Playing Masquerade: Parading Radical Participation (Workshop)
This event offers multiple portions; please register for each portion individually:
- Presentations: 1:30 PM - 3:00 PM
- Workshop + Parade: 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM (this current page)
Participants are welcome to attend either portion independently, though attending both is encouraged as the talks directly inform the collaborative workshop and parade experience.
Please note that workshop capacity is limited. The workshop portion will conclude with a celebratory parade around the OCAD University campus - attendees are encouraged to stay and join the parade, even if they are unable to register for the workshop.
The Global Centre for Climate Action Presents
BMO Climate Action Speaker Series
Playing Masquerade: Parading Radical Participation
Featuring:
Michael Lee Poy, OCAD University
Leesa Hamilton, NSCAD University
Monica Polo, Toronto Metropolitan University / mpolo designs inc.
What if climate action felt like a parade: creative, collective, and impossible to ignore?
Well, it can! Playing Masquerade is a climate gathering that transforms conversation into costume and collective anxiety into collective action. Part presentation, part workshop, part parade – we invite participants to imagine new forms of climate intervention through art, movement, and radical participation.
Rooted in the ecologies surrounding OCAD University’s campus, we are drawing inspiration from OCAD University’s pollinator garden, Toronto’s native pollinators, and migratory species to reimagine public spaces and participation as sites of collective gathering and climate imagination.
The afternoon begins with a series of presentations exploring participatory design, collective expression, and creative climate interventions, before inviting participants to become part of the experience themselves. We will then transition into a collaborative costume-making workshop using reused, recycled, and upcycled materials to create masks, costumes, and wearable interventions for the parade to follow.
The event culminates in a celebratory sidewalk parade around the OCAD University campus accompanied by music – reclaiming public space for visibility, climate imagination, and radical public participation.
Come join us! Come participate! Come play masquerade!
Open to everyone and all ages. No prior experience necessary. Participants are encouraged to bring hats, reusable materials, and empty plastic bottles or containers that can be incorporated into their costumes, decorated during the workshop, or transformed into handheld noisemakers for the parade.
Generously supported by BMO.
About the Host:
The Global Centre for Climate Action (GCCA) is a research centre at OCAD University that draws on creative vision, sustainable design, and artistic practice to imagine new approaches to sustainability, climate justice, and decolonization.
We are a vibrant community of artists, designers, and scholars building cultural communities, creating arts projects, curating exhibitions, supporting creative action and research, and cultivating a global network for creative climate justice.
Our work is committed to fostering regenerative relationships between people and land and to Indigenous knowledge on sustainability. We are committed to a decolonial, social justice framework that highlights both the origins of ecological crisis and the disproportionate impacts on Indigenous and marginalized communities.
Event graphics by: Patricia Robin Wisniewski
Attendees consent to the following: I understand when I attend an event I enter an area where photography, audio, and video recording may occur. By entering the event premises, I consent to such recording media and its release, publication, exhibition or reproduction.