Over the course of a week in late-September/early-October at the Prismatic Arts Festival in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, ALP successfully held our first SeedPool Gathering—launching the testing phase of our new project, Moving Together/Arriving Together: Decolonising Creative Partnerships. Our inaugural cohort of 8 artists gathered at the Bus Stop Theatre (along with 2 artists via Zoom) for a 3-day collaborative laboratory (CoLab), in which creators collectively assembled artistic and ancestral traditions to re-imagine the roots of community and creation.
Building on initial connections we established in the CoLab, ALP and SeedPool artists were invited to gather at the Africville Museum to introduce the public to the ALP process and our new SeedPool Gallery, engaging over 50 new artists, creators, community members, and future partners. During the final day of the gathering, the cohort of SeedPool Artists presented a showcase of embodied and audiovisual works-in-progress to an audience of 30+ festival goers.
At the root of the SeedPool Gathering and our Moving Together/Arriving Together project lies a central guiding question: How can we cultivate decolonial approaches to creative partnerships through sharing new collective possibilities and pathways for artistic creation and community collaboration? My role as Lead Researcher involved documenting the CoLab (via video, audio, testimonial, etc.) to trace the critical connections and conditions of creative partnership, which will be the basis of our open-access toolkit to be launched next year.
