PODCAST · arts
The Secret Ingredient
by Musagetes
This show is an ongoing discussion of art and ideas. We talk about the invisible elements of art that make it powerful and relevant: how artwork connects many publics, inspires cooperation and collaboration, and is created through conversation. We talk about new views on local, national, and international art where it intersects with the social. How can we add new voices to the conversation about art? What makes art useful today and how do we, as individuals, find meaning in it? Co-hosted from February 2013 – June 2015 by Musagetes’ Curator Alissa Firth-Eagland and Program Coordinator Danica Evering (and with artist Paul Chartrand February 2013-June 2013). Broadcast from CFRU 93.3 FM on traditional Attawandaron Territory in Guelph, ON and also streamable at cfru.ca.
Episodes
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Jacob Wren: Critical Optimism and the Never Ending Struggle (The Secret Ingredient - 17/06/15)
What possibilities for political transformation can be opened up through imagination, fantasy, and art? Can the left create instrumental change or is the game rigged? This week artist and writer Jacob Wren considers these questions, as well as ideas about the artist as political activist and the...
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Pablo Helguera: Art in Dialogue (The Secret Ingredient - 24/06/15)
Artist, writer, and educator Pablo Helguera discusses the integration of art and life and the dialogue that occurs between an artwork and the outside world. He considers the beginning point of artistic investigation and describes his latest project: a book about aphorisms for artists. Join us as…
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Feminism and Aesthetics: Steph Yates on Music and Art (The Secret Ingredient - 03/06/15)
This week we talk with Steph Yates, a Guelph-based screen-printer, videographer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist about the relationships between music and art. How has the dialogue between the two disciplines developed over time, in various places, and in her practice in particular? Yates...
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Fastwürms: Pirate Cultures, Queerness, and Beautiful Losers (The Secret Ingredient - 10/06/15)
Art collective Fastwürms enacts witch positivity, working class aesthetics, and queer politics through their multidisciplinary practice that includes video, installation, and performance art. The duo, Kim Kozzi and Dai Skuse, discuss queerness, distopias, the biological world, and the act of...
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The Benčić Youth Council: Work and Play in Rijeka, Croatia (The Secret Ingredient – 24/09/14)
Preuzmimo Benčić was a video project by Canadian artist Althea Thauberger depicting a decommissioned factory in Rijeka, Croatia, occupied by 70 children ages playing the roles of its former workers who have re-skilled as artists. The Benčić Youth Council, a group of young people who learn about…
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Creatrix of Culture Jenny Mitchell (The Secret Ingredient – 22/10/14)
Omnichordist, multi-instrumentalist, record label executive (Label Fantastic), mother, bus driver, instigator of Golden Throats Karaoke, and youth DIY music savior, Jenny Mitchell talks about living a life grounded in music. Having started The Barmitzvah Brothers at age 15 with co-conspirators…
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The Secular Sacred: The Primordial Hum of the Earth (The Secret Ingredient – 01/10/14)
Shawn Van Sluys discusses the non-supernatural sacred in relation to artistic practices. He identifies the sacred as the source of new meanings, a genitive creativity ultimately rooted in the great and deep vibrations of the earth, which Shawn calls the “first metaphor.” Hear about Ursa Major,...
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Bik Van der Pol’s Between a Rock and a Hard Place (The Secret Ingredient – 26/11/14)
Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol of the Rotterdam-based artist collective Bik Van der Pol discuss their approach to art making in relation to the social geography of Sudbury, Ontario. In preparation for their event-based art project Between a Rock and a Hard Place—11 outdoor concerts in 11...
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Duane Linklater and Tanya Lukin Linklater(The Secret Ingredient – 28/01/15)
Today we hear selections of a talk given at the Guelph Black Heritage Society on December 13, 2015. Performance artist, choreographer, and poet Tanya Lukin Linklater speaks at an event by People of Good Will, a collective seeking to reimagine the underground railroad as a living history and a...
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Crazy Quilt: Feminist Killjoys and the Queer Art of Failure (The Secret Ingredient – 19/11/14)
This show combines threads of different spools to affect a powerful audio wake-up call. Chock-full of rad new music that will shake out the cob webs out of the attic, in this episode we talk about failing as a style and way of life, as the orbital path of creativity itself. We talk about power...
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Clayton Windatt: Intentional Resilience (The Secret Ingredient – 05/05/15)
Visual artist and Métis curator of the White Water Gallery in North Bay Clayton Windatt reflects on the false divide between artist-run and community centers on the one hand and high art and contemporary theory on the other. Community art can be as excellent as high art and also most responsible…
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Reading Laura Marks (The Secret Ingredient – 13/05/15)
In the age of the selfie, where we make private moments public through an image or video, what does it mean to think through video’s own body in relation to the bodies that it presents? Using Laura U. Marks’s text Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, we talk about the material nature of...
