World Hope Forum Canada
For the first time, the World Hope Forum will span the vast Canadian terrain of creativity from east to west, bringing to light big and small stories of hope. From socially engaged entrepreneurship and exchange to the use of local materials, the development of an open design archive, and co-creative textile partnerships beyond its borders, a lineup of creative makers and thinkers will take us on an inspirational journey.
Curated by Cynthia Hathaway
PROGRAMME
Welcome by Lidewij Edelkoort & Philip Fimmano
Cynthia Hathaway, WHF ambassador for Canada
Zita Cobb, Keynote speaker, Founder & CEO Shorefast, Innkeeper Fogo Island Inn
Wave Weir, Designer, Wool Mill Owner & Operator
Swapnaa Tamhane, Artist, Writer, and Curator
Paul Klein, Founder Impakt
Bill Burns, Artist & Conservationist
Sarah Roseman, Artist
Todd Falkowsky, Founder Citizen Brand
Bradley Wursten, Gardener & Conservationist
Natalie Purschwitz, Visual Artist
Artcirq, Guillaume Saladin, Co-Founder Artcirq
SPEAKERS
Cynthia Hathaway
WHF Ambassador for Canada
Hathaway Designs is led by designer Cynthia Hathaway. Hathaway Designs focus includes participatory artistic research (in location and with communities), concept development, prototypes and designs based on social themes such as community and local industry regeneration (Car Mecca), food and city production (XXL City Harvester), design methodologies for social sustainability (The Mennonite and Amish Design Methodology) and the production of public space (The Department of Search). Hathaway Designs designs meeting spaces for marginalized voices and productions that are not always heard and acknowledged but are vital for the development of resilient communities. The productions of Hathaway Designs are working prototypes placed in a context to reveal and celebrate local material and knowledge resources (human, natural and animal), and kick-start self-organization. The prototypes (whether it be a sweatershop and wool organization, a corn field or a miniature train track), are built in collaboration with local inhabitants, and upon shared values. Hathaway's designs create open, public spaces for interaction, production and debate, and a new sense of citizenry in places of disconnection.
Zita Cobb
Keynote Speaker
Zita Cobb is an eighth-generation Fogo Islander, Founder and CEO of the registered charity Shorefast, and Innkeeper of the award-winning Fogo Island Inn. Zita graduated high school on Fogo Island before studying business in Ottawa. Following a subsequent successful career in high-tech, Zita returned to Fogo Island and established Shorefast to put another leg on the Island’s struggling economy to complement its ever-important fishery. With an enduring commitment to Fogo Island, Shorefast is expanding its mission through its pan-Canadian Community Economies initiative to strengthen place-based economic development within the global economy. Zita has been a Member of the Order of Canada since 2016 and was a 2020 inductee to Canada’s Business Hall of Fame. She holds honorary doctorates from McGill University, Memorial University of Newfoundland, the University of Ottawa, and Carleton University. She volunteers her full time and energy for Shorefast’s charitable initiatives and community businesses.
Swapnaa Tamhane
Swapnaa Tamhane is an artist, writer, and curator. Her visual practice is dedicated to drawing, making handmade paper, and working with the material histories of cotton and jute. Her interests extend to material culture, and with designer Rashmi Varma, she wrote SĀR: The Essence of Indian Design, Phaidon Press (2016). Curated exhibitions include In Order to Join – the Political in a Historical Moment (2013-2015) an exhibition of global feminisms at Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, and CSMVS, Mumbai, India; HERE: Locating Contemporary Canadian Artists (2017), Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, and CONSTITUTIONS (2021) at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montreal. She has an MFA in Fibres & Material Practices, Concordia University, where she is currently an Artist-in-Residene. Her artwork and research has been supported by SSHRC, Canada Council for the Arts, and Ontario Arts Council. She was a Research Fellow with the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute (2009), and an International Museum Fellow with the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (2013-2014). In 2019, she was the Ontario juror for the Sobey Art Award, and is currently on the board of SAVAC. She has exhibited her work at articule, Montreal; Museum der Moderne, Salzburg; Serendipity Arts Festival, Panjim; and has had solo exhibitions at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto; with work currently on view at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Dundee, Scotland.
