2008 North of Nowhere Expo

If you don't DIY, no one else will

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If your spirit has fallen with the arrival of autumn, been hectored by electors or simply been mauled by malls, the North of Nowhere Expo of multidisciplinary, independent media and underground art may be just what you need to re-ignite your grey matter over grave matters.

“It’s a festival of underground media and independent art,” says NoN Expo Producer, Artistic Director and Programmer Lynette Bondarchuk, better known as PostMistress Lyn X. “It’s about showcasing underrepresented, not necessarily art forms, but things we think aren’t getting covered enough in the mainstream media, the logic being, well, if we’re interested in these things, we’re pretty sure there’s going to be other people interested, too.”

Some of those under-covered materials include zines, and documentaries from the Israel/Palestine conflict film Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land, to Unrepentant, a controversial exploration of clergy collaboration with government cultural genocide against Aboriginal Canadians.

Founded in 2003 and named by the late film director Helen Folkmann, the NoN Expo is the most public outlet for the Edmonton Small Press Association, currently celebrating its 10th year in operation. Despite its small-town name and its origins in DIY comics, the left-leaning registered non-profit ESPA is driven by a mandate for social progress. The NoN Expo employs all of the ESPA’s tools of print, electronic and visual media, combining them into a gathering with workshops in skill-sharing and discussions of critical issues.

Above all, says Lyn X, the NoN Expo is about more than educating people, but about spurring them to action. Despite being in the conservative “Texas of the north,” she says she’s also “smack-dab in the middle of the arts community and the activist community. So [the Expo] is bridging the gap between those two communities that currently don’t really work together. Things are starting to change, though, so that’s good. And having people more engaged, as opposed to just being audience members ... it’s really about active participation.”

The notion of DIY, a thematic mainstay of the festival over the years, is generally misunderstood, says Lyn X.

“We have people who come to us and say, ‘Do you have any zines about X-topic?’ If we say no, they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s crappy. I’ve been really wanting to find a zine on that.’ Then do it yourself! And if not, then the issue will die with you. If we want to see films that we’re just not seeing anywhere else, for whatever reason, then we’ll just bring them in ourselves.”

Such initiative and non-profit entrepreneurial spirit might surprise people who’ve accepted the right-wing appropriation of the phrase “personal responsibility.” But as Lyn X argues, “Most activism is about [personal responsibility]. It’s active citizenship. It’s people participating in the process [and] democracy. Conservatives are a joke to me, because everything they do and everything the say are complete opposites. They talk about socialism and social welfare and all this stuff, but who are the first people to be bailed out [of the current economic crisis]? Who are the multi-billion dollar organizations that are getting subsidies, but there’s no money for a sustainable energy start-up?”

Distancing herself from traditional Marxist “commies” when she discusses socialism, she explains that to her, the S-word “is about community. People working together and supporting each other.”

The NoN Expo runs the last half of October, with events including MEDIAtion: ESPA’s 10th Anniversary Retrospective AgitProp Exhibit, the Stand Up/Take Action NGO fair against poverty, the Michael Shuman lecture on the “Small-Mart Revolution” (see prevue on page 6), the addictions play Shattering, the film acclaimed agri-doc The Real Dirt on Farmer John and the Black Cat Ball on Halloween night featuring the Kubasonics. V

Fri, Oct 17 - Fri, Oct 31

2008 North of Nowhere Expo

Various locations in Edmonton

780.434.9236

edmontonsmallpress.ca/nonexpo.html

2008 North of Nowhere Expo

If you don't DIY, no one else will

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