I heard it first through the whisper network. It was maybe 2009. He was a famous radio personality. He hosted a popular arts and culture show on CBC, Canada’s national broadcaster. He used to be in a quasi-famous band. He started every show with an earnest essay-like utterance, speaking in soft, mellifluous tones directly to the heart, to the truth, of some matter of daily importance. Always erudite, he was a feminist, or at least knew how to virtue signal enough to pass. He was as woke as anyone else in 2009. I heard it first through the whisper network. He was “shitty” to women. Women in arts, culture and media across the country knew this for a long time, told one another to watch out for him, not to go on dates with him, not to be alone with him, not to work for him. No one ever specified exactly why, but we all knew. When Jian Ghomeshi’s reckoning came none of us were surprised.
Why do we whisper? I’ve seen lists posted in the bathrooms of gigs. Been told about assaults in hushed tones while out at a club. Been warned about guys to avoid as recently as two weeks ago.
Ghomeshi’s fall came nearly two years before #metoo and #timesup. Canada’s own Harvey Weinstein. In autumn of 2015 he abruptly made a long and rambling Facebook post citing jealous ex girlfriends, consensual kink and BDSM culture trying desperately to get ahead of the news that followed moments later, that he, one of the crown jewels of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, had been unceremoniously fired. The truth became a slippery fish. Women came forward of course, but their truths were not precise. They couldn’t remember the colour of the car he drove on the date when he punched them in the face, or justify why they emailed him a few days after their assault. They liked it. They wanted it. Or if they didn’t they were, at a minimum, opportunistic. Their truths did not constitute evidence, and the courts eventually found him not guilty.
Why do we whisper? Why do we tell the truth only to each other in hushed tones? In private places, lips to ear.
Who wants to hear the truth about the truth-teller? That monolithic identity that implies some kind of impeachability. That denies the intersectionalities of our existence, or only recognizes a singular set of power relations.
What happens when truth transcends the individual, when it lies within our collective experience? When our truths are held not by one mind but across the stories of many? When we are socialized to not recognize the truth of a situation? To call assault a “bad date” or just “bad sex.” To try to forget that it ever happened. These truths form a pit, a hole, a void, an absent part. A lacuna.
Our truth lies here, in this empty space between us.
An orange blanket, one of many, hangs on the wall, stark against the crisp, sterile white paint. The softness of the fleece material is apparent immediately, but the colour, garishly bright, seems to somehow diminish the comfort offered by this simple piece of fabric. This is not a blanket to sip coffee under, cozy on the couch on a Sunday morning, perhaps doing a crossword, or reading a novel. This is not a blanket to spread over a bed, to use in front of a fire, or lay out a picnic on. It serves another purpose entirely.
Orange is the colour in the middle of yellow and red, trapped between a warning and a demand. With a wavelength that falls between 585 and 620 nanometres it is the colour most easily seen against water or in lowlight. Perhaps this is why it is so closely associated with notions of safety, or its inverse, danger. Or, perhaps it is more accurate to say it is associated with a reprieve from or mitigation of danger, a life vest or a life raft doesn’t create an inherently safe environment, but it does offer some greater chance of surviving the perilous.
It would take too much out of me to tell you.
It’s so tiring to be alive here.
I don’t want to learn how to speak again.
Words, stitched on the blankets in black thread, speak to this other purpose; refer to some notion of the perilous. Words, spoken by Syrian refugees, heard by Egyptian-Canadian artist and translator, Yasmeen Nematt Alla, and transmuted into her artwork, Shock Blankets (2017). In the work Nematt Alla’s blankets, reminiscent of those carried by paramedics or distributed during emergencies, become stand-ins for the traumatized bodies of the refugees she works closely with as a translator. The words, spoken to Nematt Alla during intake interviews upon arrival in Canada, perform the collective and individual traumas of forced migration. This performance, or perhaps the necessity of it, clearly highlights the problematics of empathy as a decision making tool for migration policy. The need to generate empathy within a populous demands a constant performance, either of one’s trauma or one’s integration, to justify entry in the case of the former and one’s right to remain in the latter.
Ethics or empathy? Logic or emotion? What do we need to recognize the inherent humanity of all peoples? How can we understand trauma without the demand to constantly re-perform it? Perhaps the challenge lies in the dual nature of trauma, that it is both individual and collective, often simultaneously. That it resides both in our discrete bodies and the body politic. There is some comfort here, that our traumas can be shared, that their weight can be shifted, that they can move from being individually held to collectively supported, but this is perhaps an uneasy comfort, like that provided by a garishly orange blanket. Comfort trapped between a warning and a demand.
