Nuit Blanche spotlights Scarborough as new haunt
Nuit Blanche has travelled broadranging turf in its nearly a dozen years, from spectacle to activism and everything in between. Next year, it ranges farther than it ever has: To Scarborough, where a sizable chunk of the annual overnight art event will touch down at dusk on Sept. 29, 2018.
If Alyssa Fearon, the Scarborough segment’s newly named curator, has her way, Nuit’s move will break ground in more ways than one.
“You always hear about Scarborough as a place that’s underprivileged, that’s at risk, that’s a ‘priority,’ ” she says. “I really think that does a disservice to what’s happening there. There’s a lot of resilience, a lot of creativity. That’s what I want to illuminate — the great things that are there already.”
Nuit Blanche, Scarborough edition, will centre around its Civic Centre, which will serve as a hub in much the same way as Nathan Philips Square does for the downtown core. The two events will take place the same night.
Born in 2006 as a bring-back-the-tourists campaign in the wake of the city’s image-battering SARS crisis, Nuit Blanche over time has moved away from spectacle to become smarter, tighter and more in tune with the city it serves.
This year, it contracted to a handful of tight zones centred around Nathan Phillips Square. It displayed a strong activist’s bent: Groups such as Black Lives Matter T.O. and a slate of Indigenous artists and movements had a strong presence, situating the event explicitly in the current, politically charged moment.
Moving a portion of Nuit Blanche to Scarborough, said the city’s director of arts and culture, Patrick Tobin, was the natural extension of that shift. With the recent census revealing that visible minorities now comprise more than half the city’s population, the event’s 2018 theme, “You Are Here,” was chosen to reflect not only that demographic shift, Tobin said, but the shifting character of the city itself.
“Toronto is an arrival city on a global scale, and Scarborough in particular functions that way even more intensely,” Tobin said. “All the dynamics that come with that, people, finding their way in a new city, and the city finding its way with newcomers, really comes to the fore in a place like Scarborough.”
While it’s far too soon to suggest specific installations or artists who might be involved — those will be announced along with the full Nuit Blanche program in mid-2018 — Tobin began with unequivocal first principles from the community.
“They were very clear — this needs to not be a ‘Nuit Lite,’” he said. “They expected to be treated with the same respect as our partners in the downtown core.”
When it arrives, Nuit Blanche’s suburban segment will come with the full slate of programming and local mentorship programs that its downtown progenitor has. Tobin said as much as a third of Nuit Blanche’s total resources will be allocated to the new zone, which will use the Scarborough Civic Centre as a hub with installations and projects pinwheeling outward within easy walking distance from there.
The city’s commitment will be for two years, Tobin said, with the event likely to shift to a new location outside the core in 2020.
The new-look Nuit Blanche puts it in tune with a rising sentiment in the city’s cultural communities, which challenges the notion of art as an exclusively downtown phenomenon.
This is less a concept than a practical reality. As the central core of the city has become prohibitively expensive for most artists, cultural activity has increasingly sought affordable space farther afield.
Fearon’s quick to refute the notion that Scarborough is undergoing a cultural awakening — and that instead, the city core is the one finally waking up to what her home turf has to offer. The next Nuit Blanche 2018 takes place on Sept. 29, 2018, with hubs in Nathan Philips Square and the Scarborough Civic Centre. For more information please see nbto.com