Collectives
The phenomenon of the artist collective is promising ground for understanding the production of art, artists’ identities, and networks between artists both local and global. Historically, internationally influential movements have originated out of them: the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood or Der Blaue Reiter, for instance. Close to home they arise from and respond to immediate pressures, expressing regional identity and issues, but as globalization increases and becomes localized, it becomes difficult to discern what is local and what is global in origin. Understanding the collective gives a social context in which to situate the activities, creative processes, and final works made by members, and the reception of them, in a constant push-pull of difference and amalgamation. Read more...

Omni Zona Franca

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Omni Zona Franca is a multi-disciplinary Cuban arts collective with members who freely shift between different forms of expression (art, music, poetry, theatre, dance) in the embrace of art as everyday life. As curator Dannys Montes de Oca writes in the 9th Havana Biennial catalogue, Omni "is a group and a life experience emerging from the very entrails of the city; from its streets, scents, cries, music, voices, from its generous and anarchical happiness and its local flavour." As such, performance in some shape or another is the binding component of their collective actions, and they have been involved in over 200 events during nearly 7 years of organization. Regardless of the form any individual project, performance or event assumes, all members are committed to the collaborative and transformative potential of art.

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Loop Collective

loop stillLoop is a collective of independent media artists whose mandate is to develop a public platform integrating experimental film and video with other art forms. Their mission is to explore the roots of experimental film and video by creating a dialogue with other artistic mediums.

The Loop Collective sees their work in relation to the local art community in Toronto, as well as to the larger framework of global capitalism and commodity-art. In the first place, their work seeks to fill a gap that they see existent in the Toronto art world, by providing expression to formalist film experiments, despite the often difficult task of locating spaces suitable to house their shows. Indeed, the interdisciplinary nature of their projects is very often hard to accommodate in the traditional venues for showcasing both visual art and film. Their work also seeks to redress some of the artistic absences in global commercial culture which they see as "purposely repressing" creative work that is experimental, formalist and non-marketable. In a cultural context that rewards market-friendly artwork, the Loop Collective is committed to providing funding and space for artists whose work is antithetical to the commercial mandates of even more progressive broadcasters and film festival programmers. While not explicitly "political" (political in content) their programming, in its very refusal of commercial form, expresses a politics similar to that described by Herbert Marcuse as the critique of "that which is."

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