An intense immersion workshop for international artists of all stripes will see sculptors working with musicians, writers working with painters, poets working with photographers to explore where creativity can go when there are no borders or cultural boundaries.
The Institute for Creative Exchange (ICE) is launching an intensive immersion series with a defiant premise: what is common to a specific language may trigger a revolution in a different one. This unique premise means that artists and cultural practitioners from all different disciplines and backgrounds –musicians, writers, actors, photographers, painters, journalists, etc.- will come together in an immersion where their knowledge and creativity in a specific area is energized and challenged to create new works with other creators from different arts and in different languages.
ICE project is being launched in an international political context where art may be seen as a way to dissolve borders and show others how we can coexist in a multicultural world.“This is the moment to demonstrate that we can eliminate boundaries and learn about other forms of expression in order to expand our own language” says Ximena Berecochea, Co-Founder and Program Director of ICE. The Institute for Creative Exchange is a platform for the exchange of opinions and ideas, and for developing new artistic and authorial projects both individually and collectively.
Acknowledged international artists will conduct ICE Immersion Series where they will meld the creativity of the participants from various artistic backgrounds and different countries. The immersion series will be designed from a curatorial perspective and the lecturers will be selected in accordance to the thematic and their experience in field of study.
Inaugural ICE Immersion Series
Inspired by the work of world-famous writer, Mario Bellatin, the first ICE Immersion Series will be Art & Orthopedics. Mario Bellatin is a Mexican writer who was born with a shortened arm and without a hand on his right side. Throughout his life, he has reflected on the importance of whether to use a prosthesis or live without it.
«He has transferred this thought to a creative and artistic expression. He found similarities between the art world and orthopaedics. Among others, the uniqueness of the production opposed to a standardized one,» says Salvador Alanis, co-director and co-founder of ICE.
Mario will be conducting the first immersion accompanied by Susan Antebi, Director of the Latin American Studies Program at the University of Toronto. Susan has been researching the relationship between disability and the creative process, as well as the ethics and aesthetics of the body in literature and other media. Author of Carnal Inscriptions: Spanish American Narratives of Corporeal Difference and Disability.
The third conductor of Arts and Orthopaedics will be Daniel Canty, a Montreal- based writer, filmmaker and publisher. Author of Mappemonde, Wigrum and Êtres Artificiels among others. Daniel will be unfolding how automatas can influence literature and the arts and will discuss issues of symmetry and body. The final output of the workshop will be a collaborative body of work that will be published with the support of ICE creators and conductors. Details on the public showing and presentation of this work will follow.