Eleanor King & the Antigonish Children's Choir
Sarah Wendt & Pascal Dufaux
Judy Bernard Julian
Marrin Jessome
Hearts & Hands L'Arche Antigonish
Nick Bostick
Michelle Sylliboy
ANTIGONIGHT: ART AFTER DARK FESTIVAL (2021)
Festival website: https://www.antigonishculturealive.ca/antigonight-2021
Antigonight: Art After Dark Festival is a free arts festival that aims to be inclusive and accessible to all persons.
In 2021 I curated the festival. It ran from September 4th-18th in Antigonish, L'nuewa'ki (Mi’kma’ki)/Nova Scotia. We invited artists from anywhere in the world who have roots in Nova Scotia and Atlantic Canada to create experimental new works for the festival, including but not limited to: video, performance, dance, sound, sculpture, and installation, which could be presented online or in-person in the town of Antigonish. Participating Antigonight artists received CARFAC-mandated artist fees.
The theme I chose for 2021 was “connection”. We sought proposals that transformed the way we think about our relationships and connections to one another, as well as to the non-human world; works that re-evaluated social hierarchies and our priorities within them. This could take the form of speculative storytelling: works that envisioned a world you haven’t seen before. White scholar and activist Donna Haraway wrote in “Staying with the Trouble” that perhaps there is a better way of framing and being in the world we share not just with other humans but with our animal kin. She writes: “It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories...Like all offspring of colonizing and imperial histories, I – we – have to relearn how to conjugate worlds with partial connections and not universals and particulars...”
In other words, we called on artists to offer us their vision or radical experiments for achieving sustainable transformation.
Artist’s programmed for Antigonight, 2021: ACALA, Adi Fleisher, Andrea Currie, Anna Syperek, Bhawani Singh Panwar, Bianca Palmer, Breaking the Silence, Colleen MacIsaac, Eleanor King & the Antigonish Children's Choir, Émilie Karuna, Evan Furness, Francine Dulong, Gaël, Hearts & Hands L'Arche Antigonish, Janette Fecteau, John Kennedy, Judy Bernard Julian, Kate Georgallas, Kate Ward, Kellie & Maggie Kat Anderson, Kelvin Gbawuru Mansaray, L. Grace Walls, Marrin Jessome, Michelle Sylliboy, Nicholas Dourado, Nick Bostick, Sarah Mihara Creagen, Sarah Wendt & Pascal Dufaux, Selina Wamsley, Yamina Mazat Morales