Festival website: https://antigonight.ca/2021-season
Antigonight: Art After Dark Festival is a free arts festival that aims to be inclusive and accessible to all persons. In 2021 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 you artists to offer us their own radical experiments or vision of what sustainable transformation looked like.