12 July—20 September 2025

EMILIA-AMALIA
Open Hearing Hotline

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.

On 2 March 2025, EMILIA-AMALIA organized “Open Hearing: Dreaming in Dark Times,” an open discussion around the future of the Toronto art ecosystem. Based on the structure of a town hall and inspired by the Art Workers Coalition’s “Open Hearing” held in New York in 1969, the event was intended to generate conversation, ideas and solutions for the wide range of problems facing our community right now. Organizing against the genocide in Gaza and recent waves of anti-Palestinian racism have had a chilling effect in the cultural world, including unjust firings, artistic and political censorship, and politically-motivated funding cuts. These ruptures have also laid bare many pre-existing and longstanding problems at the heart of our cultural structures. “Open Hearing: Dreaming in Dark Times” was a forum to discuss the future of our arts sector and what our vision of a viable, just, livable art world looks like. Nearly 40 artists and arts workers spoke at the event, and more than 200 community members were in attendance.  

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.
EMILIA-AMALIA

Public Programming

Open Hearing Listening Session

Tuesday, 15 July 2025, 6–10pm

Join us for a collective listening session where we revisit the audio recording of statements made at “Open Hearing: Dreaming in Dark Times,” held on 2 March 2025. The listening session will allow us to revisit the ideas and visions from the original event, followed by a guided conversation about how the community can activate these proposals to make a more viable, just, and livable art world for everyone.

Register

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Information

EMILIA-AMALIA is a Toronto-based feminist experimental working group founded in 2016. The group uses informal knowledge sharing and experimental writing to cultivate relationships of mentorship, collaboration and reciprocal indebtedness between generations of artists, writers, thinkers, curators and practitioners.
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Our writing and reading groups, film screenings, publications, public talks and workshops are intimate exchanges through which we centre the personal and the political in a desire to activate the undetonated potential of the past. Within our partnerships, we create space to address feminist histories that have been obscured or overlooked. Its current active members include Cecilia Berkovic, Annie MacDonell, Gabrielle Moser, Zinnia Naqvi, Joy Xiang.

Related Programs & Exhibitions

12 July—20 September 2025

groundwork
Luis Jacob, EMILIA-AMALIA, Kate Wong