2026 Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium: “Artists On/Off the Record: Living Archives and Embodied Memory”
University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada
Organization: International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation
The 2026 Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium: “Artists On/Off the Record: Living Archives and Embodied Memory”
ImprovLab, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada
September 10-11, 2026
Deadline for Abstracts: May 31, 2026
The International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI) invites proposals for presentations at our annual interdisciplinary international colloquium, held alongside the Guelph Jazz Festival. Featuring panel discussions, debates, performances, workshops, keynote presentations, and critical conversations among researchers, artists, and audiences, the colloquium fosters a spirit of collaborative, boundary-defying inquiry and dialogue, and an international exchange of cultural forms and knowledges.
Titled “Artists On/Off the Record: Living Archives and Embodied Memory,” this year’s colloquium asks:
• In what ways can/do artists engage with archival materials—those held in institutional and community archives as well as those typically referred to as ephemera—to interrogate the aesthetic and political dimensions of cultural memory?
• How can/do they generate new, future-oriented archives through creative practice, research, and community-based work?
• To what extent can/do they enact and expand repertoires of embodied memory to build and sustain community?
The 2026 edition of the Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium aims to create space for collective reflection on the notion of archival heritage as a dynamic, open-ended process. More specifically, it seeks to examine how archives are constituted, activated, contested, and transformed by—and in the hands of—artists engaged in improvisatory worldmaking.
We invite proposals for presentations and creative works that consider archives comprehensively, as both accrued and curated, inherited and self-generated, but also living and embodied. We welcome submissions that speak to both an academic audience and a general public, as well as reflect diverse perspectives, community engagement, experimental practices, and innovative methodologies, all of which are needed to see beyond the present, into its possibilities.
Submissions should include an abstract of 250–300 words as well as a short biography of 150 words.
Deadline for abstracts and bios: May 31, 2026.
For submissions and inquiries, please contact Dr. Eric Fillion at jazzcoll@uoguelph.ca.
Dr. Eric Fillion