Nocturne 2022: LEGACIES

Earlier this month we announced our curators in residence, Stephanie Yee and Lux Habrich, who will bring our 15th anniversary festival to life. Today we announce their festival theme, LEGACIES, which will inform the entire festival program from Anchor Projects, to Beacon Projects, to Community Groups and Galleries along with everything in-between.

LEGACIES

Reflecting on our legacies is a way of honouring our traditions, whilst being accountable to the ways that they may no longer serve us or our future generations.

What do we leave behind when our time in a space comes to a close? What have we inherited? What do we pass on to those who remain or have yet to come? Our legacies can span personal, collective, global and ecological realities. It can be planned and meticulously built up over decades or communicated unconsciously in a passing utterance. It could be documented in history books, passed along through spoken word, or live simply as a memory replayed in a loved one’s head.

Navigating the stops and starts, the closings and re-openings, living through this pandemic has meant moving through multiple waves of uncertainty, loss and coping. The consistent thread throughout this rupture has been our need for imagination, creativity, and connection. It is through these modes that we find meaning in everyday moments to string together the stories that move us forward.

Coinciding with Nocturne’s 15th year anniversary, the theme of LEGACIES reflects on how artists have reimagined and activated our city over the years. Continuing in this spirit, we invite artists and the public alike to consider the lasting intergenerational and intercultural legacies that have and continue to shape the depths of their interior and exterior lives. By supporting each other’s resilience and interdependence through these practices, we offer sustainable seeds for change and adaptable tactics for our collective survival.

In the wake of this upheaval, processing what got us through this period of time, we look to the work of artists. By drawing connections between the emotional, natural, virtual and physical, artists ultimately respond to the complex experience of existing in this world - the experience of being human. This year Nocturne will highlight the questioning, play and process of makers to acknowledge the embodied bonds that have been eroded by structures and systems of power that have isolated us in our struggles.

LEGACIES is an invitation for all to explore their interpersonal and environmental surroundings. It is an invitation to slow down with what is present and sit with all that got us here, so we can move towards compassionate futures and communities embedded in mutual care. It is an invitation to discover other ways of being and seeing. It is an invitation for us all to recognize the roles we play in creating, participating and upholding culture. Art can provide an immediate source of coping, but it also nurtures our ability to engage in a world with more comfort, dignity, ease and joy. And while the city’s transformation during the festival only exists for a limited time, it in itself will be a reminder that it is not permanence that makes a lasting impact - but instead, the space and time we take to gather, envision and create.

Later this week we will release our 15th annual Call for Beacon Projects where artists can apply for funding from Nocturne with projects connected to the theme of LEGACIES. Artists inspired to connect with this theme are also invited to attend a series of information sessions which will take place over the next month. Watch for more details on that this week!