Date/Time
Date(s) - June 11, 2015 - June 13, 2015
All Day
Location
Strathcona Church
Categories No Categories
Reconciling with Neighbours
Fukushima—and Vancouver—as social, cultural disaster
How can we create a culture of faith, hope and love, not a culture of fear, resentment and violence, as the source of recovery (and renewal) of communities after the multi-faceted disaster of Fukushima?
These events connect ecological sustainability with social and spiritual sustainability in local Vancouver communities by building relationships through art. Those relationships will connect Vancouver communities with Fukushima, Japan, a community that has experienced a traumatic ecological disaster and yet has also sustained hope and is seeking to recover vital local community life.
Soul Sustainability: Retreat for Urban Renewal through Art
From Fukushima to Strathcona?
What can ecological, cultural and political disasters like Fukushima teach us about the nature and possibilities for sustainability? Local Christian artists who are wrestling with the desire to integrate theology and art for the mission of urban transformation are invited to attend this 3-day retreat in Vancouver’s Strathcona/Downtown-East-Side neighbourhood, facilitated by local artists and artists visiting from Japan. The Strathcona/DTES neighbourhood has been chosen specifically because of its history of fear during the time of Japanese internment between 1941 and 1949.
Information for Participants
During the Soul sustainability and retreat you will:
- listen and work alongside
- twenty other local artists and creatives
- visiting U.S. and Canadian academics
- nine Japanese artists
- learn from and network with fellow practitioners engaging place through art
- participate in public dialogues with cultural leaders in the neighbourhood
- learn how to make “Story Walks”*: listening well, seeing well, creating well
- engage the Strathcona/DTES neighbourhoods through the art of Story Walks
* A Story Walk is a 20-minute walk that can take place over a lunch hour. The walk is punctuated by several way markers, poetic engagements with the environment. It could be described as an urban hack of a celtic labyrinth, or a Japanese garden in the streets. Poetic engagements direct attention; they attend to beauty, possibility and a re-imagined ecology of meaning.