AHA Media

The Story Box Project featured at the Surge Festival
August 6 – 28th, 2010
W2 Storyeum – 151 West Cordova St. (at Abbott St)

Opening Reception:  Friday, August 6th from 7pm till late

Regular Exhibition Viewing
August 7 to August 28, noon-6pm. Wednesday to Sunday, Free admission

At the heart of the City’s Great Beginnings Initiative is the desire to go back to its roots and give each of the founding neighborhoods something to talk about. In one such community, the DTES Story Box Project highlights its rich and storied cultural diversity through oral and written tradition. Unique object/artifact boxes illustrate stories from various voices which are intermingled to create a new and visceral experience.

The Storybox Project at the Surge Festival is the sensational finish to a process that involved over eighty members of DTES community based writing groups who developed their individual stories utilizing personal artifacts as inspiration and illustration. The manifold stories held common threads bound to universal themes. StoryBox at Storyeum presents five such themes as representative of the powerfully spoken words by the most demo-diverse voices working in concert with some of Vancouver’s brightest lights in media arts.

urban ink, an interdisciplinary theatre company connected artists with residents  to create five video and sound installations:

A solely aural exploration of the Story Box themes, AudioVox simultaneously looks at the relationship between chaos, order and form. [Frederick Brummer/Rupinder Sidhu]

Resistance for Existence exposes four different realities of people forced to hold firm against adverse forces even as they need to shift their perspectives in order to survive. [Cease Wyss/Shawn Chappelle]

Natural beauty and magic have been lost within the distractions of materialism yet we conjure different illusions & myths to help make sense of things in Web We Weave. [Su-an Ng/Sepideh Saii]

A suspension of story, image and object triangulate as audience members weave their way inside and outside the Mother Tongue musings of four multilingual tellers. [Justin Sekiguchi/Lenke Sifko]

ShadowBox presents a random interplay of silhouetted actors with the stories and key phrases from StoryBox’s eighty participants. The results of this 6-month project are revealed to pedestrian onlookers in W2 Storyeum windows. [Krista Lomax/Sammy Chien]

Media Artists: Frederick Brummer, Shawn Chappelle, Su-an Ng, Sepideh Saii, Justin Sekiguchi, Rupinder Sidhu, Lenke Sifko, Cease Wyss, Krista Lomax and Sammy Chien.

Contributing Artists: Julia Aleynikova, Samuel Beaudry, Colin Beiers, Hendrick Beune, Afuwa Granger, Lenore Herb, Jezebel S. Jones, Quest Kabuki, Bill Lim, Joan Morelli and Antonette Rea. Community Group Animators/Facilitators: Hari Alluri, Lesley Ewen, MutyaMacatumpag,  Omari Newton, Irwin Oostindie, Quelemia Sparrow and Naomi Steinberg.

The StoryBox Exhibition has been curated by urban ink and W2, with financial assistance of the City of Vancouver, and produced in association with: Vancouver Society of Storytelling, Raycam Community Centre, Interurban, Fearless City Mobile, Musqueam Nation Writer’s Group, DTES Women’s Centre Writing Group, Carnegie Centre’s Thursday Writing Collective, Life Skills Centre, Native Court Workers’ Saturday Family Storytelling, Ugnayaan Filipino Canadian Youth Alliance, Surrey Urban Youth Project, Gathering Place Megaphone project, Association of Chinese Canadians for Equality and Solidarity Society (ACCESS).

http://urbanink.ca/?p=1569