“WHAT MAKES OTTAWA WEIRD?”
This month, 150+ cities will get weird. Rather than flinching at the unfamiliar, this is a time to embrace the strange, the new, and to explore our boundaries. But what’s weird about Ottawa? Is the fact that Ottawa is seen as not weird, weird in it’s own right?
Ottawa grew up as a government town, it’s very homogenous: white collar, suburban, conservative. Is that weird for such a big city? Think about Toronto: it sprawls, it’s multicultural, it’s a mix of white and blue collar, it’s everything!
That’s not to say Ottawa is a bad place to live because it’s so straight-laced, so much so in fact that when something/someone pushes the status quo in Ottawa, it really stands out. And that’s a great opportunity for creatives because they’re not drowning in a sea of a zillion other creatives. Could we say that creativity in Ottawa gets attention because it’s outside the norm?
In accordance with this month’s theme ‘weird’, we look to people whose creativity spurs from eccentricity, people who attempts to re-draw the boundaries of normality, and people with whom you’d be courageous enough to defy conventions in this aggressively egalitarian society. In the panel this coming Friday, we’ve cherry-picked and tossed together a balanced group of quirky people who certainly have appreciation for the city's weirdness. Or the lack there-of. You be the judge.
