Coastal Camera Obscura
Anchored in the waters of False Creek with views to the last remaining undeveloped waterfront of Northeast False Creek, the camera obscura offers participants a multi-sensory experience, connecting with real time in the act of seeing a highly detailed reflection of the water and landscape that is both familiar and remarkable at the same time. Light entering a simple lens fitted within the dark, tent-like structure, projects a real-time image of the surrounding environment, where, upside down and backwards, it falls onto a screen. With distant viaducts turned on end, and the water rising, the elusive image conjures the conditions of the foreshore as a place of constant flux and asks what is, as yet, unseen?
THE FORESHORE: MELT | John Oliver and Carol Sawyer
Since the summer of 2016 John and Carol have been working on a series of musical investigations into water-related themes, including polar ice melt, acid rain, and most recently, the foreshore of False Creek. Sawyer draws on a wide range of text sources, including wikipedia entries, interviews, and romantic verse to create improvised melodies interspersed with quotes from art songs and popular music, in conjunction with Oliver’s real-time improvised soundscapes and electric guitar. Melt is an informal presentation of their work-in-progress.
The Foreshore: Session 17
Papalia will present on his last few years of practice-based research on the topic of organizing for accessibility and mutual aid. Papalia will discuss projects leading up to and including his recent conceptual work Open Access; a new, relational model for accessibility that sets a precedent for considerations of agency and power in relation to the disabling social, cultural, and political conditions in a given context.
Based on her work with Upper Fraser First Nations in natural resource management, Tung will discuss the tension between their interests and those of environmental assessment processes. Exploring what is made visible and invisible, and for who, Michelle will share her experience on how themes of access, connection, and translation can provide creative spaces to advance the interests of Aboriginal communities.
The Foreshore: Session 16
Based on her experience as a Stevedore and member of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Brooke will discuss some of the history of the union as well as how the shift toward exclusion and security in the ports and shipping industry obscures our understanding of the movement of goods, the people who do that work, and their experiences.
Lee Podesva will share some thoughts on ebbing as a means for developing a vocabulary of value that turns away from the principles of gain, growth, and accumulation, among other economic delusions. This discussion will also share very preliminary research on tides, especially low tides, to open up a space of practice that knits corporeal, terrestrial, and celestial contexts with social realities. Let us consider what an alternative vocabulary of value might look like. What forms might it take economically, aesthetically, psycho-spiritually?
The Foreshore: Session 15
In an approach to decolonization in tentacular thinking, an approach to staying with the trouble, making oddkin, and in a pitch darkness cast by the Enlightenment, Laiwan will speak nearby with recent research navigating creative practice that is, where and what is, distinct from human exceptionalism and instrumental logic.
Plowright will discuss his work with armed groups (some labelled ‘terrorists’), and the attempts to come to an understanding of them as human beings, rather than as monsters, criminals or deviants.
Laiwan is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and educator with a wide-ranging practice based in poetics and philosophy. Born in Zimbabwe of Chinese parents, her family immigrated to Canada in 1977 to leave the war in Rhodesia.
The Foreshore: Session 14
Ferreira da Silva will comment on what might become possible when thinking reaches beyond the limits of reflection. Reading Octavia E. Butler’s female characters, Dana (Kindred), Lauren Olamina (Parable of the Sower) and Anyanwu (Patternist Series) as black feminist poethical renderings of the Real, she explores the imagination’s capacity to explore the body’s hidden treasure, which is the otherwise of the world as we know it.
Chambers considers that describing dance as ephemeral calls its value into question. It is not only the erasure of embodied experience as a tool for cognition, but more importantly how it functions as a rich, living archive for personal and cultural history, ritual and resistance.
The Foreshore: Session 13
Kara Uzelman will present a new work, ‘Where the Necessary Tools Do Not Exist, the Thoughts in Question are Not Expressed and Not Even Conceived’.
Holly Ward will discuss her ‘Monument to the Vanquished Peasants’ (2016) a public intervention located on an empty lot at Broadway and Carolina and based on Albrecht Durer’s plans for a monument to commemorate the bloody Peasant Uprisings of 1525. Serving as an inquiry into the potential role of collective action and class solidarity the work considers Vancouver’s overheated and unsustainable real estate market in relation to the fate of serfs and their right to the commons.
The Foreshore: Session 12
Eric Fredericksen will discuss his interest in how art becomes public, and how sites become specific, through anonymous or publicized interventions, vandalism, parody, and time.
Dr. Cissie Fu will approach questions of political art in public space along three vectors–the aesthetics of taking a stance, the politics in social choreographies, and protest as an artistic gesture–towards teasing out the tensions between presentation and representation, while attending to the resonances between community and commutiny, in the 21st century.
The Foreshore: Session 11
ZOE KREYE creates inter-disciplinary art projects that explore transformation, collective experience and negotiations of public.
GUADALUPE MARTINEZ is an Argentine-Canadian artist based in Vancouver. She holds a BFA from IUNA and an MFA from UBC. With the support of a BC Arts Council´s Early Career Development Grant, she is currently developing her research in Performance Art and Pedagogy.
