[URBAN NOTE] "Massive art and music fest In/Future brings Ontario Place back to life"

[rfmcdonald]

NOW Toronto's Kate Robertson reports on how Ontario Place was brought back to life.

What do you do when you have less than 12 months to plan an enormous music and art festival?

That's the question Rui Pimenta and Layne Hinton of Art Spin bike tours faced when they got the green light to host In/Future on Ontario Place's largely abandoned West Island.

"Immediately realizing the scale of it, we started reaching out to creative partners," says Hinton.

Not that it was their first rodeo. Curators Pimenta and Hinton had taken 300 or so people to the site last summer for one of their art tours, so they were on familiar territory. And since 2009, Art Spin has commissioned artists and musicians to create site-specific works in some of the city's unlikeliest pockets, from rickshaw residencies to a pit behind the Tower Automotive Building on Sterling Road. Participants pedal in a mass ride to each installation or performance.

But now they had 14 acres to program with a small team and an even tinier budget, so they knew they needed help. Pimenta contacted the Small World Music Festival, a world music fest now in its 15th year.

"We were so excited by the site from our early visits, we felt the best way to do this was to bring potential partners on site for visits," he says. "Once they saw it, they were either convinced or they weren't. If they were, they started presenting ideas for what they would want to do and where they would want to do it. So things unfolded very organically that way."