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Hi Che, Thanks for taking time out to speak to 6ix and our readers. What's up with Che right now? What are you currently working on? What a question to start with….I hope your ready man, you started by opening the flood gates. As per usual I got my hands in a bunch of things, which are for the most part related and I can't tell you how much I love it all. So if I look at my stickies with my immediate list of things to do, there are about 43 slated things, which need to be completed within the next 2 weeks. Then I have a medium term list of things to do with another 25 things on it. I don't even want to start talking about my long - term list of things to do, that would turn into a book in itself . I am an avid dreamer J The most pressing things right now are the initiatives I am working on with t he Manifesto Festival and Hightop Studio. Both of these organizations I started and work on with my long time friend and business partner Ryan Paterson (big up Ryan Fiya, lifetime souljah). Hightop is our creative company where we do all sorts of things including, but not limited to: photography, design, interactive, video and event production. Both Ryan and I come from artistic backgrounds and through our Hightop work are now operating in a largely commercial sphere. We often find ourselves occupying the grey area between art and commerce. One worthwhile project we are nearing completion, i s a half hour film for War Child Canada encouraging active global citizenship among youth, which will be shown in high school classrooms across Canada. We are simultaneously working on getting our portfolio website up, which has always been on our list of things to do, but we have never reached it being so busy working on other people's projects our own initiatives like Manifesto. We are making our portfolio website and creating some more operational systems a number one priority, which is no ea s y task . W e have to archive over 5 years of highly active work, but its really exciting digging through the crates and unearthing some of our old school hidden gems. Manifesto is the other big project taking up a lot of mind space. With the success of last year's festival, t he Luminato Festival approached us to produce a component of th eir street art exhibition. Since the partnership was sparked the project has evolved into a massive dual outdoor venue exhibition with an eight-week mentorship program for youth in Regent Park, one of the communities the exhibition will be happening. Manifesto is continuing to hold town hall meetings for youth practitioners in the city to network, share meaningful discussions on various common issues and build together as a unified movement. We take much of the feedback from these meetings and use it in shaping all of the other initiatives we are working on. We were approached this year to expand the festival by bringing in young practitioners from the western hemisphere and we are in the process of exploring exactly what that will look like, but for now all I can say is the future of Manifesto is looking beautiful. We are finalizing the documentary on last year's festival and the Toronto hip hop scene itself, which should be ready to launch at this year's festival, the dates of which are Sept 18 th -21 st , in Toronto. I am a founding member and on the board of CYAN, the Canadian Youth Arts Network, and we just took on a contract to develop a framework for community mapping o f all the arts initiatives in Canada. We are going to do a test run of the framework in Toronto and if it works, expand it into a provincial and then national mapping initiative which might take the form of a website ( or some other wacky idea, we are still developing the framework). I am also bringing back a major passion project, The Big Norm Show, with my homie Big Norm. You might remember Norm from the hilarious comedy variety showcase series we did in Toronto back in 2006 or his national debut on the Much VJ search. Well , after I small hiatus, I have recently been working with Norm on getting his website back up and running and a whole new event series. Norm is an amazingly vers atile entertainer: chef, comedian, fitness instructor, visual artist, relationship guru, and singer/emcee . I will be in a managerial/producer role. Another passion project is always Earwaks.com, which with the plethora of other projects on our crews ' plates has slowed down a wee bit, but we still have some great content flowing at least once a month. We just dropped a sick interview, photo shoot and video we did with Killa Kela and will soon be addi n g a piece with Jamel Shabazz. We are deciding how we will move forward with Earwaks and may be doing a re-launch and a re-brand, so watch out! And there are always photo shoots that come up, ones for clients through Hightop but also ones I just do for passion. In the past month I shot RZA, KRS ONE and Bob Rae. I'm going to be on this reality photography show for SexTV, shooting a portrait of a couple, coming up this month and am slated to be a lead documentation director on Bboy Unit (one of Canada's biggest B boy events happening at the government nightclub in Toronto) and Style In Progress, an amazing urban arts festival happening in Toronto every July. In the past year, I have also had the amazing opportunity to start to share my experiences with young people and those interested in the arts through guest speaking and mentoring sessions, and this is something I am ex ci ted to continue with. Oh yeah, lastly, I was asked by the City of Toronto to be on a working group that is developing a community arts action plan developing key recommendations to propose to council for a healthy and sustainable community arts sector . I will be meeting with this group on a monthly basis until this work is done. I am trying my best with all of this to stay balanced and really want to spend more time with my close friends and family so I have been integrating that more into my daily life. Health and education is really important to me too, so I am going to be starting up capoeira classes with my boy Mark Valino (filmmaker extraordinaire) and picking up either a Hindi or Spanish language class. There is lots on the go, but I feel completely blessed to have the opportunity to do the work I do, and am so lucky to be able to work with the amazing people I do everyday to see each one of these things get crossed off and to add more as one big family. I always say, life is made up of billions of deep breaths, breath deeply and LIVE.
wwwthemanifesto.ca , Schemata Media ,
CheKothari.com , Earwaks.com |
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