A Call for Participation
The Council of Canadians, Blue Community Schools and members of the Justseeds artists’ cooperative in Canada are inviting teachers, community members, and youth to participate in the Water is Life Art Challenge — a shared expression of care for the waters that sustain us.
In this time of acute planetary and environmental threat, this community art project will direct creative attention towards our local watersheds – the rivers, aquifers, and rain cycles that hold life together – and the vital collaborations between plants, fungal networks, animals, and human beings that hold and purify water in our landscapes.
Why Water?
Over millennia, plants, animals, insects, fungi and bacteria have evolved elegant and complex choreographies to purify water, hold it in the landscape, and create the conditions for all life to thrive. From the generation of clouds to the replenishment of aquifers, the creation of a life-giving hydrosphere is a collaborative project — one that Indigenous peoples have understood and tended across these territories since time immemorial. A widening web of water stewards is learning about how to care for these systems, but disconnection remains widespread. Extraction, urban sprawl and unattuned development can destroy or disrupt the networks water depends on, producing conditions of scarcity, fire, flooding and contamination on top of the devastating effects of climate change.
A future with abundant shared water — the elemental foundation of a good life — requires that many take part in understanding, defending, and caring for these living relationships. Amidst retreating glaciers, exhausted aquifers and dry river beds, we are re-learning how to weave human life in harmony with other species. The result will be vital and permeable cities and landscapes, but the enabling factor will be a cultivation of hydrological literacy.
Water is not only essential for survival. It is an element that nourishes our imaginations and sustains our emotional and spiritual well-being. Across cultures, it is associated with transformation and healing. Water exemplifies the emergent nature of life: hydrogen and oxygen coming together in an unexpected miracle to create something fundamental to all of the beauty our planet holds.
This project invites students, workers, artists, and community groups to creatively express their love for water– and by extension, their care for one other, and for all of life.
The ARt Challenge
Building on the Blue Communities Schools project initiated by Maude Barlow, participating groups will be offered resources and support to explore essential water infrastructures, current threats to water, and what it might mean to protect and regenerate local hydrologies. Throughout, the project will seek to amplify the voices of Indigenous knowledge keepers and water protectors.
Out of these conversations and investigations, participants will create artworks to submit to the cross-Canada Water is Life Art Challenge. Five finalists will be selected by a jury for hand-printed screen printed reproduction in poster form by members of the Justseeds artists’ cooperative.
Every participating group will receive these posters for local display alongside their own original works.
Local groups will be encouraged to organize community art exhibitions where participants can share what they learned — and all submitted artworks will be displayed on a national website.
Other regional displays and water-based events may follow.
How it Works
- Sign up to receive updates, resources, and an invitation to our first facilitated webinar.
- Form your group — a class, a workplace, a community circle, a union local, a youth collective.
- Connect locally: reach out to artists, water experts, municipal workers, biologists, or Indigenous knowledge holders in your area. We can help make those connections.
- Run at least six sessions using our facilitation guide, adapted for all ages and backgrounds — explore the hydrological cycle in your community and give it creative form.
- Submit your art for display on the national website. Some pieces will be selected by jury for a limited-edition screen-printed poster set, distributed to every participating group.
- Hold a local showcase (optional): invite your art-makers and collaborators to share their reflections on the local watershed. Bring the community together in celebration and communion with water!
- Connect across your watershed or region for larger exhibitions and events — we can support this too.
Water is Life Art Challenge Registration
Who We’re Looking For
Students are at the heart of this project – from elementary classrooms to university studios. Around them, we’re calling in:
- Teachers and school facilitators
- Artists and art organizers
- Labour groups and water workers
- University groups
- Community and religous groups
This is an invitation for civil society and youth to reflect creatively on their relationships with water, and, through water, on their connections to other species, other generations, and other times and places.
Other regional displays and water-based events may follow.
Timeline
June
Callout and expressions of interest open
June-July
Curriculum development
August
Facilitator materials delivered; first webinar
September – March
Sessions underway; ongoing facilitator support webinars
March
Submissions due
April
Art goes live; jury selections announced
May
Exhibitions and community events
This project is initiated by the Council of Canadians in collaboration with the members of the Justseeds artists’ cooperative, and coordinated by community organizer and artist Stefan Christoff.
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