Established in 2018, Sourdough is powered by Artengine and managed by Mariam Zohouri, Remco Volmer and Zainab Muse.
The Sourdough Residency Program is a paid incubator for creative exploration and peer-learning around themes of shared urgencies in society, in order to re-imagine a more inclusive future from an artistic point of view. Each program cycle invites initiatives led by historically marginalized artists.
Sourdough acknowledges that its main operations take place on the traditional, unceded and unsurrendered territories of the Algonquin Anishinabe Nation whose presence here reaches back to time immemorial.
We encourage you to take time to learn about the lands you occupy, and explore this Indigenous Ally Toolkit by the Montreal Urban Aboriginal Community Strategy Network.
Disrupt habitual methods of art practice.
Clarify the mission of art initiatives.
Foster a sense of solidarity.
BAKING BREAD: WEEKLY SESSIONS
Artengine’s space was made available to residents to work on their projects, engage with our sessions to gain insights from speakers, gather with their peers to dialogue, and participate in short, crafty collaborative exercises.
Eschewing the colonial hierarchical model of speaker/expert and listener, our conversations were rooted in co-creation, where everyone’s unique, valuable perspectives were shared and honoured as equals. Together, we critically explored concepts that would positively transform our residents’ mindsets as artistic practitioners.
SOLO WORK: DAILY SESSIONS
Outside of the weekly sessions, Artengine’s studio space and materials-based resources were offered for the cohort to practice, create and experiment on their initiatives. Residents enjoyed open access to Artengine throughout the program to do this work on their own time, and to collaborate with fellow participants. Suggested reading/viewing was provided to compliment their work.
BAKED! PUBLIC PRESENTATIONS
Instead of a traditional, one-way public presentation, our residents got to decide the format in which they want to share their work with their community – with continued access to Artengine’s space and resources to plan and create in order to bring this to life.
Abdul Muse (KAR33M) he/him
Abdul Muse is an award-winning entrepreneur and singer/songwriter. He is the founder of Woke Studios; an artistic residency for Afro-diverse emerging artists to find support for their debut work. With his resolute mission to support emerging creatives, he has been recognized by the media and continues to form partnerships with leading community organizations in Ottawa.
As an award-winning Afro-soul artist famously known as KAR33M, he creates narrative-style music to provide a unique perspective into the African diaspora. His project focuses on how to build alternative blueprints for success for afro-diverse genre artists within the music industry, while uncovering resources to guide their path.
Jennifer A. Quintanilla (she/her)
Jennifer is a Salvadoran-American New York native who has been calling Canada her home over the past few years. Across both countries, she has worked with a range of arts and culture programs, non-profits, festivals, and social enterprises, passionately fostering community connection through mission-driven programming & curation. Jennifer holds an M.A. in Film and Media Studies from Concordia University.
In addition, she recently earned an Arts in Medicine Graduate Certificate from the University of Florida. Her experience there led her down the path of developing a creative wellness initiative. Her project centres on how film can serve as an outlet and tool to unearth possible solutions for mental and emotional health & well-being.
Mikayla Gordon (Seiiizi) she/her
Born and raised in Ottawa, Seiiizi is a self taught Emcee, DJ and Producer with artistic roots in Hip-Hop and reggae. Since 2015 Seiiizi has been creating spaces for creatives to learn and showcase their talents. Seiiizi strives to build the urban arts community, while fusing her own unique twists on tracks and mixes.
Her project focuses on supporting multimedia immersive showcases of emerging artists in the Ottawa region, while connecting them with new audiences.
Throughout our Residency Program, we came together once a week for a six-hour long session, where we learned, played and journeyed together through themes that would help us challenge the status quo and re-imagine a more inclusive future from an artistic point of view.
BREAKING BREAD
WEEK 1
Our first session was critical to setting the tone for our program. We wanted to help our residents build trust with us and among each other so they would be comfortable actively participating in our exploratory and experimental sessions, where they would gain clarity on their initiatives and foster new ways of thinking to strengthen them.
In the spirit of co-creation, we shared tentative themes for the program, gauging residents’ interest and gaining insight on other subjects and questions that interest them.
To build trust, we had solo and group activities, highlighting both self-direction and collaboration – key to building impactful initiatives that engage the communities our residents seek to serve.
We also wanted to instil the values of our program with our residents: to shift mindsets with the goal of driving community (and, in turn, societal) change.
