THE FORESHORE: PART II, SESSION I
Carmen Papalia and Joulene Tse Parent will discuss issues of cultural accessibility and human rights in the city, including Tse’s ongoing research on the history of Indigenous workers on the waterfront, as well as Papalia’s 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.
THE FORESHORE: SESSION 19
Presented as part of Flotilla: National Conference of Artist Run Centres, this last Session of The Foreshore Part I is co-presented by Marie Burge and Journée sans culture. Burge will review the history and concrete engagement work of the PEI Working Group for a Livable Income to establish Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) as a formal public program in PEI. Journée Sans Culture will discuss the methods, aspirations, and challenges that have shaped the group’s activities since 2015.
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: 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 8
Vanessa Richards will lead a conversation-in-action on the reclamation of the body as instrument of change and song in common life.
Marcus Youssef will share his insights on how good activism needs good theatre. He’ll address how the process of collaborating across difference affects, challenges, and strengthens creative practice.
The Foreshore: Session 7
Buster Simpson will speak about how aesthetics can provoke curiosity, discovery and connections that reveal the multiple, sometimes conflicting layers of meaning intrinsic to place. In this way artists working in the public realm can provide a counter balance and edge to the proliferation of the notion of spectacle, such as “way finding”, “branding” and “identity packaging”.
The Foreshore: Session 6
Reflecting on texture: riparian to foreshore. Cecily Nicholson will talk on poetics entrenched in movement, studies that contribute to all sorts of connection, such as solidarity, and undoing, such as decolonization. “there can, of course, be no apolitical…” (Mohanty, 1984).
The Foreshore: Session 5
Koh will open a conversation with other producers about working between typical disciplines. The idea of interdisciplinarity or boundary-crossing may be quite fashionable academically, but actually attempting to make headway outside one’s field of specialization can be fraught with frustration — and filled with potential. Koh will speak to the feeling of being always “in-between” and her impulse to move her work outside of the gallery system, in the belief that it can make a bigger difference there.