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Model Minority: Overturning Stereotypes (The Secret Ingredient – 21/01/15)
This show delves into the false stereotype of the “Model Minority” and what it means from a radical perspective. Hear us discuss Gendai Gallery’s year of programing around Model Minority, which was recently published as a collection of texts and art projects by PS Guelph. The book forms an...
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Scott McGovern on Working Outside of Space and Time (The Secret Ingredient – 07/01/15)
Scott McGovern, Program Director of artist-run centre Ed Video, has just returned to Guelph after spending the fall in Paris, France with his partner Jenn E Norton and their daughter Edie McGovern Norton for Jenn’s Canada Council Residency. Hear his take on what it means to be a Canadian artist...
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Art in Public: Guelph at Twilight with Mark Clintberg (The Secret Ingredient – 10/12/14)
What are the risks in cracking open binaries? Is community engagement akin to using a copper wedge tool, simultaneously changing the pryer, the pryee, and what is being used to pry? Delve into boundaries, thresholds, doorways, and outskirts with Montreal-based artist, curator, art historian, and...
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Publication Studio: Uncertain Times and Alternative Economies (The Secret Ingredient – 03/12/14)
Making books fresh like pour-over coffee? Publication Studio (www.publicationstudio.biz) is a network of 13 tiny publishing houses in which books are made one at a time by hand, envisioning the productive work of bookbinding to be more like a bakery or coffee shop than a factory. Hear PS…
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Spherical Sphagnum and Paul Chartrand (The Secret Ingredient – 17/09/14)
Socially-engaged artist Paul Chartrand discusses his work Kokedama: A Fragmented Garden at the Niagara Artists Centre in St. Catharines Ontario. Hear about the political side of houseplants, spider plants, staghorn and boston ferns, morning glories, and succulents: these green guerrillas that…
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Bik Van der Pol’s Between a Rock and a Hard Place (The Secret Ingredient – 26/11/14)
Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol of the Rotterdam-based artist collective Bik Van der Pol discuss their approach to art making in relation to the social geography of Sudbury, Ontario. In preparation for their event-based art project Between a Rock and a Hard Place—11 outdoor concerts in 11...
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Alessandra Pomarico on Free Home University (The Secret Ingredient – 10/09/14)
Education is too often an automated process of preparing the learner to become a part of the neo-liberal capitalist economy. Paolo Freire calls this a transactional process of education, where learning is “deposited” into students, who are empty receptacles. In Lecce, Italy, a group of artists…
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Fan Fiction, Art Writing (The Secret Ingredient - 29/01/14)
This week we dig into writing and artists. We first introduce a hand-written letter to co-host Alissa from artist Pablo Helguera and discuss how the handwritten letter can tug at one’s heartstrings and trigger our imagination. We examine the work of Helen Reed, artist and editor of Art Criticism...
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Reading Rijeka (The Secret Ingredient - 30/04/14)
After a trip to Rijeka for a gathering to check in on the ongoing artistic programming Musagetes has been doing there, we talk cities, people, and soft architecture. The Promise of a City was an event that brought artists, architects, municipal figures, etc. to a number of exciting events,...
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Nathan Lawr: Dismantling The System Through Music (The Secret Ingredient - 05/07/14)
Minotaurs frontman Nathan Lawr joins us in the studio this week to talk music, space, and activism. We discuss the music of The Funkees, an afro-rock group formed in the 1960s in Nigeria. Influenced by Indigenous music and political stagnation, we discuss this band and how people can bring down…
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Florian Wüst: To Have and To Need (The Secret Ingredient - 14/05/14)
We are joined in studio this week by Berlin-based visual artist and independent film curator Florian Wüst. Wüst’s interests lie in the history of post-war Germany and modern social, economic and technical progress In his curating work, Wüst is interested in creating a physical experience for the...
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Luis Jacob: Sticking with Weirdness (The Secret Ingredient - 28-05-14)
We hear from Luis Jacob this week on Rijeka, DIY culture in Toronto, and collaboration. Together, we talk about the collaboration in Toronto that developed in the 90’s after Mike Harris made cuts to the arts and collaboration. We dig into the intersection between theater, arts, film, and queer...
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Laetitia Sonami: Shower of Sound (The Secret Ingredient - 04/06/14)
This week we discuss the work of California-based artist Laetitia Sonami, including a current project of hers in Rijeka. We hear from her about her interest in creating works of sound that evoke immersive environments of memory, curiosity, and ambiguity. Her recent piece, Soundgates, showers...
