Broken City Lab

About Broken City Lab

Broken City Lab is an artist-led interdisciplinary creative research collective and non-profit organization working to explore and unfold curiosities around locality, infrastructures, and creative practice leading towards civic change.

The processes and projects of Broken City Lab stem from the lab’s observations and concerns about the collapsed post-industrial city of Windsor, Ontario, as a city, as a community, and as a network of infrastructure, and aim to do two things: first, Broken City Lab works through interventionist tactics to adjust, critique, annotate, and re-imagine the city that we encounter; secondly, through these interventions, the lab seeks to educate, inspire, and facilitate a new way of viewing the potential for interacting with and in the city.

Broken City Lab’s creative activity is rooted in community-based social practice, where the lab attempts to generate a new dialogue surrounding public participation and community engagement in the creative process, with a focus on the city as both a research site and workspace.

The projects, events, workshops, performances, and interventions created by Broken City Lab offer a sometimes momentary, sometimes extended, injection of creativity into a situation, surface, place, or community. These projects continually connect various disciplines through research and practice, generating projects that mix visual arts and writing, performance and design, and activism and new media, while embedding those projects within the community and working alongside community members.

Broken City Lab has worked with the City of Windsor’s Transit Authority to install community-created text-based art in its buses, generated an interactive projection performance detailing 100 ideas for saving the city of Windsor onto a building in its downtown core, designed and distributed removable micro-gardens made from recycled plastic bags and rare-earth magnets, written interactive text-based performance software, told thousands of Windsorites that “You Are Amazing,” projected large-scale messages visible across an international border, hosted 25 artists from across Canada for an interdisciplinary storefront residency project, and led numerous psychogeographic walks, DIY workshops, and community brainstorming sessions.

Broken City Lab‘s projects and research have been featured in Fuse Magazine, Public Journal, Next American City, Alternatives, GOOD, the National Post, the Toronto Star, NPR (WDET, NPHR), CBC Radio One, CBC television, Le Téléjournal, The Windsor Star, the A-Channel, Wooster Collective, PSFK, and Tree Hugger, presented and exhibited across North America including the Art Gallery of Windsor, TRUCK Gallery, Forest City Gallery, Propeller Centre, Open Engagement, and CAFKA, and have been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the University of Windsor Humanities Research Group, OPIRG Windsor, and the City of Windsor.

The text above was pulled from Broken City Lab’s website.