May 16-31, 2025 - How to protect a radical idea?
Save the date!
To mark its 50th anniversary, La Centrale galerie Powerhouse is organizing a symposium that will take place between May 16 and 31, 2025. This two-week event will bring together over twenty artists, curators, and cultural workers around the question: How to protect a radical idea?
Through a variety of formats— roundtables, conferences, workshops, performances, and installations—the symposium will create a space for reflection, sharing, and experimentation around strategies to preserve and sustain radical practices.
This event will address topics such as empathetic curatorial practices, resistance to overproductivity and the importance of rest, the transmission of invisible knowledge, tools for reconnecting with one's radical essence (both individually and collectively), as well as issues related to intersectional feminist knowledge and imaginaries, and the relationships between bodies, environment, and care.
Rooted in the radical spirit and sense of community that shaped La Centrale’s founding in the 1970s, this project draws from our past while maintaining a critical perspective on it. We hope to generate proposals for a sustainable future for Canadian artist-run centres by redefining healthy structures of governance, and encouraging the well-being of cultural workers and artists.
PROGRAMMING - MAY 16-31, 2025
May 16, 6-7:45 pm - Utopian Dreaming: Feminisms in Artist-Run Centres - Amber Berson
May 17, 2-3:30 pm - Gossip & the whisper network - Sanaa Humayun, Kiona Callihoo Ligtvoet & Julia Rose Sutherland
May 17, 4-6 pm - Speed Collaborator-Generator - Geneviève Wallen & La Centrale
May 21, 1-5 pm - Radicalities and transformations - Sylvie Tourangeau & Holly Timpener
May 22, 7:30-10 pm - Nuit de la poésie / Poetry night - Dare-Dare x La Centrale, Carole David, Louise Dupré, Martine Audet, Nadine Ltaif, Nicole Brossard, Alegría Gobeil, Dada, Juliette Langevin, Mimi Hadam et Sayaka Araniva Yanez. Music provided by Nana Quinn.
May 24, 2-3:30 pm - Empathy practices - eunice bélidor, Annie Wong, Raven Spiratos & Avalon Mott
May 25, 6:30-7:45 pm - ART HOTLINE - Hugo Dufour & Kriss Li
May 31, 2-3:30 pm - The Power of Saying No and Resting - Victoria Stanton
May 31, 4-6 pm - Guided daydream - Salima Punjani
Registrations now open <3