Organized under the groundwork program, Mercer Union invites the working group EMILIA-AMALIA (Cecilia Berkovic, Annie MacDonell, Gabrielle Moser, Zinnia Naqvi, and Joy Xiang) to develop Open Hearing Hotline, a project that extends the legacies of grassroots arts organizing from the 1960s and '70s with the aim to strengthen collaboration and solidarity across existing coalitions, collectives, and art workers’ unions.
For groundwork, EMILIA-AMALIA will extend the conversations that were initiated at “Open Hearing: Dreaming in Dark Times” through a combination of follow-up community programming, new research into the arts sector in Toronto, and the presentation of the diverse and incisive statements made by participants at the March 2025 event. With the goal of developing nine concrete calls to action, aligned with the structure of the 1969 event, Open Hearing Hotline evokes the spirit of a community-driven information network, inviting visitors to listen in on a recording of the event, make and distribute pamphlets to increase the reach of the proposals that were shared, and to come together to share tactics for dreaming up more sustainable futures.
Public Programming
Open Hearing Printing and Binding Party
Thursday, 21 August 2025, 6:30–9pm
Join EMILIA AMALIA for an evening of collective printing and binding!
Taking cues from the 1969 Open Hearing in New York—in which participant statements were mimeographed to extend the reach of the event—EMILIA-AMALIA hosts a printing and binding party, inviting visitors to help print and bind the statements from the Toronto Open Hearing. With the goal of mailing these copies to the people, institutions, funding bodies and stakeholders who are addressed in the statements, the event will include a conversation about who needs to read these transcripts, as well as next steps for realizing the proposals made at the hearing. If our local institutions are listening, what do we want them to hear?
Join us to help with the printing and binding!
No experience required, and once participants are trained on the binding machine, they can make custom copies of their own, or excerpts from the groundwork library to take home.
Please contribute to the list of people, institutions, funding bodies and groups that should receive the Open Hearing transcript by adding names here.
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