Submission Deadline: February 18, 2019

Many cities, countries, and peoples, are tied together by water – by our shared experience, memory, and use of it. Cambridge Art Galleries and BRIDGE invite our local communities to contribute to this major collaborative project of community art, events, and conversations about our common waters. Common Waters will consist of a diversity of outlooks and opinions that discuss the future of community and our relationship to water.

Common Waters, the theme for this project, addresses our relationship with each other and our environment. In our increasingly divided world, we have a responsibility to actively engage with our community at home and abroad to strengthen human solidarity. From the connective banks of the Grand River to the oceans we share, we must look to each other for compassion and empathy as our identities evolve in our global world. The treaty land we live on is a chance for us to come together as a community, creating provocative conversations about how we can work together, make, learn, understand and look for solutions to the problems facing all of us in our shared world today.

Common Waters is a platform for us all to discuss the future we want, and to connect with each other through these discussions. Focused on water, these discussions are a way to talk about ways we connect in both a local and wider context.

We want to hear your voices and see your proposal for a piece of this collaborative initiative: local community members, traditional knowledge keepers, artists, designers, scientists. We are looking for submissions that challenge the boundaries of traditional exhibitions and look beyond, to new ways of thinking and talking with each other about our world and water. This may include installations, performances, conversations, workshops, art pieces, gatherings, activities, and anything else. If you have an idea, or something to say, propose it! Be ambitious, be creative, be limitless.

Guided by BRIDGE Centre for Architecture and Cambridge Art Galleries, Common Waters is looking to both the local and the wider community for ideas, enriching the discussions and focusing the series on relevant issues. Using the Design at Riverside Gallery, the BRIDGE Storefront on Main Street, and the streets of Galt, Common Waters has the potential to engage and inspire a range of community members and participants. Happening between June 17 and September 22, this activation extends past our local community, sparking discussions and a new understanding of our shared waters and our agency in the world. Common Waters is a catalyst; the first of many events that will question the nature of community and our relationship with our communal world.

In your submission, be sure to include an estimate of budget (if applicable), the skills and support you bring to the project, and how it engages the idea of community and water. On our end, we bring the expertise, financial support, and space that you need to explore your idea. We welcome all proposals, especially from Indigenous, deaf and blind, and marginalized communities. Please visit our website https://www.common-waters.com/about/to submit your ideas by February 18th at 5:00pm.

If you require assistance with your application, please do not hesitate to reach out to us. For more information, please contact us at bridge@waterlooarchitecture.com.

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS

• Title
• Contact information
• Anything about yourself that you’d like us to know
• 300 words about the idea and intention
• Please include an estimated budget and the proposed format
• Please include how the idea engages our core theme of Common Waters, however you wish to define it
• Up to 5 images or alternative media that illustrate the concept

Please upload your proposals here.

Media Contact
Karly Boileau
Gallery Assistant
Idea Exchange, Queen’s Square
1 North Square, Cambridge, ON  N1S 2K6
519.621.0460 x160
kboileau@ideaexchange.org
ideaexchange.org/art