MANIFESTO

The BJJ Collective was officially formed in 2021 but began in spirit at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. The collective consists of three trans-generational female Canadian artists working in three different countries – Bonnie Baxter (Val-David, Quebec, Canada), Juliana España Keller (Alhaurín el Grande, Malaga, Spain) and Jen Rae (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia). Each of us has our own team of technicians, committed participant artists and community partnerships. We have all worked together in the past in different forums and share an essential belief in the need to shift towards an eco-social existence and the essential role of story-telling and art in moving towards sustainable existence. 

Initiated under the onus of environmental emergencies and the pandemic lock-down, the bjj Collective is taking a living-laboratory approach. We believe that the rapid ecological and social changes we’re experiencing require a process of adaptive communication, experimentation and iterative feedback loop processes. We will be using technology to Triangulate our experiences and discoveries as an important facet of our initiative. 

Each of us has, in the past year, worked to transform a plot of land into a community resource whose goal is to sustain body and spirit through the creation of food and art led activities. As a group we are dedicated to a rich and varied collaboration – working with communities and partnerships across a wide range of cultures, orientations, languages, ages and minorities. As a person of Métis-Scottish descent, Jen Rae, in particular, is keenly aware of the issues faced by First Nations peoples in relation to land and food sovereignty.

Each of us bring both strong and complimentary commitments to the collective as well as a unique set of artistic and organizational skills. Baxter, has practiced a philosophy of life and art as a single expression. She has spent decades creating magnificent gardens in the relatively inhospitable mountain conditions of Val-David. Her work in the last years has been dedicated to creating immersive installations designed to create an experiential awareness of ecological crisis and existential joy. She has worked for decades with community groups and students on transformational projects and has developed a strong technical team that will guide the teams in other countries to harness the power of various programs and technologies to streamline and triangulate the collectives cumulative progress—their gardens, their practices, fables for a new society—in a way that will allow an expansive distribution. Jen Rae creates long and multi-artform socially-engaged works centred around disaster preparedness, food justice and speculative futures. She is a master of oversight and coordination and environmental knowledge. She is the Director of Fair Share Fare and Fawkner Commons which gives her a dearth of knowledge in creating and maintaining a food-system community resource https://www.fairsharefare.com/about. Keller, aside from creating a food resource is creating an artist’s residency BAJO DE OLIVO – https://www.bajo-de-olivo.es/about-us/. She is an expert in sound and performance art, video, installation, interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary practice. She speaks three languages and holds PhDs in Arts and Philosophy.

We are committed to creating work spaces for artists and community members that are safe, both physically and emotionally, where expression is free, safe distance is maintained, and sanitizing facilities are readily available. We are also committed to providing artists and art-workers with fees in accordance with CARFAC and RAV standards or better.