It’s beautifully sunny as Beth Anne and I stand in silent contemplation on the balcony of the Watchmen’s cabin at Sɢ̠ang Gwaay looking across the water to Kunghit, the last landmass of any significant size in the 400 island archipelago that makes up Haida Gwaii, the islands of the people. Bounded by the still disputed Dixon Entrance to the north and the treacherously shallow Hecate Strait to the East, these islands hang off the edge of the North American continental shelf, a transitory space between continent and ocean, the last land before Japan. It’s no wonder to me that the Haida worldview situates their territory on the edge of things, envisioning it to be where the veil between perceptible and un-perceptible worlds merge, where bears become human and humans become bear, where trickster Raven released the First People from the giant clam shell that both gestated and imprisoned them.
“Looks like you’re staying here tonight,” says Jay, one of the Watchman, breaking the brooding space Beth and I have created. We both sigh a little in relief. Our clients, novice paddlers now on the 3rd day of an 8-day sea kayaking expedition, sit blithely in the cabin enjoying their lunch, unaware of the building wind and seas that have Beth and I concerned. Overnight stays on Sɢ̠ang Gwaay, a UNESCO world heritage site that hosts an abandoned Haida village with over 30 still standing mortuary poles, are expressly forbidden, except in circumstances like these where the winds make it too dangerous to leave. Secretly I think we’re both relived that Jay made the decision for us. Beth heads into the cabin to tell the group we’re staying put, and I head off down the winding forest path to the pocket beach we arrived on to secure our boats for an overnight stay. Weather days are a strange puncutiation in the normally busy life of a guide, full of an uneasy stillness and far too much time. When I get to the beach there’s a Parks zodiac tied up and three wardens sharing lunch, they wave me over calling with a knowing smirk, “you can’t be that busy today, it’s not like you’re going anywhere!” and “I remember you, you where here last summer too, weren’t you?” Haida Gwaii is like that. It’s a place where people remember you.
Over cold salmon and bread we shoot the shit, talking about how our seasons have been going so far, how unnaturally dry it is, where the best fishing spots are and the precious secrets of how to catch halibut. Brian, who lives in Masset during the winter tells me about a storm that took the roof off of his house, Beau laughs saying that’s why he spends his winters in Europe. The conversation shifts to Beau’s next trip, which museaums and institutions he’ll be meeting with this time, what cities he’ll be visiting. Barcelona. London. Paris. Copenhagen. Lisbon. Frankfurt. Last year he went to Australia too. “We’re focusing on the human remains first,” he says “we’ll work on repatriating the rest of it later.” This warm and frank conversation brings the remarkable reality of this place into perspective. That so many poles remain standing in the ground here, when so many others sit divorsed from their context in instititions around the world- pulled down with ropes, or hacked apart with chainsaws – seems almost miraculous.
This is problem of babies and bathwater. How do we know what to keep and what to discard? When a way of thinking, a system of constructing reality, or the dispositif that allows for the creation of a certain commonsense causes irrevocable harm to some while making irrevocable and lasting gains for others, how can we acknowledge the gains without diminishing the accompanying losses? That such theories of the efficacy of art exist to contest each other hardly seems to matter when one creates the conditions to house the cultural properties of those othered by power, and the other is used to justify their continued holding. When the notion of aesthetic distance creates the conditions for the misrecognition of an object central to the legal and historical systems of a culture as merely art, or even worse as merely decoration, and allows for it to be carted across the globe, displayed for those with the privilege of an indifferent gaze, does it matter what was gained through its inception in another field? When will we leave behind the patriarchal notion that impersonal effects are more important than personal affects?
Beau tells me that he takes bentwood boxes with him on his trips, made by the children in Skidegate using traditional techniques: heating, steaming and bending a single plank of cedar to make the body of the box, stitching the seam with cedar roots, fitting the base and lid snuggly. When Beau succedes in his negotiations for the return of the bones of his ancestors from their uneasy institutional rest he places them in these boxes with care, bringing them back to be reclaimed by their territory, on the edge of things, in the space between preceptable and un-preceptable worlds.
This text began in a room in the sky. If I walked out the window I would drop 8 floors. There are no nets.
What does a neighbourhood look like when all its power relations are flattened? Is this even possible? Is the best we can do to strip them bare? Expose them to the light so that the invisible strings that choreograph our movements become visible and exposed? What does it take to create a reciprocal feedback loop with power? To pull or push back and have that gesture make an impact? What happens when we name the strings that guide us?
