The Great Library Festival proposes a new way of being in the library
The Great Library Festival is a fourteen-week residency from September 8, 2018 to December 10, 2018. It includes seven art and two farm workshops curated by Big Pond Small Fish for the Downsview Public Library.
Big Pond Small Fish envisions the library as a democratic site of crosspollination, bringing together forms of art, knowledge, and people of ages from different communities. The residency engages aesthetic, activist, pedagogic approaches that draw on African and Afro Caribbean, Sri Lankan, Tibetan and Anglo-Canadian cultural knowledge to create images, sounds and words; a website, a final exhibition and performance.
Five hours a day, three days a week from September to December residency artists Tenzin Chozin, Anupa Khemadasa and Krys Verrall animate the public space the library.
They introduce tools that offer new possibilities for interaction and creative engagement through art making and play. They invite experts from the local community and Toronto’s broader art scene to lead six weekend and three after school workshops. Workshops feature spoken word artists Kareem Bennett and Moose, photo-based youth organization Flaunt It!, and Food Share’s urban farmer Connor Allaby from Black Creek Community Farm. Residency artists lead workshops in performance-based games (Chozin), book making (Krys) and improv (Anupa).
Together arts residency and workshops act as demonstrations and activation points that encourage open ended participation through participant driven creativity, skill building and exploration.
