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January 26, 2023 @ 7:00 pm - January 29, 2023 @ 2:30 pm
January 26 – 29, 2023
Click here for more info.
The ArtsEverywhere Festival is the place where conversations, ideas, and artistic experiments presented on ArtsEverywhere.ca come alive in our home community of Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
Over four days, the festival offers lectures, conversations, music, artistic performances, circle gatherings, literary readings, exhibitions, and much more. As the publisher of ArtsEverywhere.ca, Musagetes co-presents the festival in partnership with the University of Guelph and the Eramosa Institute. Many other community partners collaborate with us to co-present specific events.
The Guelph Lecture—On Being
The festival’s inspiration and its signature event, The Guelph Lecture—On Being, enters its 16th year in 2019—a testament to the success of community initiatives and the life of creative ideas in Guelph. The Eramosa Institute launched the Guelph Lecture in 2003. Since the Eramosa Institute launched the lecture in 2003, it has become a widely recognized series with each event consisting of a literary reading, music performance, and keynote lecture. Past literary guests have included Tanya Talaga, Lee Maracle, Miriam Toews, Sandra Birdsell, Rawi Hage, M.G. Vassanji, Michael Helm, Ann Hui, and Thomas King, among many others. Past lectures have been presented by Jeannette Armstrong, Joseph Heath, Madeleine Redfern, John Ralston Saul, , Lee Smolin, Jaron Lanier, Louise Fréchette, Henry Mintzberg, Alexandre Trudeau, Severn Cullis-Suzuki, Guy Maddin, Atom Egoyan, Brigitte Shim, Janice Gross Stein, and Mark Kingwell. Our musical guests have included The Young Turban Professionals with Esmeralda Enrique, Martha Henry, Spencer Shewen, Spirits of Havana with Jane Bunnett, Oni the Haitian Sensation, Lauren Mann and the Fairly Odd Folk, Okavango African Orchestra, Midnight Shine, The Penderecki String Quartet, DJ Cyclist, Basia Bulat, and Sarah Neufeld.
ArtsEverywhere Keeps the Conversation Going
The ArtsEverywhere Festival aims to spark rich dialogues about issues, ideas, and challenges that are of the interest to our Guelph & Region audiences, and of relevance and interest to our national and global audiences on ArtsEverywhere.ca. By bringing to the gathering a diverse, informative, creative, and, sometimes, unlikely combination of speakers, artists, and musicians, the festival offers a program that connects to the ongoing work and needs of many organizations and individuals that wish to make the world a better place. For this reason, we involve a large team of volunteers, partner organizations & businesses, sponsors, and creative people who have a say in who we invite, how we frame the discussions, and how we keep the conversation going after the festival is over.
The Program
Black Vitality: Life, Listening, and The Sugar Shack
Thursday, January 26, 2023; 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
This Big Ideas in Art + Culture talk with artist Derrais Carter is a collective listening session masquerading as a lecture. Pairing musical selections from the Black Revelry Quiet Storm radio show with close readings of Ernie Barnes’ painting The Sugar Shack, we’ll ask what happens when we apply the painting to our social worlds.
River Run Centre, Woolwich Street, Guelph, ON.
The Guelph Lecture—On Being 2023
The 2023 Guelph Lecture—On Being marks our 20th edition, and to celebrate we’re bringing together three presenters who address the urgencies of our time in three engaging ways.
Literary Guest: Liz Howard
Our literary guest for the evening will be Ontario poet Liz Howard, who was recently the Eastern Comma artist-in-residence at the rare Charitable Research Reserve. Her latest collection of poetry, Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, was published by McClelland & Stewart in June 2021.
Musical Guest: Sarah Harmer
Fresh off a tour of Eastern Canada, beloved Canadian musician and activist Sarah Harmer will present songs from her latest album Are You Gone and her extensive discography of treasured music.
Keynote: Dr. Will Valley, Unsettling Approaches to Food Security
This year’s keynote will feature Dr. Will Valley, who explore the tensions and contradictions inherent to approaches that seek to increase food security. These approaches are characterized by a reluctance to accept the power, presence, and perpetuation of white supremacy in mainstream Canadian culture, and a failure to recognize the fundamental limits to creating a food secure future without first acknowledging and working toward dismantling settler-colonial legacies.
