Spectrum Youth Arts Archiving Project:

The Spectrum Youth Arts Archiving Project celebrates LGBTTQQ2SIA youth culture through media trainings, documenting emergent spectrum youth artists, and broadcasting their work through various cultural platforms. The main objectives of the Spectrum Youth Arts Archiving Project are to empower, document, archive and broadcast the incredible cultural and artistic talents of Toronto and Canada’s spectrum youth.

We aim to build upon the synergy of an essential moment in time within the Spectrum community of Toronto; a cultural renaissance taking place and predominantly led by queer and trans youth of color from every corner of our city. These artists works range from experimental, to formal, emergent to established and explore dance, music, drag, poetry, photography, video, alternative journalism, performance, print arts and everything in between.

The SYAAP team will assemble documentary footage from the past 5 years with studio filmed interviews with spectrum artists speaking about their lives, their experiences as LGBT folks, and about the how’s and why’s of their creative work.  This material will be produced into vignettes that will then be archived and housed in various platforms such as The People Project website, the Lesbian and Gay Archive of Canada and several partner websites. The SYAAP will also be mounted on the Egale National website with a tool for spectrum youth across Canada to upload their own videos to be added to the collection.

Each artist featured will get a professionally produced demo reel of their work and interview for their portfolio’s, will get ongoing coverage through various screenings, online galleries and in exhibitions. They will also have their work and stories recorded (by us for us) into the growing lexicon of LGBT history. 

Finally, videos will be assembled into a ‘Speaking Room’ installation. This will be a large-scale projection based installation which showcases all of the SYAAP video vignettes into a wall panel composed into a mosaic of small videos. Each vignette is held in a single quadrant in the mosaic. All vignettes will play together at the same time so all of the voices of our community are heard together like a veritable room that speaks the stories of our lives. 

You can see an example of this type of installation at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQYbME67Z5o