So, after spending a few hours getting comfortable with one another through play and a shared meal, we started an open discussion.
Together, we unearthed the narratives/stories our residents may unconsciously believe – narratives that can be limiting, or positive.
A typical example in the traditional world of art is: To be a successful visual artist, your work must be shown at a respected gallery/museum.
By shifting their mindsets to the abstract, we sought to bring our residents outside of these narrow goals, and into a realm of greater possibility and impact where cross-disciplinary collaboration and speculative imagining exist.
So we asked:
1. If an artist/director/musician could direct/write the score for/etc. your life, who would it be? What would that story/song be?
2. Compare this to the expectations projected on you by society. How do they differ from your own personal story?
3. How does this affect your outlook and what you feel you can express as an artist + how you work?
ENTANGLEMENTS
WEEK 2
We wanted to get our residents outside of their creative disciplines, opening them up to the richer world of mixed discipline/anti-disciplinary experimentation.
By seeking collaboration beyond their siloes, artists can create space for imagining speculative futures not limited by the systemic and oppressive structures that exist in our present day.
As always, our intention is to tie it back to their initiatives. To clarify their goals, we asked residents: What pain are you relieving? What joy are you creating?
To broaden our thinking, we welcomed a speaker familiar with this speculative, experimental space: Dorothée Dupuis, Director and Founder of Terremoto.
You need to help yourself in order to help others. Find the balance to change the system.
As an organization that is always evolving with the changing socio-political landscape, Dorothée’s advice resonated with our residents, historically-marginalized artists committed to supporting their communities: “You need to help yourself in order to help others. Find the balance to change the system. Act strong when you have a lot of energy, and rest when you need it.”
NON-HYPERBOLIC DISCOUNTING
WEEK 3
Our Residency Program is all about shifting mindsets. That, inevitably, includes money, resources and sustainability – especially for historically-marginalized artists, who often come from precarious socio-economic backgrounds. Our intention with this session was to help them understand how, on a very practical level, they can keep their initiatives afloat.
We didn’t take the importance of this subject lightly. Our residents are artists who are creating in a system that wasn’t built for them. To go beyond survival to build an initiative that is sustainable throughout – and whose impact, in turn, can meaningfully support their communities long-term – we couldn’t ignore their financing.
Instead of pushing our residents to adopt the status quo, we examined what it is that gives primary funding institutions economic power, and how we can use this knowledge to develop alternate models truly built to serve historically marginalized communities.
This conversation was among our most interesting. We explored alternative funding models, such as decentralized money sharing among organizations and collectives, vs. top-down hierarchies that only offer a fraction of their funding to the creatives they support – thus imposing a sense of ownership on participants that incentivizes them to seek out funding in a more meaningful way.
To help our residents adopt this exploratory mindset, we connected them with their mentors: professional artists from around the world whose initiatives model similar goals to those of our residents. We are pleased to share that, at the time of this report’s publication, each of these leaders continued their relationships supporting our residents beyond our program.
Our mentors were:
SMADE (Adesegun Adeosun Jr), Co-Founder of Afronation, Founder of SMADE Group
SMADE’S work founding and leading the operations of SMADE Entertainment and Afronation created a powerful platform for artists from the African diaspora to share their work, celebrate their roots, and connect with their communities – giving musical talent from the continent more chances to headline large scale events.
Cary McQueen, Founder and Executive Director of Art With Impact
Cary’s focus on art as a tool to empower people to address their mental health has made Art With Impact an impactful arts-based mental health resource serving thousands of students each year at colleges and universities throughout the U.S. and Canada and housing the most diverse library of short films about mental health issues in the world.
Cat Lamoureux, composer, musician, and member of susy.technology
Cat’s work spans the converging spheres of music, digital art, performance, immersive sound, video and installation, allowing technology to serve as a tool for complex and profound communication. Through these interdisciplinary tools, she explores how immersive and spatial sound connect to neurodiversity, somatics, trauma and pedagogy.
PROJECT HEISENBERG
WEEK 4
The focus of this session was space. How do we define space? Does it have to be a physical environment or can it be digital?
Our goal here was to challenge contemporary art spaces, which impose an inside/outside: if your art is being shown in this reputable gallery, then you are an artist, because you have entered the artist’s space. If your art is outside of this space, you are an outsider to this community, to this craft.
