As per Jennifer's request in class yesterday, here is the text from my "Walking the City" movie.
Just to reiterate, I used a mini-DV camera to retrace last Wednesday two partial routes I took back in February 2009 and September 2008 as part of separate site-specific performance works in the DTES.
As de Certeau suggests, my attempts at capturing and recording a "nowhen" that has long since passed me by, was an interesting exercise in forgetting.
"It is true that the operations of walking on can be traced on city maps in such a way as to transcribe their paths (here, well-trodden, there very faint) and their trajectories (going this way and not that). But these thick or thin curves only refer, like words, to the absence of what has passed by. Surveys of routes miss what was: the act of passing by. The operation of walking, wandering, or 'window shopping,' that is, the activity of passers-by, is transformed into points that draw a totalizing and reversible line on the map. They allow us to grasp only a relic set in the nowhen of a surface of projection. Itself visible, it has the effect of making invisible the operation that made it possible. These fixations constitute procedures for forgetting. The trace left behind is substituted for the practice. It exhibits the (voracious) property that the geographical system has of being able to transform action into legibility, but in doing so it causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten." (Michel de Certeau, "Walking the City," 97)
Carrall to Cordova—September 30, 2008/January 13, 2010/August 7, 1971: Thinking, again, about the social groups left behind when host cities harness their particular urban aspirations to abstracted messages of Olympic inspiration: if human bodies can be engineered—via equipment vested or drugs ingested—to go “faster, higher, stronger,” then why can’t the places those bodies reside? This question was in part what informed my experience of local artist Althea Thauberger’s September 2008 site-specific performance event Carrall Street, in which she threw a one-night live art spotlight (quite literally) on a contact zone in the city that runs a scant six blocks—from the red brick buildings of historic Gastown, through the strewn hypodermics of Pigeon Park, to the gleaming real estate offices of Concord Pacific on the north side of False Creek—but that in that distance maps a fraught and polarising social history relating to the ethics of livability and the politics of development in Vancouver. Thauberger is known for performance based video and photographic works in which she collaborates closely with different social communities (Canadian soldiers and tree planters, US military wives, linguistic minorities in Northern Italy, conscientious objectors in Germany) to explore the dynamics of group consciousness and state control. For Carrall Street, Thauberger worked with community groups with varied interests in the area (housed and unhoused DTES residents, local service organisations, artists and theatre directors, politicians and city planners); together, they created both scripted and improvised scenes of social interaction in which the roles of performer and spectator, local denizen and curious passer-by would deliberately blur on a stretch of streetscape cordoned off and brightly illuminated like a film set. For me, the piece’s plainly visible fictional scaffolding, and the highly telegraphed orchestration of its “scenes” (I was “interviewed” by two very manic “real estate agents”) threw into relief the different performance publics (between business owners and low-income residents, artists and activists, tourists and addicts, security guards and the street homeless) that are daily negotiated at a very local street level. In the process, Thauberger brought out in ways often obscured by abstract policy discussions relating to the proposed revitalisation of the area, the historical connections between this particular street’s past (as a tavern-lined, working-class byway connecting Vancouver’s old port to Chinatown), present (as a thoroughfare traversed on one end by visiting tourists and local hipsters negotiating both the tack and trend of Gastown, and, on the other, by the homeless, addicted, and mentally ill citizens of the DTES), and future (as a showcase street targeted for a controversial clean-up and beautification in advance of the Olympics). Whether Carrall Street’s latest incarnation as a high-profile “Greenway Project” is designed to stimulate the economy of the area, as officials contend, or simply to provide more pleasant direct access from Gastown to the downtown portion of Vancouver’s famed pedestrian seawall for Olympic tourists and the affluent new residents that will hopefully follow in their wake, is open to debate. But along with the restoration of Pigeon Park’s concrete surface, the painting over of graffiti on adjacent walls, and the installation of new benches and tables, the erection of high-powered street lamps is probably a clue as to who is winning the contest between social engineering and the protection of civil liberties. And on view at the just-about-to-open SFU Woodward’s we have two new public art works that, like Thauberger’s piece, remind us there is a history to such contests: Stan Douglas’s photographic “Abbott and Cordova, 7 August 1971” (on permanent display in the interior courtyard of the building); and Ken Lum’s text-based “No Way” (on temporary display on the building’s new Audain Gallery Hastings Street façade).
Victory Square, Hastings and Cambie—now/forever/never: “Cities of the dead are primarily for the living.” (Joseph Roach)
Peter
