The Gathering Divergence Multi-Arts Festival & Conference
Moulding The Future:
Rethinking Strategies for the Arts Sector Now
May 10 – May 13, 2022
Via Zoom and Small World Music Centre (Toronto)
This year, Gathering Divergence Multi-Arts Festival & Conference Spring 2022 | Moulding The Future: Rethinking Strategies for the Arts Sector Now will address emergent ways of rethinking the sector as we emerge out of the pandemic, focusing on the responsibility of the sector to strategize, implement supportive systems that benefit IBPOC artists / organizations and the Arts Sector at large.
We are excited to showcase these talented artists:
WORKSHOP II: ZERO PATIENCE: Addressing administrative worries and artistic barriers at the intersections of HIV/AIDS, Youth Work and Experimental Arts.
Artists: Sean Morello, Julian Morello and Juan Saavedra
Date and time: Thursday, May 12, 2022 at 1:00 PM
This presentation-workshop is told from the perspective of three artists: Sean Morello, Julian Morello and Juan Saavedra, all three racialized minorities, and all living with chronic and invisible disabilities. In this session, a case study in developing a hybrid arts project will be explored, presenting the opportunities to mobilize and monetize creative work through a portfolio-driven lens. Additional considerations include project life cycles and administrative lessons to improve effective collaboration. The case study is a result of a micro-grant offered by Buddies in Bad Time Theatre during its Pride in Place festival, a response to the pandemic and lockdown measures. The project, Sleep Codes and Coordinate is a multi and interdisciplinary collaboration, bringing together theatre, industrial design, and live music.
This presentation address:
- How does belonging to IBPOC groups inform or limit our creative practice?
- What strategic actions can IBPOC artists pursue to protect themselves from punitive actions within the creative sector?
- Processes of monetization when you work in both public funded and private sectors.
- How to position projects and ground your artistic vision in research and narrative.
- The importance of organizational policies that support IBPOC artists.
- Capacity building as disabled artist living on the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP).
- Combating shame and stigma through the arts; hybrid activism.
Julian Morello is an artist specializing in performance through spectatorship and happenings. He uses makeup and costuming to push the boundaries of each narrative performed. As a graduate from CMU College of Makeup Art & Design, Julian uses his skills not only to elevate himself but others who wish to use makeup as a medium for expression and art. Julian is concerned with intersectional narratives that overlap the experience of queer, HIV+, BIPOC; his work spans through the individual and collective narratives shared by these identities, to engage audiences into the livelihoods of these margins of society.
Sean Morello explores and conveys universal experiences, using allegories as a conceptual frame of work. Print media, installation, mixed media, animation, video, sound and assemblage become intersectional components, rather than individual and separate entities. His choice of media is diverse as the universal experiences he conveys, because the politics of identity which appear thematically in his work are also subjected to various intersections and multiple interpretations. The individual experiences are as important as the whole; the viewer’s unique lived experience often becomes intersected into Sean’s art, and tells an even more personal story to the viewer than the narrative told at face value.
Juan Saavedra is an interdisciplinary arts researcher operating between the domains of graphic and industrial design, and social policy. His interests included volunteerism, policy innovation, design-activism, and entrepreneurship. He is a recipient of the Mayor’s Community Safety Award (2017) from the City of Toronto for developing innovative arts-based programming. He has presented on topics such as: Co-Design, Death and Dying, World Sustainability, HIV Education, and Social Health. He holds a master’s degree in Design from Carleton University’s School of Industrial Design, specializing in health literacy, service navigation and education.
The full schedule is available here.
Registration: Tickets: $15 a day or PWYC
Day 1: Tuesday, May 10 via Zoom | 9:30 am – 2:00 pm
Day 2: Thursday, May 12 via Zoom | 12:30 pm – 5:00 pm
Day 3: Friday, May 13 in-person and live stream via Zoom | 11:00am-5:30 pm
Location: Small World Music Centre
Artscape Youngplace, 180 Shaw St, Toronto, ON M6J 2W5
Pleas note we have a limited number of Pay What You Can (PWYC) tickets to enable price accessibility for low income individuals to attend.
Covid protocols: People attending the event in Small World Music Centre need proof of vaccination or negative test within 24 hrs before the event. Masks are recommended in Artscape common areas. No food or drink in common areas and hallway.
Register online: https://the-gathering-divergence-spring-2022.eventbrite.ca
If you have any questions email: info@cpamo.org
As you know we have been fundraising for both — our last Gathering Divergence in December 2021 and for our upcoming Gathering Divergence in May 2022. Help us showcase more IBPOC artists and arts administrators by contributing today!
https://gofund.me/3f9402a9
Jody Chan is a writer, drummer, organizer, and therapist based in Toronto/Tkaronto. They are the author of haunt (Damaged Goods Press), all our futures (PANK), and sick, winner of the 2018 St. Lawrence Book Award and 2021 Trillium Award for Poetry. They are also a Performing Member of Raging Asian Womxn Taiko Drummers (RAW). They can be found online at 
Alia Ettienne is a Black, Afro Caribbean, multidisciplinary performer, writer and facilitator from Toronto, ON. After graduating from the Sheridan College Performance Program she has since gone on to study Creative Writing and Arts and Entertainment Marketing. As a member of both the Workman Arts and VIBE Arts artist roster, she recently completed the VIBE Arts: Desire Lines Residency. Her first solo piece, YellowZoned premiered in The 2016 Toronto Fringe Festival. Going on to remount as a part of Hamilton’s Mental Health Theater Festival MindPlay. Leading to her being featured in Hamilton’s Views Magazine on two separate occasions.
Based in Kjipuktuk (Halifax), on the powerful, unceded and unsurrendered land of the Mi’kmaq people, Liliona is a dancer, choreographer, actor, singer, community organizer, and activist. Originally from Ghana and the Philippines, she has an eclectic background that has taken her through many performance styles on four different continents.Liliona performs across the country and internationally, creates original works as an independent artist, facilitates community programming, and is the Artistic Director of Kinetic. The scope of Liliona’s artistic work is broad, but is particularly focused on the relationship between art and social justice, on the body’s ability to carry ancestral memory, and on the role the performing arts can play in creating change. Liliona loves to work in collaboration and community, and is mom to two wonderful kids.
Cultural Pluralism in the Arts Movement Ontario (CPAMO) 
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