predatory individuals, coping mechanisms, the weight of masking and more.

“I decided to create this work about my experiences because I finally feel safe to do so. I feel it is time to remember out loud, to create visual evidence of past and present challenges and joys associated with my identity. I feel it is time to start sharing my experiences with others. This is a first step in what I hope will be an ongoing discussion in my work. This work serves to benefit me therapeutically and also possibly provide others with understanding and a sense of compassion between myself and those who have had similar experiences.” -Dani Crosby

Dani Crosby is an artist, illustrator, arts educator and community collaborator working and living in central Oshawa. Art has become many things for Dani – a service they offer and an experience to share in academic settings. But before any of these things it serves as a place to put the parts of themselves that have nowhere else to go. Dani recognizes how lucky they are to have this outlet. Dani has been making art since childhood and has never stopped. They began showing, creating illustrations, and teaching visual arts in 2004 and continue to this day.

Keywords: Alcoholism | Anxiety | Depression | Trauma

HYBRID PRECARITY
Leena Raudvee

Hybrid Precarity is a series of pen and ink drawings that has emerged out of a daily drawing practice from the last year of pandemic related anxieties and isolation. It is superimposed, by necessity, on ongoing issues of vulnerability, disability and the precariousness of severely limited mobility.

As internal self-portraits, these drawings respond to changes in Raudvee’s emotional and physical body, as body in process, and become records of the evolving dis-eased body. They are reflections on a strangely hybrid identity, attached to walking aids and no longer wholly human.

Hybrid Precarity is an online slideshow of black and white drawings, accompanied by a sound recording of dissonant sounds, of things creaking and broken.

Leena Raudvee is a Toronto-based visual and performance artist, who focuses on the body in relation to personal history and social interchange.

Raudvee’s drawings, which investigate the performative embodied within the drawing of a line, have been exhibited in numerous juried shows including Drawing 2021 at the John B. Aird Gallery, Drawing Unlimited at the Propeller Gallery and Unpacking Pandemic Pondering with OCADU and Gallery 1313.

In performance art, Raudvee has explored disability and aging in Teetering on an Edge for Pi*llOry in Toronto and in Making Space, as video, screened in Photophobia 2020, presented by Hamilton Artists Inc. and Hamilton Art Gallery.

Keywords: Disability | Trauma

Recipient of the Ontario Arts Council grant for Deaf and Disability Arts Projects:
Materials for Visual Artists

UNBREAKABLE
Amplify Collective

Amplify Collective loudly and proudly presents the performance experience
UNBREAKABLE.

People in positions of power and their systems of oppression exert intense pressure on historically oppressed individuals and communities. Still we rise! We will not crumble in the face of this Intergenerational Trauma. Instead we continuously challenge racism, sexism, poverty and injustice. United we push back against these oppressive systems, the patriarchy and inequity. The strength that exists within our communities and the weight of injustice is woven within this performance through the use of symbols, body movement, music, distressed textiles and elaborate, wearable sculptures. Individually we endure, but collectively we are UNBREAKABLE.

Together we continue to heal!

Performances by Kayla Ross-Jackson, Caitlin Marzali, KJ McKnight, Matt Eldracher, Sebastian Marzali, Chy Ryan Spain, Scarlet Black, Sze-Yang Ade-Lam, Aryana Malekzadeh, Jaz Fairy J & more!

CREDITS
Curation & Costuming: Allie Amplify
Lighting Designer: Sebastian Marzali
Set Assistant: Jack Comerford
Makeup: Elene Seepe
Hair: Dmitry Komendant

Amplify Collective is a Toronto-based wearable art, performance and advocacy company. They create one-of-a-kind wearable art pieces, as well as host community classes and live experiences. Founder Allie Amplify has an extensive background in fashion, marketing and events. Her designs have lit up the stages of Fashion Art Toronto, the MMVA’s, PRIDE, the ROM and more!

Amplify Collective is a community of individuals with lived mental health and addiction experiences. Despite these challenges they have prevailed and hope to share a message of resilience and growth.

Turn up the volume with Amplify!

Keywords: 2SLGBTQIA+ | Activism | BIPOC Experience | Community

A Virtual Exhibition
In-Site, Incite, & Insight

Rather than experience the festival’s exhibition on-site, this year we experience it “in-site” — in a website, in the digital world, in the virtual. The works in the festival this year have been selected with the intention of being experienced virtually.

The artists bring insight to their experiences of the world having changed, how it continues to change and what this change can offer. This includes our growing awareness around mental health, our relationships with both the physical and digital worlds, and how the works can incite us into action. The exhibiting works investigate these themes and more, providing room to engage with the arts in a time when interacting and experiencing work has been significantly impacted. Through these works, we recognize that we are in the moment, in the current, in the site.

Visit the virtual exhibition here:

insite.workmanarts.com

SELF // ISOLATION
Chelsea Watson

Self // Isolation is a collection of digital pieces generated from photographs taken by the artist in her home. One portrait was taken for every month she spent alone in isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using code to manipulate the photographs through a process called generative art, the images morph from everyday household objects and scenes of day-to-day life, into indiscernible blurs. Drawing from experience with anxiety and depression, the artist attempts to capture the chaos, fog and distortion, which is often experienced in times of trauma, and acutely felt by most during the pandemic. The project is a comment on the unreliability of memory and the brain’s misperception of reality, and ultimately a reflection on the artist’s progressive mental decline during the lockdown.

Chelsea Watson is an artist from Calgary, Canada currently residing in Toronto. Her unique process, known as generative or computational art, uses creative coding to make computer programs that create art. Chelsea’s work is purposefully random with an appreciation for imperfection. She draws inspiration from tactile art forms, such as paintings, ceramics and textiles to create layered and textured pieces with code as her medium.

Keywords: Addiction | Dispalcement | Harm Reduction | Healthcare | Indigenous rights | Trauma