“People of Good Will” project opens headquarters, art space
With the help of Musagetes, arts collective Postcommodity, and the Guelph Black Heritage Society, the British Methodist Episcopal on 83 Essex Street has its sights set on becoming a new space in the flourishing art corridor of Essex Street. With Silence down the street, and the Boarding House Arts building around the corner, the church, known as Heritage Hall, is another welcomed addition to the street of artist’s havens.
To celebrate, the GBHS hosted a “feast in the street,” complete with delectable Caribbean and Ethiopian Food and African fusion beats playing through the P.A. Neighbours of all ages and backgrounds came to celebrate not only the resilience of Guelph’s diverse immigrant community, but also the resilience of artists and art programmers who have something crucially important to say and do.
Part of the afternoon’s program featured a series of short documentaries, made by people of the area’s immigrant community with support by Immigration Services Guelph-Wellington, as well as the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. These short documentaries were moving and insightful meditations on transcultural understanding, immigrant opportunity in Canada, and, more generally, the concept of “home” as both a place and an idea.
The church itself was built in 1880 and, like numerous other BME churches from Niagara Falls to Windsor, was integral to abolitionists’ efforts during the post-Civil War period. The People of Good Will project, spearheaded by Musagetes, GBHS, and Postcommodity, attempts to revisit the Southern Ontario abolitionist narrative by way of a long-term, multimedia installation that “seeks to re-imagine the Underground Railroad narrative as a living history and metaphor of cultural self-determination for all culturally diverse peoples living in Guelph,” as stated on the Musagetes website.
Educator and community programmer Marva Wisdom spoke to me about the GBHS’ acquisition of the church, and the Heritage Society’s goals.
“There is an actual national body called BME Canada, and that church traditionally was a church that was associated with the Underground Railroad. So, all the way through Southwestern Ontario, so St. Catherine’s, Niagara Falls, Brantford, coming all the way down to Windsor, there are a number of these churches dotted, all along,”explained Wisdom. “Although this was not a terminus, an underground [railroad] terminus, it is certainly is associated with that history, and it was built based on that safety that was needed for people who were looking for safe space. So, that’s really the history of the BME church, and we couldn’t let it get into commercial or other hands. We needed to make sure its history was being retained.”
Postcommodity, composed of members Raven Chacon, Kade L. Twist, Nathan Young, and Cristóbal Martinez (who is currently in Africa), are a Native artist collective based in New Mexico, whose work takes a transdisciplinary approach with social praxis at the heart of it. They took a moment to talk about their involvement in the People of Good Will project.
Raven Chacon: “We were invited by Musagetes, the organization here in Guelph, to do a project. And so, we came out to do a site visit and started developing this video game called Game Remains, which was another socially collaborative piece in which we input the city data from Guelph City Planning into this video game to use it as a musical instrument [. . .] We were thinking more, as we were analyzing that city data, realizing there was a large immigrant population here in Guelph, and led us to interview with Immigrant Services who told us there was also a community of artists within this immigrant – new immigrant and old immigrant – community.”
Kade L. Twist: “All of us are educators, all of us have worked a lot in communities, we all have professional backgrounds that require us to engage communities, to build consensus, and to formulate a scope of work that will act out that community’s will, whether it’s through video, filmmaking, music education, or technology education. In my case, it’s public policy. I am a public policy professional. So, we bring that, we have it in us, and it comes out in our work. It’s part of our voice. And I think it’s much more feasible to do something like that as a collective than it is individually, because it’s a deliberative process with decision making and ideas, and we’re able, working as a group, to get a much fuller, more dynamic picture that we can bring to the table [to] work from and map out. It also helps us bring that into communities.”
All around, the feast was a great opportunity for the community to get more familiar with the GBHS, Postcommodity, and Musagetes, as well as gaining a valuable preview of the People of Good Will project’s initiatives and plans. Considering Postcommodity’s past work with Musagetes, it should be a sight to behold when completed.