Instead, we wanted to encourage our residents to view space as something that is fluid, that is not static, and that does not need to be grounded in one place or way.
To begin this exploration, we asked our residents to reflect on their own initiatives. How were they defining the spaces through which their audiences connected with them?
Big change starts with little steps.
Because these initiatives are dedicated to serving historically marginalized communities, this activity helped our residents identify new and alternative paths to engage with them, ones that would offer an environment that is more accessible, welcoming and empowering for their audience (who may not feel welcome in traditional art spaces not built for them).
It was with this in mind that we welcomed our speaker, Aja Wiley, Global Lead at Free The Work. As a global community of underrepresented creators, Free The Work is consistently navigating spaces that weren’t built for their clients.
It’s in challenging the perceived limits of the spaces – i.e. the experience and network someone “needs” to work on a film or commercial set – that they support and create opportunities for diverse artists.
Throughout our conversation with Aja, she reinforced the importance of your collaborators in bringing your vision to life, especially when it’s one that goes against the status quo: You can’t do it all at once. Big change starts with little steps. It’s by staying consistent, instead of leaping to huge bounds, that we can make a difference.
SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS
WEEK 5
As a program with a focus on the intersection of art and society, we offered social consciousness as a theme to our residents to explore and challenge their mindsets around environmentalism, sustainability and community engagement with regards to their art initiatives.
Thus, how are they truly and deeply thinking about the environment in which their initiative is to exist, and the communities in which their initiative is to serve?
Social consciousness is a collaboration between art, society and communities, and how they work to create sustainability.
As a result we structured this session in three parts:
A speaker presentation from Ela Spalding of Estudio Nuboso, an art and ecology organization with a vision to restore the relationship between humans and nature, as part of the global movement that seeks to create greater harmony and reciprocity with the planet.
A speculations and scenario-building exercise where three scenarios were offered to the residents and they were encouraged to imagine possible solutions for their art initiatives to exist and remain sustainable in the event of each scenario.
These scenarios include:
i) Five years from now if the Conservative government were to come into power and perhaps arts funding is cut severely or almost completely. What do you do and how does your initiative go forward and possibly thrive?
ii) Five years from now if things become highly localized due to travel being cut down and so this diminishes and defines your talent pool and audience pool. What do you do and how does your initiative go forward and possibly thrive?
iii) Five years from now if you stayed on the same path, or if you radically shifted and if money were no object. What do you do and how does your initiative go forward and possibly thrive?
A play session with Instant Archetypes to foster collaboration, and continued speculative imagination.
Overall the outcome from this fifth session of the residency program was to build on mindsets around the interconnectedness of art and the environment, while advocating for collaboration, and the exploration of how an artistic lens can be used to address urgencies in society.
WEB3
WEEK 6
Discussions about Web3 and the advent of the new internet is an inevitability in 2022, and so, for this final group session, we focused the theme on NFTs and Web3.
The session began with a group round-table about overall reflections from the program, as well as the mindset shifts that have happened for each resident with the progress of the program.
Then, Eliza Fish of Voice.com spoke to the art residents about how the metaverse, and NFTs will impact art making in the future. This sparked ethical questions from the group about the intersection of art and technology, and the artist’s role to adapt in this ever expanding technological landscape.
Voice.com is New-York based, and it is composed of a team of technologists, artists and curators using the transformative power of NFTs to make digital art collectable. Their mission is to empower artists from all walks of life to build sustainable art practices by using the power of blockchain technology.
Following this conversation with Eliza, the residents continued their reflections about the impact of the Sourdough residency program:
Abdul: “Sourdough helped me to realize that my art initiative may benefit from a Partnership with a parent company to tap into funding required to support the art collective that I manage.”
Jennifer: “Sourdough helped me expand the possibilities of my art initiative and to identify the kinds of film we will work with, and the community partners we wish to collaborate with.
Mikayla: “Sourdough helped me clarify the groups of artists I hope to support through my art initiative, and the specific ways to support them.”
To conclude the weekly sessions of Sourdough, we once again enjoyed a shared meal as a group.
What began as community consultations to validate our program quickly became a study that supported community co-creation and community decision making. We immediately realised that we couldn’t have built Sourdough in a vacuum, especially with its anti-institutional and decolonization ambitions.
What we needed was collectivism.
