We’re back to Friday nights. Someone thought to move the tables outside. In the dimming light, we worked. Many things are on the task list.
We’re starting to work on a publication of sorts for How to Forget the Border Completely. It’s been a really clarifying decision to pull the strands of research we’ve been working on for the project together in a form that will allow the entire project to be read at once.
“One can understand the railroad in engineering terms, as the history of trains and tracks, or in architectural terms, as stations and freight yards, or in urban planning terms, as the right and the wrong side of the tracks, without fully capturing its social history as the production of space.” — from The Power of Place by Dolores Hayden
Among the railway cuts examined throughout my research, International Gardens came to be an example of how these types of environments could exist and be somewhat functional when community residents of the surrounding neighbourhood come fourth to maintain, clean up, use and care about them. International Gardens also shows the limits of community engagement without a proper long-term plan, multidisciplinary approaches, or youth integration, as well as the importance of city backing and complications due to lack thereof on initiative such as this.
We met twice on Thursday, and those meetings were after Michelle and I headed over to SB Contemporary Art to finally check out “On Your Mark” (a great exhibition featuring work by many of our friends) and talk about how we could partner in some way on Homework: Infrastructures & Collaboration in Social Practices.
Back at the Ecohouse to try to get the plan together to work on a video we’ve been tossing around for a while — final decisions have been elusive, so we put it on hold for now. Instead, we headed out to the front lawn and reminded ourselves of the what we can do with How to Forget the Border Completely.
Executing these projects is just a matter of carving out a day … we spend time planning, testing, experimenting, brainstorming because we know we’re more curious together and our collective curiosity is the driver for every one of these projects. It’s not about the solutions, it’s about the questions.
Continue reading “BCL Report: May 5, 2011 (Big Books & Small Letters)”
This evening–during a regular BCL group meeting–Hiba, Kevin, and I made a one-off miniature version of the retroreflective CAFKA text installation happening this fall. This miniature is about 7 inches tall, a roughly 1:14 scale model of our proposed text installation. The best part about it is we made the entire thing in about 2-3 hours!
Today, a very brief summary of some things that I’ve been thinking about and noted over the last few weeks…
Above, a portal. Perhaps a cross-border portal. An under-used, long forgotten relic of a portal prototype. Cordoned off, waiting for a new route. Partington and Wyandotte on our side, where’s the related neighbourhood in Detroit? Maybe the portals we’ve been thinking about are more readily located than we’ve realized, or maybe this is all about something closer to what Rosina pointed out last week. I’m certain that it’s worth re-appropriating all kinds of infrastructures for our own imaginary impossibilities.
Down the street, a message from an anchor in the neighbourhood. Somehow this made me feel like things are going to be okay in this end of town — maybe that this hair salon sits steadily against the constant tide of rental units, impermanence — or maybe business is just really bad, but maybe, just maybe, this hand-written notice to passersby suggests that 19 years went by with some things really able to stay the same.
And across the river, a simple sign, retroreflective glory, the layout, the strangeness of nearly all type of informative signage, somehow these messages always make me ask more questions — that is, curiosity about the space between what this sign can tell me and the uncertainty of the missing information and details about just how to get back to where I started, a parking lot I can’t geographically place in my mind days after leaving my car and after hours of travel. Signs everywhere communicate with a strange grammar, commands and directions, and I’m continually interested in why I often have to reread signs so many times to try to ascertain exactly what they’re trying to get me to do.
Perhaps a summary was too generous. This is more just a collection, an attempt to annotate these photos before they’re long buried in a photo library and an attempt to try to think through some projects on the go and in the works.
The news of yesterday’s election was undoubtedly disappointing, but it still doesn’t stop me from rejoicing in the amount of progress that is happening on a national level, and on a municipal level.
On that note, Pina Ciotoli of WindsorEats posted a video documenting the beginning of a new initiative by the Ford City Community Garden.
The city is leasing a chunk of property on Drouillard Road to the community organization and work is already underway to develop it. It will be made available to the local neighbourhood to grow and foster it, and founder Steve Green is sure that it will become a positive meeting place where other ideas will flounder.
Other information can be found on the FCCG Facebook page.
Things are still happening, make no mistake. This election proved that determined communities and groups can have their say and break ground.
It takes time, but there is strength in numbers.
Photo taken by David Schalliol.
Lee Rodney teaches one of the best courses at the University of Windsor, Border Culture. I took the course in the fall of 2010 and wrote a book: The Creation of Place in Abandoned Railway Cuts in Windsor.
The book serves as documentation and comparative analysis of three specific forgotten spaces in downtown Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Each of these are former sites of railway lines that ran across the Detroit River into Michigan at the height of industrialization in the first quarter of the twentieth century, but are now closed up dead ends and dead zones, unlit at night and undetectable from street view due to their below street level geography.
These spaces have a transient quality, as people exist in them only while passing through, usually as quickly as they can in order to reach a safer location. The contents of this book are based on my own personal experience in and around these spaces as a young adult white female artist, including historical research on the areas as well as references from multiple disciplines including activism, art, urban planning, geography, design, visual culture, gender and feminist studies. The invisible borders embedded within the fabric of these hidden, forgotten underused and misused spaces is examined.
Over the course of the next month, I will be posting chapters of the book with images on a weekly basis. However, I would like to introduce the book by providing some info and context around what I was reading prior to and during the research phase of this project.
So, without further adieu, a few books that informed my book:
Continue reading “The Creation of Place in Abandoned Railway Cuts in Windsor: 1/4 Intro”
Over three days this week, we got a lot done. And, as I write this, stuff is still getting done. This is why collaboration is such a valuable model for art practice.
But, it’s not just about getting stuff done, it’s the challenges, the insights, the novel perspectives that can be brought up around a table that push the work forward. With some of us having worked together for nearly three years, we can anticipate one another and move ideas and projects that much further along because there’s a context, there’s a history, there’s a resonating understanding of what we can do together.
Collaboration FTW.
Continue reading “BCL Report: End of April, 2011 (the Art of Planning & Collaboration)”
While we’ve been imagining and devising our own portals for How to Forget the Border Completely, San Francisco artist Jeff Waldman has been creating his own type of imaginative gateway in an endeavour he’s called ‘The Happiness Project’.
Pictured above is Waldman’s first installation called ‘Shut In’, which features a couple interior locks, and a large keyhole that emits a strong light from within.
For one of my last projects with Sigi Torinus as part of my BFA degree I made an iphone App.
I was able to speed up a usually lengthy process by skipping over the coding portion of creating the app. This was made possible by using Buzztouch, a web-based content management software (CMS) out of Montery California that helps build iPhone and Android apps. Buzztouch provides tools that allow people to create mobile apps and provides a back-end database to support those apps over the long-term. They do both of these things for free, for anyone. The source-code that app owners download for each of their applications is released under an open-source license.