At R.I.S.E., performers are encouraged by a sympathetic audience, who fully participate in an atmosphere of mutual support and collective therapy. The meetings are punctuated by different forms of acceptance through equally affective audience responses (finger snapping, deep throat intonations, mmmmm): a twenty-first century call-andresponse. The majority of poets who perform at R.I.S.E. have one foot in another land, culture, or language. As a result, a sense of in-betweenness or duality is often discursively expressed, performed, and debated at each R.I.S.E. meeting.

The aesthetics of a culturally mixed Toronto is exemplified in the practices of R.I.S.E. participants, whose poetics give expression to a certain political place-full-ness, a sense of being at home with an elsewhere.

This is discursively expressed by the film’s protagonists as an aesthetics of poly-vocal futurity—no longer as a negotiation of cultural forms of the past. This is explored in the film by shooting in the liminal spaces of the Toronto Transit Commission’s (TTC) long-awaited subway extension. Linking the centre (downtown) and the peripheries (suburbs), this new underground space is a passage, not a destination.

Treated as a mise-en-scène, the subway acts as a literal and conceptual platform to frame concerns expressed by artists at R.I.S.E.: the artistic inquiries happening in Toronto’s suburbs and the special perspectives that this peripheral condition has to offer the visual culture of tomorrow.

Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca