Quality Time with Books & Imaginary Spaces

Friday night was especially fun. With next week being our first research report for How to Forget the Border Completely, we basically spent the evening casually going over some preliminary research, planning out some new directions, and getting more acquainted with the collection of border books next door.

Michelle brought a tourism Detroit magazine she picked up at Windsor Airport.

Danielle spends some time reading over the article — the proposed tourist things to do reveal a comically simple view of the city. Not that we expected much else, but it still provided some fodder to imagine writing about a view of the city that’s based more on everyday life than the bookends of ruin porn or this particular take on Motown (one that involves bypassing much of Detroit proper).

Danielle points out one of the more strange (and now-fading descriptions of Detroit), as the city that put the world on wheels. Danielle has also been working on some research looking at the limits one might be able to test while in the midst of a border-crossing scenario, while trying to unfold how internationally-networked security does and does not work.

Meanwhile, Josh diligently taking notes on one page of his sketchbook …

…with his proposed Ambassador-inspired walking bridge on the next. I’m anxious to see more of this next week at our research findings party.

Rosina flips through the tourism Detroit magazine … Michelle will be posting some scans from the magazine soon.

Hiba brought Memoirs of a Border City by Spike Bell. The book provides some incredible photos of not only Windsor and Detroit’s city infrastructure, but some great shots of the people who have come through this area.

We talked about the idea of creating some fictional histories based on these photos…

…Hiba is going to look into what else we might be able to pull from this book as inspiration (historical re-enactments, a timeline of fantastic border-city occurrences?). Basically, with Hiba and Michelle on the history portion of How to Forget the Border Completely, they’re going to start compiling some trajectories to drive the rest of our research.

We also had a visit from Meghan Macgillivray from St.Clair’s Interior Design program.

Her class is going to be creating some conceptual plans for large artist work spaces in downtown Windsor, I think out of the Armouries. She asked a ton of great questions that really had us wishing for this dream space. I think we’ll also be heading over to Detroit with Meghan in the coming weeks to connect with some new friends.

It was also interesting to understand how we actually work together and how we’d imagine working together more often if we could. And, that conversation actually led us to deciding to meet Thursday evenings as well as Fridays. We’ll keep Fridays as regular meeting/planning sessions, but Thursdays will be more of an open-studio / work time, whether it’s on BCL or our own stuff, just spending more time together in the same space seemed like a good idea.

We spent the last bit of the evening in the Border Bookmobile Reading Room.

We’re so incredibly lucky to be able to access all these books on the border …

Josh and Michelle flip through some historical books on the border.

Extra love and thanks to Border Bookmobile!!!

Michelle pulls out a flyer for a bicycle tour of the old Sandwich Streetcar Line.

She also finds another book with an incredible chapter title, “The Romance of Windsor.” I kind of feel like we’re going to use this for something we make eventually.

Rosina finds an old shot of the Armouries … this would be facing east on University Ave just east of Ouellette.

And Hiba finds an old photo of the Windsor Star’s building — those letters are amazing!!

Looking forward to Thursday already…

How to Forget the Border Completely is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.