Goblin Market
Goblin Market is an artist’s economic lab inspired by the magical quality of fairytales and fables. This work is enabled through a place-to-place network of global creatives, each developing their responses to the increasingly volatile world in which we live.
Core Pillars
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Circular Mentorship
Artists learning from artists, building networks that grow over time.
We connect high-potential artists with mentors who have carved out sustainable creative paths—from fundraising experts to cultural entrepreneurs.Participants also share their insights back into the community, creating a living, evolving knowledge network where mentorship flows in all directions.
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Prototyping Abundance
Experimenting with creative ways to build a life in the arts.
Artists in our prototyping process design their own models for financial sustainability. With tools for business modelling, grant writing, and financial literacy, we are shifting the economic outcomes for artists away from scarcity and toward mutual and relational flourishing. -
Art in Every Neighbourhood
Bringing artistic imagination into public life.
Our program culminates in a free, public event where artists share the work they’ve developed with local communities. Instead of rigidly formatting talks and presentations, artists present their research outcomes in everyday spaces and unconventional community hubs, such as parks, storefronts, and offices, welcoming direct engagement from audiences.
As a collective effort, our goal is to reimagine artists’ financial sustainability through capacity building, alternative presentation formats designed for experimental art forms, and artist-led production networks rooted in translocality.
We achieve this by sharing our process and experiments with the public and inviting people of all walks of life into a temporary and fictitious world, where small acts of kindness and mischief can help us better relate to the world in which we live.
We occupy unconventional spaces that aren’t dedicated to artistic production “full time” to show that the future doesn’t need to be perfect to be worth inhabiting and made beautiful. With the knowledge we share, we cooperate and improvise with the spaces we are re-imagining despite many challenges.
Arts and culture bring communities together, creating beautiful and liveable environments. A sustainable artistic production process offers insights into new ways of exchanging, forming relationships, and creating value.
Goblin Market is a model that enables artists to prototype desirable economic models in the arts and share insights with audiences, fostering a more generous relationship with money, production, and resources during periods of widespread economic uncertainty.
Toronto Edition
In partnership with UKAI Projects and Friends of Allan Gardens, Goblin Market created two nights of magical exchanges where visitors traded jokes for art books, snacks for memories, and mapped their friendship journeys.
The artists welcomed over 300 visitors over the course of two nights. People offered not only money, but also attentive listening, deep engagement, and emotional responses to the artists’ works being shared.
“One of the people who sat down to watch my dance film was in tears by the end of it. This direct emotion is something I don’t ever get to see as a dancer on a stage.” Abbey Richens of The Meaningful Movement shared about being face-to-face with an audience.
Montréal Edition
In partnership with GU, Goblin Market transformed a former mechanics’ garage in Mile-Ex Montréal into three evenings of activities, each night built onto the next. Visitors from the neighbourhood wandered off on their daily errands and found themselves staying for hours, returning the next day for more. Many brought their art to exchange with the artists for memories and stories, a handful set up shop and offered their works for a price.
“I never imagined this space could be used like this,” one of the visitors who frequents GU, now a shared artists studio, shared with us, “I hope there will be more events like this to open creative spaces to the neighbourhood.”
Support
Featured in
Cultural Technologies Lab by UKAI Projects
Year
2025
Documentation
Nick Gallarza
Anna Arrobas
Seed Funding
Canada Council for the Arts
Partners
Friends of Allan Gardens, Toronto
GU, Montreal
Éditions in Space, Montreal
Co-creators of Goblin Market
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The Meaningful Movement
Abbey is a movement artist expanding into otherworlds of technology, community, and the visual. She’s devoted to space making and generating connections, which made Goblin Market especially attractive. There is so much more to learn about her creative identity, but under the lens of this project it’s important to her to see how weird wiggly ways can be supported as a social art form.
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“I use new kinds of technology to tell new kinds of stories.
I’m interested in science storytelling for Environmental futures and how homelessness intersects with Climate Justice. Climate change could force up to 216 million people to migrate within their own countries by 2050.
I stand with those who defy categorization. We are prototyping just futures in places that do not exist. For the people, they will one day be, for the liquid, the hybrid, the cyber, the unreal.”
-Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Artist Statement 2025 -
annais linares is a musician and eco-social practice artist improvising through voice, sound, play, delight and kin making. Cosmically-oriented, she explores reciprocity, relationality and gratitude for more than human beings (including goblins) in this project as a way to consider future artistic economies.
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My name is Emil Woudenberg, a working-class trans artist, designer and hacker from Toronto, residing in London. My practice focuses on zines, websites that explore the early internet, DIY and open-source publishing. I earned a Bachelor with Honours from York University and Sheridan College. I have worked with brands like Wetranser, Autodesk, and Roots and have exhibited at institutions like Temple Contemporary, Sam Fox School, East Side Projects, The Bentway, MOCA Toronto, Printed Matter's Art Book Fair, and Art Metropole. I have completed residencies with SuperHi Plus, Trinity Square Video, Digital Justice League, AkinxMOCA, and Whippersnapper Gallery.
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Luisa Ji is a creative strategist and cultural technologist working at the intersection of public imagination, digital transformation, and systems of care. With over a decade of global experience, she leads participatory programs that use storytelling, worldbuilding, and culturally-specific technological adaptations to help institutions navigate cultural and ecological volatility.
As Studio Director at UKAI Projects, Luisa has delivered initiatives across Canada, South Korea, Iceland, and the UK, supporting artits and emerging arts organizations transform their practices. Her background spans civic experience design, AI literacy, and cultural infrastructure, with speaking and workshop credits at Watershed (Bristol, UK), MUTEK (Montreal, CA), Société des arts technologiques (Montreal, CA), and Milieux Institute (Montreal, CA).
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Born in Waterloo, Ontario and currently living between many places, including Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, Tricia Enns (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist and designer who centers playful material and relational engagement. Their practice often generates counter-maps that explore themes of place, home and care. She has a Masters in Design and Computation Arts (Concordia; 2023); presented work at this year’s artch Emerging Contemporary Artists Festival (Montreal, 2024); has facilitated workshops and presented in numerous other cities including: Toronto, Cardiff, New York City, and Detroit, and is a co-founder of the international collective [per]mission to Play (2020).
Jess, Wendy, Maria, Nick, SCREWFACE TORONTO, The Meaningful Movement, Husna, Albéric, Jerry, Anna, Ulysse, Dora, Ilyse, Milen, Xige, KRUMP Alliance MTL, Taminator & more
Thank you for your support!
Jess, Wendy, Maria, Nick, SCREWFACE TORONTO, The Meaningful Movement, Husna, Albéric, Jerry, Anna, Ulysse, Dora, Ilyse, Milen, Xige, KRUMP Alliance MTL, Taminator & more Thank you for your support!
Goblin Market is a network of creatives from different disciplinary backgrounds. Our world is ever-growing. We talk about art money in radically (and comically) candid ways.
We are interested in collaborating with artists and creatives worldwide to explore innovative approaches to resourcing and sustaining artistic production and exchange.
We are seeking contributions from funders, venue partners, and businesses that want to make a lasting impact by building strong relationships with their local communities.
The question we get asked the most is “When is the next Goblin Market?”
Find out how you can support and contribute to the next Goblin Market by joining the network.
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https://goblin-market.ghost.io