Physiologically agonists are muscles that apply force, in the form of a contraction, to create movement.
Cumberland is an idyllic town almost half way up the 460km length of Vancouver Island, the largest of the Islands that sit in the Pacific, off the west coast of British Columbia. Popular today with mountain bikers and craft beer enthusiasts, the hamlet’s main drag features cute turn-of-the-century structures, originally built to house workers from the local mine, now tastefully updated with ikea soft-close kitchen cabinets, and plumb-in espresso machines. Every July 27th, Cumberland residents gather together to performatively rebury its most famous adopted son, labour organizer Ginger Goodwin. Shot in the head by a 30 caliber rifle on a mountain that now bears his name on that day in 1918, ostensibly for dodging the draft – Goodwin had famously declared in the previous years that the workers of one country should not be employed to kill the workers of another country under the influence of a capitalist conflict – Goodwin’s death in this somewhat backwater mining town sparked a general strike in Vancouver, the first action of it’s kind in Canada. While the Vancouver strike lasted only a day; the collective action paved the way for the much longer Winnipeg General Strike – spanning 6 weeks in May and June 1919. Coming to a bloody and violent end with the brutal suppression of the strikers by police on July 21st the action won no immediate concessions, but has been credited with seeding the beginnings of the social democratic political tradition in Canada.
Dan Campbell, the officer that shot Goodwin on the slopes of the mountain that now bears his name, was charged with manslaughter over the affair, charges which where later dropped in light of his claims of self-defense.
In chemistry an agonist is an agent that causes an action, unlike it’s counter-part the antagonist, an agent that prevents or blocks action. Heroin is an agonist. Naloxone is an antagonist. Sometimes it’s beneficial to be antagonistic.
What does a neighbourhood look like when all its power relations are flattened? Is this even possible? Is the best we can do to strip them bare? Expose them to the light so that the invisible strings that choreograph our movements become visible and exposed? What does it take to create a reciprocal feedback loop with power? To pull or push back and have that gesture make an impact? What happens when we name the strings that guide us?
Who gets hurt? How long does it take for us to remember them?
1. I wrote this while flying on an airplane. I had a window seat, 8A. I have always loved watching the landscape slip by from the air – the pale and faded greens and browns punctuated by towns and settlements, clouds and the blue-grey of the ocean, all merging into what author Rebecca Solnit calls “the blue of distance.” I wonder how our perspective of the planet has changed since we gained the ability to view it from above. To view it from a distance. I remember the first time I flew over Vancouver Island, my homeland, and a contested territory shared by many nations. From the air I realized what I had imagined to be an endless blanket of trees, more trees than are truly comprehendible by the human mind, was nothing more than a slick façade. The logging companies had left thin strips of forest along the roadside – strips just thick enough to hide the clear-cuts and slash-and-burn pits that made up the majority of the scarred landscape.
2. Scene From my Window, mounted in January 2017, was my curatorial project WNDW Gallery’s 4th exhibition. Comprised of 7 hours of footage shot by artist Stefan Sollenius on an iphone through the window of a tree-planting crew truck over the course of 3 summers, and compiled by Sollenius and media artist Ana Carolina von Hertwig, the work layers individual video clips on-top of one another, playing both forward and in reverse simultaneously, creating a mesmerizing cycle of legibility and abstraction, green-blue-brown moving compositions that crystalize into landscape only to slip away again moments later.
Sollenius and I first met in Spring 2012, in a sculpture class at Emily Carr University, but we really got to know each other during a 6-credit writing course in the Autumn semester of the same year where he wrote very eloquently about his time working as a tree-planter. Our relationship developed over discussions of our observations about the rampant industrialization of Canadian wilderness, from our respective positions of wilderness guide and silviculture worker. We often talked together about the flow of capital in the form of raw materials from Coastal British Columbia east to Asia, the historical movement of sea otter pelts, the contemporary movement of entire trees, and the proposed movements of natural gas and bitumen from the oil-sands through contested pipelines projects to tidewater.
3. A letter to Rita Wong, Poet and Vancouver resident recently incarcerated for 28 days for violating a court injunction to peacefully protest the proposed twinning of the Trans-Mountain pipeline at the Westridge Terminal on Burnaby Mountain, in Vancouver BC.
