Antigonight: Art After Dark Festival is a free arts festival that aims to be inclusive and accessible to all persons. This year, the festival runs from September 4th-18th in Antigonish, L’nuewa’ki (Mi’kma’ki)/Nova Scotia.

We are inviting artists from anywhere in the world who have roots in Nova Scotia and Atlantic Canada to create experimental new works for the festival, including but not limited to: video, performance, dance, sound, sculpture, and installation, which can be presented online or in-person in the town of Antigonish.

Participating Antigonight artists will receive CARFAC-mandated artist fees in payment for their work. We strongly encourage members of LGBTQIA2+ communities, non-white communities, newcomers, and persons with disabilities to apply.

Our 2021 curator in residence, Jessica Mensch, has chosen the theme of “connection” for this year’s festival. We seek proposals that transform the way we think about our relationships and connections to one another, as well as to the non-human world; works that reevaluate social hierarchies and our priorities within them. This may take the form of speculative storytelling: works that envision a world you haven’t seen before.

White scholar and activist Donna Haraway writes in “Staying with the Trouble” that perhaps there is a better way of framing and being in the world we share not just with other humans but with our animal kin. She writes: “It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories…Like all offspring of colonizing and imperial histories, I – we – have to relearn how to conjugate worlds with partial connections and not universals and particulars…”

In other words, we’re calling on you to offer us your own radical experiments or vision of what sustainable transformation looks like.

To apply, please fill out this Google Form!