Collective Camera
Reflections on the Journey to Here
On Tuesday, April 24, 2018, Collective Camera’s vision of community collaboration and co-creation came of age. A small group of community residents, guests, musicians, poets, writers, police officers, and media disruptors gathered indoors under a makeshift, decorative, symbolic tent for an ephemeral live transmedia experience. Produced by Collective Camera (CC) as part of the Transmedia Zone (TMZ), this inaugural event, titled Under the Tent: Stories from the Village, unfolded in the heart of Toronto’s St James Town (SJT) community, while also being live-streamed. It was the first ‘official’ CC/TMZ event held in SJT and served as a soft launch for CC’s vision for JTV (St. James Town Television) — a platform to house transmedia projects by, about, and for the SJT community. Under the Tent also marked the culmination of the work of CC’s volunteer-members, dedicated TMZ staff and the TMZ space that allowed CC to have the time and space for the creative process. My journey through the TMZ with CC has not only been an enriching and fulfilling learning experience, it has also been a revelation.
As a scholar, musician, and filmmaker with a wealth of media experience and a keen interest in community engagement, I originally came into the TMZ with a spark of an idea that was nurtured, fanned, and allowed to catch fire. One interesting outcome of my experience with the project’s tenure at the TMZ, is the revelation that CC is also a Socially Engaged Art (SEA) practice, something that I have been unknowingly steeped in as a participant, and as an artist/collaborator/initiator. As a participant, I fondly recall two special projects that were produced during my middle-school years at King Edward Public School in downtown Toronto. One was the Blue Bird Feeder Club and the other was an after-school Film Club. I had just arrived as a new immigrant to Canada and, as a newcomer searching for ways to be included, I embraced the opportunities. The population of Eastern Bluebirds had declined in Southern Ontario, and declared rare by the Ministry of Natural Resources. Under the mentorship of our science and carpentry shop teachers, a dedicated group of ten students designed and built two hundred wooden and glass Bluebird feeders, and subsequently installed them in Hockley Valley, about an hour north of Toronto. We participated in a socially engaged collaborative project that contributed to the population increase of the Eastern Bluebirds in the area. This project was so successful that we were invited to share our experience on a popular national CBC Television program of that time.
The after-school film club was convened by my history teacher Mr. Niederreiter, who was also an immigrant to Canada. It paired a handful of my fellow student outsiders with mentorship, skills, camera, lights, and editing equipment, and helped us shape our unique stories through the production of a super 8mm film titled Ohh Canada. Twenty-five years later, this award-winning narrative film was the subject of another award-winning documentary titled Film Club. In hindsight, I realize that the after-school film club was a participatory social media project. These two projects exemplify what Pablo Helguera observed in Education for Socially Engaged Art (2011), that socially engaged projects are also “community-building mechanisms”, and in addition to having specific tangible outcomes,“the process itself — the fabrication of the work — that is social, ”creates a sense of community, camaraderie, and collective ownership. In retrospect, throughout my personal experiences with participatory practices, Helguera’s observation on process holds true. However, it was my practice as an artist/collaborator/initiator, which led me to envision the Collective Camera project — an opportunity for immersive media collaboration between youth from St. James Town and undergraduate students from Ryerson University with specific tangible outcomes.
My trajectory to the invaluable collaborative opportunity started a few years ago in a tiny coffee shop in Toronto’s St. James Town neighbourhood. I had scheduled a meeting with Ravi Subramaniam, a settlement worker I had met ten years earlier. Currently a senior management team member of Thorncliffe Neighbourhood Office, and the strategic lead for SJT, he is a Canadian from the Tamil Sri Lankan community and resides in SJT. My intent in reconnecting with Ravi was to garner his help in accessing potential subjects for my thesis documentary project Brothers in the Kitchen — a story about the Tamil Sri Lankans who fled a brutal civil war and sought refuge in Canada in the late 1980s. Ravi promised me that he and other members of the Tamil-Canadian community were eager to help me with my request, but they also had a request of their own. The Tamil diaspora have been an integral presence in St. James Town and though they have continued to support their own communities here and abroad, they felt they had not necessarily given back to the immediate community that had hosted them for nearly three decades. To that end they requested that I help them envision a legacy project for their community. I was excited about the unique opportunity and eagerly began to piece together the seeds for an art collective that would engage within the community. At the same time, as a graduate student at Ryerson University, I began dreaming of the possibility for a prolonged collaboration between the youth in St. James Town, in collaboration with undergraduate media students at Ryerson, hence, the birth of Collective Camera.