Bill Burns
Bill Burns was raised in a book selling family in Saskatchewan where he learned about art from monks and poets. His projects about animals, nature and advanced industry have been shown widely including at the Seoul Museum of Art; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; KW, Berlin; Mendes-Wood DM, Sao Paulo; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Bill believes that autoroutes have served us well in protecting the soil but should now be ploughed under to make room for wild birds, flowers, vegetables and goats.
Paul Klein
Paul is a globally recognized authority on helping businesses benefit from solving social problems. In 2001, Paul founded Impakt, a B Corp that has helped corporations including Cadillac Fairview, De Beers, Home Depot, John Deere, McCain Foods, McKesson, Nestlé, Petro-Canada, Pfizer, Scotiabank, Starbucks, TD, Walmart, Telus International, GoodLife Fitness and 3M to improve the impact of their investments in social change. Impakt has also helped leading non-profit organizations to understand their social purpose and improve their impact. In 2019, Paul established the Impakt Foundation for Social Change, a registered charitable organization with a mission of helping refugees and newcomers find pathways to employment. Paul’s book, Change for Good: An Action-Oriented Approach for Businesses to Benefit from Solving the World’s Most Urgent Problems was published by ECW Press in March, 2022.
Sarah Roseman
Sarah Roseman (b. 1999) is a Canadian designer based in Eindhoven, The Netherlands and educated at Design Academy Eindhoven. She is passionate about creating a more beautiful world through materiality and works on the boundary of textile and object. Through her playful and imaginative pieces, she aims to evoke a sense of joy. Her works carry unique personality and appear to come alive in a world of their own. Sarah works as a designer and material researcher and draws on her archives of new and reclaimed materials to lead the creation of new work.
Bradley Wursten
Bradley Wursten was born in Hamilton, Canada in 1972. In the 80s he started growing giant vegetables for the local agricultural fair. In 1991 he immigrated to The Netherlands where he later on started growing giant pumpkins and vegetables again, growing a world record squash in 2007, a world record marrow in 2009 and the world's heaviest field pumpkin in 2019, to mention a few. He also collects and preserves various types of plants from the Americas, including heucheras, (heritage) potatoes, (native) corn and (wild) strawberries. Most recently he has designed and helped set up a number of therapeutical and communal gardens to help stimulate mental and physical well being and provide a local food source. Always willing to share his unique gardening expertise, Brad has collaborated with many artists and designers. With Cynthia Hathaway and artist Melle Smets, Brad designed a giant corn field on a University Campus to promote self organization, feeding from local food resources, and the production of the commons.
Natalie Purschwitz
Natalie Purschwitz is an artist and designer living and working on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw, and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ First Nations, also known as Vancouver, Canada. Her research draws on modes of making that include collecting, accumulating, arranging, editing, and transforming materials. She is curious about the ways that landscapes are shaped by humans and nonhumans, through systems of organization, networks of support, and ruptures within these systems.. Her work seeks out spaces between art and design, performance and daily life. Her visual art practice is materially motivated and driven by curiosities in anthropology, archaeology, human/nature relationships, morphology and formal arrangement. Thinking about earth - as a complexity of materials, a location, a temporal range, a perspective, an intelligence, a system within systems, a geometric configuration, an embodiment of motion and a life-supporting loam - has become the primary substance of her research. Her work incorporates a range of media including sculptural installation, video, performance, photography and works on paper. By reconfiguring everyday objects and elemental substances, Purschwitz creates conditions for material events.
Wave Weir
Wave Weir is a clothing designer, wool mill owner and operator and freelance community developer in Seguin, Ontario, near Parry Sound on the shores of Georgian Bay. Her designs are simple, classic, unstructured pieces that are meant to showcase the fabric, last for years and accommodate body changes. Looking for a quantity and quality of local, natural fibre and materials for her clothing line, Weir came face to face with the limitations and bottlenecks in wool processing being felt by small sheep farms. Most are forced to sell their annual harvest of raw fleece to the wool grower’s co-op to be shipped off shore, or to destroy it, if the cost of transport from the farm is more than will be realized by the sale. Living in an area desperately in need of permanent year-round employment, Weir decided to start a fibre processing mill in her small community. Purchasing vintage equipment from a retired business, Weir has established a semi-worsted spinning and weaving mill, providing added processing services for area farmers as well as purchasing raw material from regenerative farms to be used in an ever-growing possibility of product.
