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Nuit Blanche & Toronto: art as therapy NADIA GUO News Editor “Cities have shape and size; they have histories, constitutions, administrations and systems; they have rhythms, bodies and buildings. They are formed with all of these elements in relation to each other to make space for dwelling, commerce, ritual and play, giving expression to memories, chronicles, secrets and desires. We can discover something about the heart, mind and soul of the city by the passage of our bodies through its built form. Each of the artists selected for the exhibition works with specific elements of urban experience to construct relationships that go beyond the usual patterns of time, scale or movement, demonstrating that our urban destiny is both more fluid and more imaginary than its built form suggests.” --Christina Ritchie, curator of Bodies and Buildings in Zone B for Nuit Blanche 2012 Nuit Blanche in Toronto is an event that always reignites a part of me that lies dormant the rest of the year. For me, it will always be a reawakening of the roots I’ve sown into this city, a celebration of the joie de vivre of the Toronto community, and an indulgence in the very jouissance, fragmentation, and conflict that quotidian life in the city produces.
We all got to bear witness to a Toronto transformed, a Toronto paused in time as people took a break from the daily grind to marvel and participate in the creativity our artists had to offer. It was at the end of the night, or I suppose it was early morning by that point, when my friend and I found ourselves in the middle of an eerily quaint financial district, with only a few quiet cabs idling by. We were staring up at the stars in the gaps of sky between converging skyscrapers above, and it was then that I knew I was in a place I truly belonged. This year Nuit Blanche marked another new phase in my life. We were older, and we had more responsibilities. I’d just finished my first month of law school. My friends had 9 to 5s. We were all tired. I was stressed and irritable, second-guessing my ability to deal with the demanding nature of this program. I have a background in the liberal arts. I was a dreamer, living the bohemian life, reading Faulkner and Woolf in between endless nights out dancing and fucking. Law seemed like a tool I wanted to wield to chisel society in the direction I wanted it to go, but is it going to turn out to be that stuffily conservative, treacherous sojourn my friends warned me it would
Nuit Blanche was a concept that first originated in Paris in 2002 as a way to increase public accessibility to contemporary art, with Montreal as the first Canadian city to pick up the idea in 2003. Toronto followed suit in 2006. My first ‘sleepless night’ was in 2007. That September evening would mark my starting point in a city that would come to be the place I would call home. I had just moved to start my undergrad at the University of Toronto and my youthfully green, suburban heart was only beginning to ripen. Transplanting myself from the pre-fab, cookie-cutter, Abercrombie & Fitch-obsessed, and culturally bankrupt wasteland that is Mississauga to the city is probably a temporal milestone that will resonate with me for the rest of my life. (Although, I can’t deny that I’ll still have those Arcade Fire-inspired moments when I start to romanticize my adolescent years wandering in between empty rows of houses late at night, or lying in dog piles in someone’s parents’ basement, playing with amputee Barbie dolls, high on whatever thrills we could find.) Nuit Blanche 2007: In the company of new friends, we ventured out of our warm dormitories to traverse across the cool, fog-filled green of King’s College Circle, through Queen’s Park, and eventually down Yonge St, where we saw Dundas Square lit up like some strange diamond. All those bright advertisements rained down on us as thick crowds of people oozed by below. We had to detangle ourselves from the mess of the crowds now and again to find each other, but it was pleasant to feel lost that night in the company of strangers. monday - oct 15 - 2012
WORLD WITHOUT SUN BY CHRISTINE DAVIS
be? It seemed like I was going to have to leave the libertinism of my past behind, being among a class where everyone seemed to embrace, at least on the surface, clean, efficient and professional lifestyles geared towards a final landing in a spot on Bay St. Commuting from my beloved downtown life up to North York everyday takes its toll after a while. The fact that all of York campus seems to be in the midst of being completely ripped apart and reconstructed didn’t help my utter lack of appreciation for my new surroundings. Of course it was silly to even compare the magical, castle-like, 19th century setting of my alma mater to the ugly reality of York University. But, this was the decision I made, after all. At least it was the decision I made after being rejected from the U of T Faculty of Law. Which isn’t to say that I preferred U of T’s program to Osgoode’s – the latter has the kind of holistic outlook towards its
incoming class that I approved of in contrast to the hard-nosed environment U of T seemed to foster. But being a person who is closely bonded to the physical world around me, not being able to hear the bustle of downtown life in between classes added to my stress and lack of enthusiasm. All of this was on my mind at this year’s Nuit Blanche. But the events of the night worked to restore my confidence a little. Nuit Blanche is always demanding insofar that there are so many promising installations to visit and only so much time and energy you can devote to each one. We decided not to go on the wild drunken goose chase we sometimes found ourselves on in other years, and stuck to Zone B. A mutual friend was part of an art collective (XXXX Collective) and had an installation called Ground Cover, part of the larger exhibit Constellations, in the courtyard outside my old residence at University College. The artists had sculpted lounging, elongated human forms out of pieces of lawn laid over chicken wire. It seemed as if the shapes were pressing in raised relief from the grass of the quad itself. They were like the realizations of a generation of lost memories, of ancestors who had been laid in the ground to rest coming to reassert their presence again. Inside the sculptures, there were hidden speakers that played recordings of people breathing in their sleep, and sometimes snoring too. The public was invited to interact with the slumbering shapes, to cuddle, pet, spoon, or be spooned by them. I never thought I’d feel so comforted by an inanimate object, but they seemed to radiate an almost tangible warmth, despite being only made of earth and wire. It was surreally comforting to be near these things and I could feel my heartbeat slowing down as I caressed the grassy haunches of my soft companion. Inside University College, there was an instalInside University College, there was an installation called Crave Crawl Cave by artists Claro Cosco, Grey Muldoon, and Piffin Duvekot, where we were invited to explore three large tents connected by crawlspaces. We pulled off our shoes, ducked into the first tent, and it was as if we had fallen down Alice’s rabbit hole. They had filled GROUND COVER BY XXXX COLLECTIVE
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