St. James Town “is the most densely populated neighbourhood in Canada.” Encompassing eighteen high-rise buildings, this “world within a block” also ranks as one of seventeen densely populated places on earth. Ravi introduced me to the Community Corner (Corner). Located on the ground level of 200 Wellesley East, The Corner opened its doors in 2011 as “a dynamic, flexible, community driven hub of activity for residents across St. James Town.” This infamous high-rise: home to numerous media headlines about homicides and mysterious deaths, home to survivors of a six-alarm fire back in 2010 that displaced more than twelve hundred residents for months, was also home to a successful SEA project by the STEPS Initiative. They created an impressive public art installation transforming the thirty-two-story building into a canvas that became the tallest mural in the world. The Corner’s hub-coordinator informally undertook the Collective Camera project as a valuable initiative and began to provide administrative and logistical support from hosting our meetings to providing light snacks, and coordinating communication. Around this time, other players, community members and stakeholders also came onboard to help move the initiative forward. By September, there were twelve different stakeholders at the “table”: St. James Town Community Corner; Thorncliffe Neighbourhood Office; Sherbourne Health Centre; Young Street Mission; Youth Network of St. James Town; St. James Town Youth Advisory; Jarvis Collegiate, Toronto District School Board; Service Providers Network; two college placement students; community members; and myself — all with our own reasons and agenda.
Initially, the project was envisioned as an opportunity for youth in St. James Town to be matched with students enrolled in media studies at Ryerson University to work together over an academic year. The hope was that the collaborative process twined with substantial timeframe would allow for creative ideas to emerge leading to the production of tangible multimedia outcomes. This model is reflected in the Youth Empowerment Strategies Project (Wilson et al., 2007), wherein the project was “specifically interested in the potential of youth empowerment through group-determined design and implementation of an action plan. Ideally, this process would be entirely led by the group members” (Wilson et al., 2007). Even if there were no expected creative outcomes from the process, the possibility of the social exchange alone would be greatly beneficial to all participants and stakeholders, creating a kind of social capital whereby the measure of community-level engagement would “include such indicators as the degree of sociability and solidarity among residents, the extent of reciprocal exchanges, as well as levels of trust and expectations of collective action” (Berry et al., 2007). The original focus for Ravi and me in formulating this project was to attract youth of Tamil Sri Lankan descent living in St. James Town; however, as the project moved forward and gained traction, it attracted a wider range of youth from diverse cultural backgrounds.
I was so excited about this project that as the first order of business I purchased the URL <collectivecamera.ca> then wrote up an initial paragraph and began to reach out to a handful of faculty at Ryerson University for feedback, and to see if the idea could garner support from the University. Although I had not initially thought about Collective Camera as a tool for social change, I pondered whether art is required to facilitate social change. In fact, sometimes the media project for social change may become the catalyst for increased agitation and violence in the community as witnessed by a community camera team that recalls “just when we arrived with our equipment, the violence took on new drama and intensity, and it was almost impossible to calm it down” Boehm (2004). However, In Playing with Wild Fire, author Deborah Brandt (2006) counters that in “challenging narrow definitions of art and activism, we reframe art as activism.” And, “artmaking that ignites people’s creativity, recovers repressed histories, builds community and strengthens social movements is in itself a holistic form of action” (Brandt, 2006).