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Cities and People (The Secret Ingredient - 15/10/14)
Musagetes Executive Director Shawn Van Sluys and Project Assistant Danica Evering co-hosts for a discussion about cities, art and resilience. How do we creatively navigate and experience the city and the spaces we hold in common? How we can we experience the overlap between the two in order to…
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Postcommodity: Third Space (The Secret Ingredient - 16-04-14)
It’s Postcommodity’s third trip to Guelph, and they join us in the studio to discuss the project they have been developing, establishing a DIY space working with Guelph’s immigrant and racialized communities. We discuss the third space, a concept of theorist Homi Bhabha, as a place where anyone…
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Roberta Smith: Gut Feelings (The Secret Ingredient - 09-04-14)
“Reactions to art typically stop at the neck,” Smith argues in a taped interview before her Shenkman lecture. Most people believe they are not art critics, and yet we often have opinions about everything is mass society. While we are all critics of pop culture, we become uncomfortable when asked…
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cheyanne turions: A Problem So Big it Needs Other People (The Secret Ingredient - 26-03-14)
This week curator and writer cheyanne turions joins us to discuss A Problem So Big it Needs Other People, an exhibition at Montreal’s Galerie SBC about negotiation and sovereignty. We discuss privilege and improvisation, and engage with how we generate meaning from the things that we encounter in...
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Brad McInerney - Kazoo Fest: A History Of Music & Community (The Secret Ingredient - 05-03-14)
Founder of Kazoo! Fest Brad McInerney joins us in the studio this week. We talk about the intersection of pop and experimental music, freedom of expression, and pancake breakfasts. We engage with Griel Marcus’s book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century to discuss the…
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Clip Show: Revisiting The Past (The Secret Ingredient - 05-02-14)
We revisit our first two shows with Christian Giroux and Janet Morton through the lens of the "clip show" television trope (the flashback-heavy episodes pieced together from already-aired footage often brought on by writer's strikes), looking at how we can see the act of putting two different...
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No Place/Good Place: Jenn E Norton’s Site Lines and Urban Utopia (The Secret Ingredient - 22-01-14)
This week we re-visit Norton’s public project Site Lines, a suggestion box placed in Saint George’s Square which invited downtownites to suggest fantastical improvements to public space. Norton discusses the project in relation to utopia, that “things are created in a specific context and a...
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Adrienne Spier: Overlooked Objects and Unwanted Spaces (The Secret Ingredient - 15-01-14)
Artist Adrienne Spier joins us in the studio to talk about her practice. Spier works with unwanted objects and overlooked spaces, taking what people have thrown away and seeing them with new eyes as art. Her practice allows her to be open to possibility, and to explore new angles. As Spier notes,...
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Community Building Through the Memory of Will Munro (The Secret Ingredient - 08-01-14)
This week, we talk about artist, social worker, and DJ Will Munro and his extensive work in community-building before his death in 2010. Through his work, we discuss queer culture and collective otherness, and the desire to be recognized. We talk about strong communities as inherently political,...
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Ben Grossman Brings the Music to Guelph Through Silence (The Secret Ingredient - 19-11-13)
The founder of Guelph’s own Silence, Ben Grossman, joins us in the studio today to talk live music and how Silence has become a locally iconic epicenter of culture in Guelph. Grossman also brings up the science fair meets party meets nerd-fest event known as Handmade Music, which offers...
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Fastwürms: Interspecies Collaboration & Ecological Resilience (The Secret Ingredient -13-11-13)
Having recently participated in The Mulch Project, we discuss the art collective FASTWÜRMS, who alongside the Specialized Studio students of the University of Guelph have developed this project in the local neighborhood known as The Ward. The Rhizome collaboration looked to grow roots out into…
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Althea Thauberger on Work and Play (The Secret Ingredient - 06-11-13)
This week we talk with Vancouver-based artist Althea Thauberger and her work in Rijeka, Preuzmimo Benčić. Thauberger calls into question to future of Rijeka through the occupation by over 70 children between the ages of 6-13 of a local heritage site Benčić, a former sugar refinery, tobacco…
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Arts Incubator Residents Annie Dunning and Monika Hauck (The Secret Ingredient - 03-10-13)
This is a special episode as part of CFRU’s Raise your Voice campaign, and we sit down with Art Incubator Residency participants Monika Hauck and Annie Dunning in our local coffee shop, Planet Bean. Monika speaks with us about her varied practice, looking specifically at marginalized and unused...
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Ghouls, Gendered Ghosts, and Democratic Discussion (The Secret Ingredient - 23-10-13)
As Halloween approaches, we talk haunted houses, specifically Killjoy’s Kastle by Allyson Mitchell. Filled with, demented women’s studies professors, straw feminists, and the ghost of Valerie Solanas and gravestones marking the death of the Gender Binary, this feminist haunted house demands that...