While we can’t point to one thing and call it The System, the myriads of them – intrinsically linked or scattered as they may be – serve people and institutions that reflect the status quo. If you, either through your identity, activities, or beliefs, fall outside that mainstream, you will struggle to succeed. That’s why one of the key tenets of our Residency Program is to foster a sense of solidarity amongst our participants
The Sourdough Residency Program is a paid incubator for creative exploration and peer-learning around themes of shared urgencies in society, in order to re-imagine a more inclusive future from an artistic point of view. Each program cycle invites initiatives led by historically marginalized artists.
Sourdough acknowledges that its main operations take place on the traditional, unceded and unsurrendered territories of the Algonquin Anishinabe Nation whose presence here reaches back to time immemorial.
We encourage you to take time to learn about the lands you occupy, and explore this Indigenous Ally Toolkit by the Montreal Urban Aboriginal Community Strategy Network.
Disrupt habitual methods of art practice.
Clarify the mission of art initiatives.
Foster a sense of solidarity.
Artengine’s space was made available to residents to work on their projects, engage with our sessions to gain insights from speakers, gather with their peers to dialogue, and participate in short, crafty collaborative exercises.
Eschewing the colonial hierarchical model of speaker/expert and listener, our conversations were rooted in co-creation, where everyone’s unique, valuable perspectives were shared and honoured as equals. Together, we critically explored concepts that would positively transform our residents’ mindsets as artistic practitioners.
Outside of the weekly sessions, Artengine’s studio space and materials-based resources were offered for the cohort to practice, create and experiment on their initiatives. Residents enjoyed open access to Artengine throughout the program to do this work on their own time, and to collaborate with fellow participants. Suggested reading/viewing was provided to compliment their work.
Instead of a traditional, one-way public presentation, our residents got to decide the format in which they want to share their work with their community – with continued access to Artengine’s space and resources to plan and create in order to bring this to life.
Abdul Muse (KAR33M) he/him
Abdul Muse is an award-winning entrepreneur and singer/songwriter. He is the founder of Woke Studios; an artistic residency for Afro-diverse emerging artists to find support for their debut work. With his resolute mission to support emerging creatives, he has been recognized by the media and continues to form partnerships with leading community organizations in Ottawa.
As an award-winning Afro-soul artist famously known as KAR33M, he creates narrative-style music to provide a unique perspective into the African diaspora. His project focuses on how to build alternative blueprints for success for afro-diverse genre artists within the music industry, while uncovering resources to guide their path.
Jennifer A. Quintanilla (she/her)
Jennifer is a Salvadoran-American New York native who has been calling Canada her home over the past few years. Across both countries, she has worked with a range of arts and culture programs, non-profits, festivals, and social enterprises, passionately fostering community connection through mission-driven programming & curation. Jennifer holds an M.A. in Film and Media Studies from Concordia University.
In addition, she recently earned an Arts in Medicine Graduate Certificate from the University of Florida. Her experience there led her down the path of developing a creative wellness initiative. Her project centres on how film can serve as an outlet and tool to unearth possible solutions for mental and emotional health & well-being.
Mikayla Gordon (Seiiizi) she/her
Born and raised in Ottawa, Seiiizi is a self taught Emcee, DJ and Producer with artistic roots in Hip-Hop and reggae. Since 2015 Seiiizi has been creating spaces for creatives to learn and showcase their talents. Seiiizi strives to build the urban arts community, while fusing her own unique twists on tracks and mixes.
Her project focuses on supporting multimedia immersive showcases of emerging artists in the Ottawa region, while connecting them with new audiences.
Throughout our Residency Program, we came together once a week for a six-hour long session, where we learned, played and journeyed together through themes that would help us challenge the status quo and re-imagine a more inclusive future from an artistic point of view.
BREAKING BREAD
Our first session was critical to setting the tone for our program. We wanted to help our residents build trust with us and among each other so they would be comfortable actively participating in our exploratory and experimental sessions, where they would gain clarity on their initiatives and foster new ways of thinking to strengthen them.
In the spirit of co-creation, we shared tentative themes for the program, gauging residents’ interest and gaining insight on other subjects and questions that interest them.
To build trust, we had solo and group activities, highlighting both self-direction and collaboration – key to building impactful initiatives that engage the communities our residents seek to serve.
We also wanted to instil the values of our program with our residents: to shift mindsets with the goal of driving community (and, in turn, societal) change.
So, after spending a few hours getting comfortable with one another through play and a shared meal, we started an open discussion.
