Fault Lines: Art in a City Built on Extraction

Explore ecology, public art, climate anxiety, and civic responsibility within systems built on consumption and displacement.
About this Event

Calgary is a city shaped by extraction. Oil, land, labour, capital, and rapid expansion have all left visible and invisible marks on the urban landscape. But as ecological instability intensifies, artists and cultural workers are increasingly asking what it means to create within systems built on consumption, displacement, and environmental contradiction.

This panel explores the intersections between ecology, public art, climate anxiety, and civic responsibility. How can art make visible the systems that cities are often designed to obscure? What does it mean to create work that responds to extraction while existing inside economies dependent on it? And how might artists imagine new relationships between land, infrastructure, community, and regeneration?

Bringing together artists, environmental organizers, and urban thinkers, Fault Lines examines public art as a potential vehicle for ecological imagination and collective action.

Speakers TBA

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BUMP Festival returns August 3–17, 2026, transforming Calgary through murals, sculpture, music, placemaking, and artistic dialogue. Running August 13–15, the BUMP Urban Art Conference is the festival's ideas hub—a three-day gathering of artists, thinkers, musicians, and cultural leaders exploring the forces shaping public art and the cities we share. Learn more at yycbump.ca and follow @yycbump on Instagram.