Todd Falkowsky
Todd Falkowsky is an experienced brand consultant and creative director. Working globally with some of the world's leading agencies and brands for the past 25 years, he recently launched his own brand consultancy Citizen Brand to help small brands and start-ups create maximum value and growth. Additionally, he is an active educator, speaker, and writer and is the publisher of The Canadian Design Resource, Canada’s largest open source collection of design. Todd has produced influential exhibits and research projects including Objecting survey of Tobias Wong and has collaborated with the MoMA, Cooper Hewitt, and The Royal Ontario Museum.
Guillaume Saladin
Born into a family of anthropologists, Guillaume grew up partly in Igloolik up until the age of 15. After completing a bachelor’s degree in Sociology & Communication at UQAM in 1998, he helps start Artcirq while attending the National Circus School in Montreal. In 2001, Guillaume joined Cirque Éloize as an acrobat and performer for the 4 year tour of the show Nomade, directed by the well-known Daniele Finzi Pasca. Since 2005, Guillaume has dedicated his passion and career to collaboratively leading Artcirq in Igloolik with the goal to improve opportunities for youth in Canada’s Arctic. Artcirq: Summer 1998, Igloolik, Nunavut. Two teenagers commit suicide, once again shattering this small island community of 2,000 residents. Every time a suicide occurs, feelings of despair and powerlessness resurface in this world where two cultures collide. In the Arctic, loss of sense and sorrow are real facts of life.
Following the recurrence of such tragedies in Igloolik, some concrete actions were taken to give children and teenagers a medium through which they could express themselves. An initiative of Isuma Productions (movie Atanarjuat, the Fast Runner) forms a group of eight young people with the goal to prevent suicide in this small community. The organisation Inuusiq is born, which means “Life” in Inuktitut. With the help of Isuma Productions, its first mission is to produce a televised series about the life of youth in the Canadian Arctic of today. Guillaume Saladin a member of the Innusiq Youth Drama Group and a student of Montreal’s National Circus School returns to Igloolik the following year with 5 classmates to lead circus workshops for youth, which marks the beginning of the social circus project Artcirq. Since then, Artcirq has grown into an Inuit performing arts collective with the mission to bridge traditional Inuit culture to modern artistic practices by creating meaningful and original work through the performing arts, music, and video. Artcirq members have created a rich body of work featured on a national and international scale, through which Inuit artists express and redefine themselves in their changing world.
Li Edelkoort
Co-Founder World Hope Forum
One of the world’s most renowned trend forecasters and colorists, Li is an intuitive thinker who constantly tracks how socio-cultural trends evolve. She is also a publisher, humanitarian, educator and exhibition curator. From 2015 to 2020 she was the Dean of Hybrid Studies at Parsons and she also founded New York Textile Month each September. She wrote the Anti_Fashion Manifesto in 2014 and is the co-author of A Labour of Love (Lecturis, 2020), presenting the work of a very new generation of conscious designers and makers. Her most recent endeavor is the World Hope Forum, dedicated to spreading hope across the globe through design in a post-pandemic landscape.
Philip Fimmano
Co-Founder World Hope Forum
A trend analyst, design curator and writer, contributing to Trend Union’s forecasting books, magazines and strategic studies for international companies in fashion, interiors and lifestyle. Fimmano along with his partner Lidewij Edelkoort, has co-created exhibitions for museums and institutions around the world, including Tokyo's 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT, Design Museum Holon and the Gaîté Lyrique in Paris. In 2011, he co-founded Talking Textiles; an ongoing initiative to promote awareness and innovation in textiles through touring exhibitions, a trend publication, a design prize and free educational programmes – including New York Textile Month, a citywide festival celebrating textile creativity each September. Fimmano teaches a forecasting masters at Polimoda in Florence and is on the board of directors for the International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe.