
Locals Only – Call for Saskatoon-based Artists
AKA artist-run and CHEP Good Food Inc.
Developed by Justin Langlois, for AKA artist-run in collaboration with CHEP Good Food Inc., Locals Only is a large-scale multi-year art project that explores food security, community-led resource development, and intergenerational exchange in Saskatoon’s core neighbourhood of Riversdale. As one of the oldest neighbourhoods in the city, Riversdale hosts some of the most diverse and culturally rich communities in the region, and yet is simultaneously facing unprecedented pressures from encroaching gentrification along with long-standing challenges related to accessing locally-sourced sustenance. The project responds to these critical issues in the form of a mobile food service truck that deploys socially engaged art, local knowledge, and long-form hospitality to cultivate a community-based exploration of reciprocity by redeploying symbolic representations of gentrification into the hands of longtime community residents. Locals Only will operate as an elder-guided, artist-designed, and youth-operated mobile programming space, and will serve as a platform for intercultural dialogue and intergenerational capacity building by sharing traditional knowledge around food, hospitality, and community development. Beginning in 2017, the project extends until June 2019, and will encourage meaningful participation from community-based youth and elders, as well as deep collaboration with local and national artists.
For 2018, Locals Only will commission four Saskatoon-based artists to play an integral role in the “Locals Only” mobile site for arts-based community workshops, food-focused interventions, and dialogical engagement activities around food security, economic justice, and place-affirming organizing. From April through September, these artists will work with youth artists to deliver this programming alongside free once-a-week food-truck style dishes to participating community members based on recipes shared by elders in Riversdale-based Indigenous, Chinese, Ukrainian, Russian, and Francophone communities prepared by staff and volunteers at CHEP.
Details
Selected artists will work closely with the Lead Artist and Curator to create socially engaged programming and projects that extend and animate the Locals Only mobile site and platform over the course of its operations. Artists may also identify one of the forthcoming Locals Only community dinner events for a launch or distribution of their project. Crucially, selected artists will mentor youth artists involved in Locals Only throughout the course of their project or programming.
Projects or programming could include: workshops, small-scale publishing, temporary interventions, public engagement, gardening-based activities, food-focused education, mapping and documentation, short-run audio or video works, or other forms of distributable artist multiples. Proposed projects must take into account the goals of the project and the unique diversity of the Riversdale community. In particular, artists should endeavour to embed in their project anti-oppression frameworks and protocols and ensure their projects responsibly and ethically respond to the dynamics of the community within which they will unfold. Selected artists will have the opportunity to create new work for the Locals Only mobile programming platform or Locals Only community dinner events to be held at various venues in Riversdale in the spring and fall of 2018.
Locals Only will pay an artist fee of $2000 alongside a material or production budget of up to $1000.
Submission Requirements
Statement of Interest (200 words)
CV (2 pages)
8-10 Images of previous work and image list
Project Proposal (300 words)
Budget Estimate
Brief Bio (100 words)
Submissions should be emailed in a single pdf document to projects@akaartistrun.com, subject heading: Locals Only Call for Local Artists by September 8, 11:59pm CST.