Dear Rita,
Firstly, I’m very sorry I didn’t write earlier. Your sentencing and incarceration coincided with my trans-Atlantic move – I wanted to get a letter to you while you were still in prison, but it just didn’t happen. But that is about me, and this is about you.
Thank You. Thank you for sitting on the mountain that day and refusing to move. Thank you for continuing to insist that we respect the territories we find ourselves living on as guests, as settlers, as allies and most importantly as co-conspirators. Thank you for continuing to insist, that we conform to the laws of this land and not just the laws of our colonial state. When these laws are in conflict, I agree with your stance that indigenous law takes precedence, and your statement to this effect was as moving and as eloquent as your poetry. Thank you for using your time in Alouette to highlight the lived reality of being incarcerated in Canada, and for again being an ally and co-conspirator, this time with those caught up in the carcerial cycle.
Thinking of you and everyone on the mountain and thank you for being there while I can’t.
4. (Lim, J. “MMIWG inquiry calls on resource sector to address risks from work camps.” ipolitics.ca. published June 3, 2019, accessed October 14, 2019. https://ipolitics.ca/2019/06/03/mmiwg-inquiry-calls-on-resource-sector-to-consider-risks-from-work-camps/)
A national inquiry is calling on resource industries and regulators to consider the safety and security of Indigenous women and girls at all stages of project planning and development, amid long-standing concerns over the connection between work camps and sexual violence. Among the 231 calls for action in the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls’ final report are five recommendations for the resource-extraction and development industries.
So-called “man camps” — temporary housing set up for predominantly male workers that accompany mining, oil and gas development projects — have been considered a safety threat to local women, particularly for Indigenous women and girls who live in more rural and isolated parts of Canada. The 1,200-page final report officially released this morning stated the national inquiry had heard testimony and examined evidence that suggested resource projects can drive spikes in violence against Indigenous women and girls… …A 2017 report by the Firelight Group, a consulting firm that conducts research in Indigenous communities, found a 38 per cent increase in sexual assaults reported to the RCMP during the first year of construction on an industrial project in Fort St. James, B.C. The report also noted a “sharp increase” in sex trafficking in Alberta’s Fort McMurray and Grande Prairie which it connected to the rise in “increased incomes of young men, social isolation from families and relationships, and the hypermasculine context of camps.”
5. The last time I spent anytime in Northern Alberta it was over a decade ago. I was working for The Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival, screening films about mountaineering, rock-climbing, skiing and mountain culture on a tour across Western Canada. In an attempt to offset our carbon footprint while driving films all over BC and Alberta we bought a 1984 Mercedes’s Turbo-diesel sedan, and converted it to run on waste vegetable oil. In a ridiculous fit we decided to call the car George Oilwell. For more than 2 years George was a fairly trusty companion, despite the odd break-down or two, and the fact he temperamentally refused to start if the engine was too warm. This meant either very long breaks, or taking advantage of the fact I could remove the key from the ignition without turning the car off, and leave him idling while I took a break. I spent a lot of time learning about how to purify vegetable oil once its life in the fryer is done, and also leaving caches of oil with friends and acquaintances spread across Western Canada. At one point I remember leaving Vancouver with over 300 l of treated-vegetable oil, my trunk and foot wells all full of the viscous golden substance. Apparently when Rudolf Diesel’s first engine experiments designed to run on coal-dust failed, he switched to designing for Vegetable Oil, hoping its ubiquity would encourage farmers to adopt his machines- the idea of combusting plant-based oils in by no means new. The only downside, other than having to lug hundreds of litres of oil around with me everywhere, is that the fuel becomes an index of its prior life, permeating the car with the scent of burgers, fries, fish and chips, curry joints and doughnuts. I gained at least 10 kilos driving that car.
6. It’s late July 2019. I’m sitting in PLOT, a project space at Access Gallery in Vancouver BC that is currently housing my friend Caitlin’s curatorial project Far Afield in its current iteration, entitled “Under the Beating Sun, From Summer to Summer.” We are at Oakland-based artist Elia Vargas’ performance entitled “Oil Rituals for the Future #35.” Vargas is currently a PhD candidate at UC Santa Cruz, and his research looks into the potentiality of oil as media, mining the history of human relationships to the substance to look for ways forward within our petro-obsessed world. He is talking about the relationship pre-colonial American cultures had with oil, talking about the rampant spiritualism related to early oil exploration, talking about the potentiality of oil as a material during its early life as a commodity. He is holding a bottle of crude oil in his hand, telling us that in the wild-west of snake-oil sellers and unchecked medical claims the notion that crude, and particularly Pennsylvania Sweet Crude (with its very high paraffin content), was often sold as a scalp treatment. He is telling us the only way he could get his hands on raw crude was to buy this product, which is unbelievably still being produced and sold today. He is looking for a volunteer to receive a free scalp treatment. When he uncaps the bottle and hands it around for us to sniff, I have a startling flashback to my childhood, to my mother washing my hair at least once a month with this very same shampoo. After Vargas’ performance I immediately call my brother to confirm my memory – and he agrees, although neither of us can remember the reason why. My father thinks its because she thought it would take chlorine our of our hair that accumulated from our weekly trips to the swimming pool. When we ask my mother about it she claims it never happened.