Together, we unearthed the narratives/stories our residents may unconsciously believe – narratives that can be limiting, or positive.
A typical example in the traditional world of art is: To be a successful visual artist, your work must be shown at a respected gallery/museum.
By shifting their mindsets to the abstract, we sought to bring our residents outside of these narrow goals, and into a realm of greater possibility and impact where cross-disciplinary collaboration and speculative imagining exist.
So we asked:
1. If an artist/director/musician could direct/write the score for/etc. your life, who would it be? What would that story/song be?
2. Compare this to the expectations projected on you by society. How do they differ from your own personal story?
3. How does this affect your outlook and what you feel you can express as an artist + how you work?
ENTANGLEMENTS
We wanted to get our residents outside of their creative disciplines, opening them up to the richer world of mixed discipline/anti-disciplinary experimentation.
By seeking collaboration beyond their siloes, artists can create space for imagining speculative futures not limited by the systemic and oppressive structures that exist in our present day.
As always, our intention is to tie it back to their initiatives. To clarify their goals, we asked residents: What pain are you relieving? What joy are you creating?
To broaden our thinking, we welcomed a speaker familiar with this speculative, experimental space: Dorothée Dupuis, Director and Founder of Terremoto.
You need to help yourself in order to help others. Find the balance to change the system.
As an organization that is always evolving with the changing socio-political landscape, Dorothée’s advice resonated with our residents, historically-marginalized artists committed to supporting their communities: “You need to help yourself in order to help others. Find the balance to change the system. Act strong when you have a lot of energy, and rest when you need it.”
NON-HYPERBOLIC DISCOUNTING
Our Residency Program is all about shifting mindsets. That, inevitably, includes money, resources and sustainability – especially for historically-marginalized artists, who often come from precarious socio-economic backgrounds. Our intention with this session was to help them understand how, on a very practical level, they can keep their initiatives afloat.
We didn’t take the importance of this subject lightly. Our residents are artists who are creating in a system that wasn’t built for them. To go beyond survival to build an initiative that is sustainable throughout – and whose impact, in turn, can meaningfully support their communities long-term – we couldn’t ignore their financing.
Instead of pushing our residents to adopt the status quo, we examined what it is that gives primary funding institutions economic power, and how we can use this knowledge to develop alternate models truly built to serve historically marginalized communities.
This conversation was among our most interesting. We explored alternative funding models, such as decentralized money sharing among organizations and collectives, vs. top-down hierarchies that only offer a fraction of their funding to the creatives they support – thus imposing a sense of ownership on participants that incentivizes them to seek out funding in a more meaningful way.
To help our residents adopt this exploratory mindset, we connected them with their mentors: professional artists from around the world whose initiatives model similar goals to those of our residents. We are pleased to share that, at the time of this report’s publication, each of these leaders continued their relationships supporting our residents beyond our program.
Our mentors were:
SMADE (Adesegun Adeosun Jr), Co-Founder of Afronation, Founder of SMADE Group
SMADE’S work founding and leading the operations of SMADE Entertainment and Afronation created a powerful platform for artists from the African diaspora to share their work, celebrate their roots, and connect with their communities – giving musical talent from the continent more chances to headline large scale events.
Cary McQueen, Founder and Executive Director of Art With Impact
Cary’s focus on art as a tool to empower people to address their mental health has made Art With Impact an impactful arts-based mental health resource serving thousands of students each year at colleges and universities throughout the U.S. and Canada and housing the most diverse library of short films about mental health issues in the world.
Cat Lamoureux, composer, musician, and member of susy.technology
Cat’s work spans the converging spheres of music, digital art, performance, immersive sound, video and installation, allowing technology to serve as a tool for complex and profound communication. Through these interdisciplinary tools, she explores how immersive and spatial sound connect to neurodiversity, somatics, trauma and pedagogy.
PROJECT HEISENBERG
The focus of this session was space. How do we define space? Does it have to be a physical environment or can it be digital?
Our goal here was to challenge contemporary art spaces, which impose an inside/outside: if your art is being shown in this reputable gallery, then you are an artist, because you have entered the artist’s space. If your art is outside of this space, you are an outsider to this community, to this craft.
Instead, we wanted to encourage our residents to view space as something that is fluid, that is not static, and that does not need to be grounded in one place or way.
To begin this exploration, we asked our residents to reflect on their own initiatives. How were they defining the spaces through which their audiences connected with them?