At the first meeting at SJT, intended to attract potential youth to the project, there were ten stakeholders in the room and only three youth from the community. However, this did not deter the project’s progress and by the first week of December, there had been three outreach meetings in total attracting ten youth from within the community who committed to participate in the Collective Camera initiative. Moreover, at an initial working group meeting at the Corner in late October a white senior citizen from the community confronted me about feeling excluded from the Collective Camera process, and also felt discriminated against because of his age and social status. Freely expressing his frustration, he became extremely agitated and angry with me. He even accused me — a brown man — of being “privileged!” I will say here that when he accused me of being “privileged”, my back went up and I became defensive and he became dismissive. There was nothing I could do in that moment to allay his feelings of disenfranchisement. Although, I kept telling him and myself that it was not my intention to exclude him, I began to realize that he was marginalized. These are examples of how even good intentions like the Collective Camera project can result in unintended consequences in neighbourhoods. Brent Berry summarizes that “[n]eighbourhoods are extremely important social units for three reasons: they represent a major source of our social identities, they circumscribe the realm of opportunities, and they are amenable to social programs and policy intervention” (Berry et al. 2003). I feel that embedded within St. James Town are a multiplicity of stories yet to be heard and talents that may never be nurtured. My confrontation with the senior citizen did not result in an immediate solution but it certainly influences my decisions moving forward exploring creative solutions around equity, community and inclusion.
Reflecting back on Collective Camera and Helguera’s observations about the social nature of participatory practices, I also observed that regardless of the intent for social change, the relationship of the art to the context and its use are far more important than the media. Furthermore, how the community “sees” the participatory practice at times may carry more weight than the practice itself. Last October, the City of Toronto in partnership with Tourism Cares led by Toronto’s Goway Travel, organized a community cleanup day “ to spruce up community space in Toronto’s St. James Town district,” and Collective Camera was engaged to document this event.
The Tourism Cares for Our Cities program was aligned with the United Nations’ World Tourism Organization’s “recognition of city tourism as a critical force in sustainable development and livability.,” and St. James Town, was not only the first and only Canadian stop, it was also the final stop after community cleanups in US cities such as Detroit, Okland and Providence. We witnessed an army of, mostly American, volunteers in the travel industry from all over the USA descend on SJT with shovels, tools and an agenda to “clean up” or “fix” the neighbourhood. Although, this community cleanup event was in collaboration with some community residents, I felt the intent of ‘cleaning up the neighbourhood’ already biased, and that once again, outsiders entered a depressed and/or needs-based community cleaned up some garbage then left feeling good. However, my feeling were challenged when residents from the SJT community voiced their feelings of how it helped their sense of belonging and citizenship captured in this shot-video titled “a little less concrete” produced by Collective Camera. Once again, I was challenged to re-think my assumptions.
By mid-fall the CC team also grew in size, scope, and talent, which led to a wider capacity to achieve our collective goals. We had editors, filmmakers, live-streamers, hosts, musicians, technicians, and others who just wanted to learn and make stuff. Along with the invaluable assistance of Wilson Lin, and student intern Caitlyn Fernandez, CC also welcomed Illarra Riyad, Mohamed Eissa, and Yanique Stirlin as well as friends of the ‘Collective: Sultan, a live-stream blogger from the Thorncliffe neighbourhood of Toronto; Sabreen Taha, a Lebanese video journalist from Jerusalem; and other staff, volunteers and a diversity of artists, including young and old, from SJT and the greater Ryerson communities. This foundation of talent built our inaugural successful event Under The Tent: Stories from the Village, and culminated in the following outcomes: St James Town senior resident’s performance and storytelling was so compelling that the police officers from 51 division, who were present, reached out to him to begin talks about using his talents towards engaging more youth in the community and building a bridge through drumming; a pivotal face to face meeting with the Principal of Jarvis Collegiate, one of CC’s potential partners with plans to meet with the TDSB; the World Cities/World Cultures Conference (WC2) hosted by Ryerson University this August, will program Under The Tent: Stories from the Village. Collective Camera will produce the event in collaboration with the WC2 team and contributors from 10 top universities from around the world from South Africa to Russia, Mexico to Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom to the United States.
In closing, I have come to learn that, above all things, the Collective Camera project has greatly profited from the community of people and the critical creative synergies inside the TMZ, which has helped the project to potentially benefit the community of St. James Town. The process involved in producing Under The Tent: Stories from the Village helped to further define CC’s focus, refresh its objectives, and create a roadmap/work-plan to get there. All this was achieved in collaboration and in co-creation with all members — a chance to fail and re-vision or fall and get back up. The journey to here has been enlightening and has been deeply enriched by my experience as member of the TMZ.
Works cited
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