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Friendly Rich: Improviser, Composer & Musician Extraordinaire (The Secret Ingredient - 04-09-13)
Today’s interview with Rich Marsella tackles a number of topics including musical production, collaboration, and community involvement. An improviser, composer, and musician, Marsella talks with us about his recent project Scheherazade which is part of Musagetes Improviser-in-Residence program.…
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SYN: Building New Ways to Bring Us Together (The Secret Ingredient - 27-02-13)
In our studio this week, two members of SYN - atelier d'exploraine urbaine, Jean-Maxime Dufrensne and Jean-François Prost, talk with us about their project INFRACAMPUS and their work in re-organizing public space. Working with university students and staff, SYN explored misused, underused, or...
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Janet Morton Crafts the Answer to Value and Time (The Secret Ingredient 20-02-13)
Janet Morton talks with us about time, money, and the value of everything. Morton’s playful work critically addresses crafting and labour, as Morton herself knits works to address “measured time” and the value we associate with the handmade. In a culture where most of our products are made…
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Scott McGovern: Hacking Systems, Reinventing Culture (The Secret Ingredient - 16-10-13)
This week Ed Video curator Scott McGovern Joins us to talk about hacker culture, the spirit of exploration, and their relation to the art community. We talk about University of Guelph student Edward Kim’s, Science Hack Day at Ed Video Gallery. We explore hacking as a way of combining technology…
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Shawn Van Sluys talks Ships, Sounds, and Social Responsibility (The Secret Ingredient - 09-10-13)
Today we have Shawn Van Sluys, Executive Director of Musagetes, in the studio to talk about the current projects in Rijeka and Lecce. His most recent paper, A City and its Pier, looks at the projects that are happening in Rijeka, to address questions of social responsibility…
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Reflecting on the Musagetes Guelph Café (The Secret Ingredient - 02-10-13)
This week we reflect on the events and happenings of the Musagetes Guelph Café, which happened from September 25th – 28th. Postcommodity’s visit as part of the weekend encouraged stimulating dialog, mobilizing language to challenging the structure of the Café itself. Postcommodity’s own…
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Postcommodity: Game Changers(The Secret Ingredient - 25-09-13)
Postcommodity join us in our studio. The members of Postcommodity are interdisciplinary, and work together to build trans-disciplinary work through a shared indigenous lens. We discuss their practice and what it means to create discourse through complexity and confusion. Comprised of Raven…
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Jenn E Norton: Site Lines & Artistic Interventions (The Secret Ingredient - 18-09-13)
Artist Jenn E Norton is talks with us about her latest project, Site Lines. Norton made a suggestion box in which ideas for how St. George’s Square could be reimagined can be entered. The big ideas shared by individuals in the space will later be rendered by Norton as a form of concept art…
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Janet Morton's The Stack: An Industrial and Creative Production (The Secret Ingredient - 11-09-13)
This week we talk with artist Janet Morton about her project for the Musagetes Guelph Café, The Stack. This stack for the creative and artistic production happening in the building is made up of a couple thousand cassette tapes, recycled doilies, and some resin. Morton herself refers to the work…
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Joshua Cleminson: Residencies and Reinterpretations (The Secret Ingredient - 10-04-13)
In today’s episode, we interview artist and Guelph grad Joshua Cleminson to discuss the Treehouse Residency in Brooklyn, New York. Cleminson worked with a group of seven artists who host a residency in their gallery space, allowing others to experience New York. His own practice touches on…
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Gordon Monahan & Scott McGovern: Art, Music, Kazoo!Fest (The Secret Ingredient - 03-04-13)
This week, start by chatting with musician Gordon Monahan about his experimental practice and then hear about Scott McGovern’s art curatorial philosophy. Monahan’s work is influenced by the New York Scene, John Cage, and his own experiments with music and science. Monahan explores sound in many...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
This show is an ongoing discussion of art and ideas. We talk about the invisible elements of art that make it powerful and relevant: how artwork connects many publics, inspires cooperation and collaboration, and is created through conversation. We talk about new views on local, national, and international art where it intersects with the social. How can we add new voices to the conversation about art? What makes art useful today and how do we, as individuals, find meaning in it? Co-hosted from February 2013 – June 2015 by Musagetes’ Curator Alissa Firth-Eagland and Program Coordinator Danica Evering (and with artist Paul Chartrand February 2013-June 2013). Broadcast from CFRU 93.3 FM on traditional Attawandaron Territory in Guelph, ON and also streamable at cfru.ca.
HOSTED BY
Musagetes
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does The Secret Ingredient have?
The Secret Ingredient currently has 57 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is The Secret Ingredient about?
This show is an ongoing discussion of art and ideas. We talk about the invisible elements of art that make it powerful and relevant: how artwork connects many publics, inspires cooperation and collaboration, and is created through conversation. We talk about new views on local, national, and...
How often does The Secret Ingredient release new episodes?
The Secret Ingredient has 57 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to The Secret Ingredient?
You can listen to The Secret Ingredient on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts The Secret Ingredient?
The Secret Ingredient is created and hosted by Musagetes.
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