Big change starts with little steps.
Because these initiatives are dedicated to serving historically marginalized communities, this activity helped our residents identify new and alternative paths to engage with them, ones that would offer an environment that is more accessible, welcoming and empowering for their audience (who may not feel welcome in traditional art spaces not built for them).
It was with this in mind that we welcomed our speaker, Aja Wiley, Global Lead at Free The Work. As a global community of underrepresented creators, Free The Work is consistently navigating spaces that weren’t built for their clients.
It’s in challenging the perceived limits of the spaces – i.e. the experience and network someone “needs” to work on a film or commercial set – that they support and create opportunities for diverse artists.
Throughout our conversation with Aja, she reinforced the importance of your collaborators in bringing your vision to life, especially when it’s one that goes against the status quo: You can’t do it all at once. Big change starts with little steps. It’s by staying consistent, instead of leaping to huge bounds, that we can make a difference.
SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS
As a program with a focus on the intersection of art and society, we offered social consciousness as a theme to our residents to explore and challenge their mindsets around environmentalism, sustainability and community engagement with regards to their art initiatives.
Thus, how are they truly and deeply thinking about the environment in which their initiative is to exist, and the communities in which their initiative is to serve?
Social consciousness is a collaboration between art, society and communities, and how they work to create sustainability.
As a result we structured this session in three parts:
A speaker presentation from Ela Spalding of Estudio Nuboso, an art and ecology organization with a vision to restore the relationship between humans and nature, as part of the global movement that seeks to create greater harmony and reciprocity with the planet.
A speculations and scenario-building exercise where three scenarios were offered to the residents and they were encouraged to imagine possible solutions for their art initiatives to exist and remain sustainable in the event of each scenario.
These scenarios include:
i) Five years from now if the Conservative government were to come into power and perhaps arts funding is cut severely or almost completely. What do you do and how does your initiative go forward and possibly thrive?
ii) Five years from now if things become highly localized due to travel being cut down and so this diminishes and defines your talent pool and audience pool. What do you do and how does your initiative go forward and possibly thrive?
iii) Five years from now if you stayed on the same path, or if you radically shifted and if money were no object. What do you do and how does your initiative go forward and possibly thrive?
A play session with Instant Archetypes to foster collaboration, and continued speculative imagination.
Overall the outcome from this fifth session of the residency program was to build on mindsets around the interconnectedness of art and the environment, while advocating for collaboration, and the exploration of how an artistic lens can be used to address urgencies in society.
WEB3
Discussions about Web3 and the advent of the new internet is an inevitability in 2022, and so, for this final group session, we focused the theme on NFTs and Web3.
The session began with a group round-table about overall reflections from the program, as well as the mindset shifts that have happened for each resident with the progress of the program.
Then, Eliza Fish of Voice.com spoke to the art residents about how the metaverse, and NFTs will impact art making in the future. This sparked ethical questions from the group about the intersection of art and technology, and the artist’s role to adapt in this ever expanding technological landscape.
Voice.com is New-York based, and it is composed of a team of technologists, artists and curators using the transformative power of NFTs to make digital art collectable. Their mission is to empower artists from all walks of life to build sustainable art practices by using the power of blockchain technology.
Following this conversation with Eliza, the residents continued their reflections about the impact of the Sourdough residency program:
Abdul: “Sourdough helped me to realize that my art initiative may benefit from a Partnership with a parent company to tap into funding required to support the art collective that I manage.”
Jennifer: “Sourdough helped me expand the possibilities of my art initiative and to identify the kinds of film we will work with, and the community partners we wish to collaborate with.
Mikayla: “Sourdough helped me clarify the groups of artists I hope to support through my art initiative, and the specific ways to support them.”
To conclude the weekly sessions of Sourdough, we once again enjoyed a shared meal as a group.
What began as community consultations to validate our program quickly became a study that supported community co-creation and community decision making. We immediately realised that we couldn’t have built Sourdough in a vacuum, especially with its anti-institutional and decolonization ambitions.
What we needed was collectivism.
While we can’t point to one thing and call it The System, the myriads of them – intrinsically linked or scattered as they may be – serve people and institutions that reflect the status quo. If you, either through your identity, activities, or beliefs, fall outside that mainstream, you will struggle to succeed. That’s why one of the key tenets of our Residency Program is to foster a sense of solidarity amongst our participants