River Run Centre, Woolwich Street, Guelph, ON.
Rose Beef Drag Brunch
Rock/Paper/Scissors Book and Print Fair
Come check out our first Rock/Paper/Scissors Book and Print Fair. This year, local zinesters, poets, and publishers will join international micro presses from the Publication Studio Network on Saturday afternoon from 1–6pm in a print media lover’s dream. Peruse hand-made and locally published books and print media and support small book makers and publishers.
Two panels will take place during the fair, with time to visit the tables during and between the sessions:
2pm – 3:30pm Author Simon(e) van Saarloos in conversation with Ricky Varghese and Catherine Clune-Taylor
3pm Snack Break: browse the book vendors
4pm – 6pm A Print Community Publication Network panel
River Run Centre, Woolwich Street, Guelph, ON.
Simon(e) van Saarloos with Ricky Varghese and Catherine Clune-Taylor
Catherine Clune-Taylor, Simon(e) Van Saarloos and Ricky Varghese join each other for a conversation about the limits and possibilities of consent, the queer and anti-racist potential of addressing ageism, and the need for difficult stories and unsettling narrative—as for example encountered on the couch in psychoanalysis, in Black feminist readings and rewritings of the archive, in science-fiction novels and films, in sexual fantasies and experiences.
The conversation will be informed by Clune-Taylor’s work on intersex conditions and securing cisgendered futures for children, Van Saarloos’ discussion of the age of consent in their forthcoming Against Ageism: A Queer Manifesto, and the contradictions of pleasure and sex positivity Varghese encounters in his practice as a psychoanalyst.
Drawing from a wide range of theoretical fields and personal experiences, Clune-Taylor, Van Saarloos and Varghese connect over their non-monogamous research practice, characterized by a scholarly promiscuity and institutional infidelity.
River Run Centre, Woolwich Street, Guelph, ON.
A Print Community Publication Network panel
Join panelists from Publication Studios in São Paulo, Montevideo, Hudson, and Glasgow for a discussion about community in print. What is the “social life of the book”? Why is independent publishing so important to a global community of readers? How does bookmaking constitute a “way of making” culture, and what relationship does a book’s physical production have to its contents? The panel will feature publishers Darío Marroche (PS Montevideo), Annie Hazelwood (PS Glasgow), and Patrick Kiley (PS Hudson). Moderated by Laura Daviña (PS São Paulo).
Ever Deadly: Film Screening & Performances
Ever Deadly is an immersive, visceral music and cinema experience featuring Tanya Tagaq, avant-garde Inuit throat singer, and created in collaboration with award-winning filmmaker Chelsea McMullan. This documentary explores Tagaq’s transformation of sound with an eye to colonial fallout, natural freedom, and Canadian history.
We witness Tagaq’s intimate relationship with the Nuna—the Land—a living, breathing organism present in all forms of her improvised performances. Ever Deadly weaves concert footage with stunning sequences filmed on location in Nunavut, seamlessly bridging landscapes, stories and songs with pain, anger and triumph—all through the expressions of one of the most innovative musical performers of our time.
Accompanying our screening of the film will be performances from guest Inuk artists curated by Taqralik Partridge.
The Bookshelf, Quebec Street, Guelph, ON.
The radical potential of ekphrasis for Blackness, Access, and Magic
The term “ekphrasis” refers to the practice of describing artwork, for example a poetic description of a painting. Ekphrasis is known for its potential to augment a work—in translating the original artwork, a collaboration emerges which can potentially contribute to revealing an artwork’s essence.
Cape Breton-based disability advocate and social practice artist Aislinn Thomas, Berlin-based writer Erin Honeycutt, and Big Ideas lecturer Derrais Carter come together to discuss how the practice of describing artwork forms an intimate part of their distinct practices and communities—be they Disability arts communities and the pleasure of audio description, Black communities and multiple ekphrastic descriptions of the iconic painting The Sugar Shack, or communities of poets and the “image magic” of writing that Honeycutt discusses in her book Sensible Structures. Come listen together and lounge with us as we investigate the connections between these artists. Blankets and pillows are welcome and lounging encouraged if that helps you feel comfortable.
River Run Centre, Woolwich Street, Guelph, ON.
Megaflora Film Screening & Discussion