7. I finished writing this text while doing laundry. 2 loads. One (30 degrees) delicates – mostly underwear and silk, the other for everything else (40 degrees). I hung everything up to dry in the drying cabinet shared by our building. While I was folding clothes I remembered hearing once that the dinosaurs farted themselves into extinction. That the largest creatures that ever walk the earth produced so much methane that they affected the climate so much it eventually became inhospitable. This is probably not true, or maybe I heard it in a Jurassic Park movie? In any case the dubious nature of this anecdote is irrelevant – the dinosaurs couldn’t have known what they where doing. And even if they did they couldn’t have stopped. I wonder if someone invented this story to make themselves feel better about they ways in which the anthropocene will leave a lasting mark on this earth. I wonder if I invented this story.
The first paragraph of Beatriz Colomina’s Privacy and Publicity in the Age of Social Media ends with a declarative statement.
We can no longer think of distinct spacesfor work, play, private life, and rest
As with all statements of this kind, I wonder this: Who exactly is We? In Colomina’s framing We certainly includes those living in 24/7 culture, young New York City professionals, and perhaps users of social media, though this We seems only to represent those with autonomous control of their labour, and while such autonomy is certainly gained through the networks of social media, not all users hold such privilege. While Colomina focuses on the what and the where of this transformation, I prefer to consider aspects of the who: Whose labour makes this space possible? Who has access and who is excluded? From this perspective it seems that, despite its democratic potential, the digital revolution has created new forms of stratification in society, where those functioning at the apex of the capitalist chain can reply to emails while lounging on high-thread count sheets, oblivious to the labourers creating the conditions for their new domestic workspace.
But, as Colomina asks, how did we get here? How did labour, and specifically privileged labour, shift from the home to the office and back again. Colomina’s historical reference, Walter Benjamin’s famous Louis Phillppe, or the Interior, is certainly referring to a privileged class of worker it’s ponderings; Benjamin’s “private individual” is surely male, white, affluent and of European-descent. Indeed, while Colomina declares “Industrialization brought with it the eight-hour shift,” I would reply that in actuality the Labour movement won such concessions, and that those fighting for them had little access to the differentiated work, life and social spaces of Benjamin’s “private individual.”
I suspect that the differentiation of space under Louis Philippe that Benjamin discusses has more to do with the entry into the European workforce of the aristocratic and upper classes, than any kind of universal experience. While managing the estate, or perhaps a few investments from home would be deemed acceptable, any further participation in a capitalist sphere from home would certainly be deemed tres gauche. In the intervening two centuries, as Colomina aptly depicts, the capitalist project has so successfully recentred human life around the notion of “work” that such separations are hardly necessary anymore. Today even the last remaining bastions of decaying aristocratic systems are said to “work” – the British Monarchy’s “working royals” being perhaps the prime example. The new privileged, and perhaps even more importantly fashionable, worker, who Colomina models after Hefner, Capote or Neutra, invites the tentacles of late-capitalism into the home, and even into the bedroom with little concern that such action will have detrimental social effect.
In Colomina’s depiction Hefner, Capote and Neutra become a curious and antipodal reflection of what is perhaps the ultimate expression of that most fashionable of 19th century European man, the flaneur. The gentleman at leisure becomes the gentlemen at leisure-work, exchanging their lobster on a lead for loungewear. What, or perhaps more poignantly who, is missing from this depiction? Who brings Capote his sherry? Who washes Hefner’s silk pajamas? Who is making Neutra’s son breakfast? Certainly this work cannot be completed from the “high-performance bed”. This underlying armature of supportive labour, the work that makes the high-performance bed possible, much like the underlying labour that supports the digital realm itself, is obscured by the glory of the modern-work-domestic-site or the glow of the screen.
