Category Archives: Activism or Protest

Lisa Myers, and from then on we lived on blueberries for about a week (2013)


Lisa Myers, ‘and from then on we lived on blueberries for about a week’, made for MAP Spring 2013, 6’44” (animation with assistance from animator Rafaela Kino). This work pays homage to an on-foot journey her grandfather undertook to flee Shingwauk Residential School in Ontario. Myers herself once did an 11-day walk tracing the route of her grandfather’s journey.

“When he was a boy, artist Lisa Myers’s Anishinaabe grandfather walked some 250 kilometres along Northern Ontario railroad tracks for one reason: to escape Shingwauk Residential School in Sault Ste. Marie.

Myers recorded her grandfather’s account of this journey during a conversation with him in the 1990s—and she listened it to it many times before she made the decision, in 2009, to walk the route he’d described alongside her cousin Shelley Essaunce and her nephew Gabriel.

Myers and the Essaunces took 11 days to walk the 250-kilometre journey.

“After this walk,” Myers writes in a 2016 Walter Phillips Gallery exhibition essay titled “Rails and Ties,” “I began thinking about how to locate myself within my grandfather’s story, and about how I wanted to convey its different iterations. One thing that struck me was that he survived by eating blueberries growing along the tracks. He said, ‘and from then on we lived on blueberries for about a week.’”

The latter quotation from her grandfather became the title for a video installation by Myers—one related to trauma, food, walking and survival—that was on view at Artcite in Windsor this spring as part of the exhibition “Walks of Survivance.”

“Instead of always repeating his story, [walking] was a way of finding myself in that story,” Myers told curator Maya Wilson-Sanchez a few years ago. And by walking, Myers also told Wilson-Sanchez, she was “able to bring the places in the story to life.”

“When I recall walking across the railway bridge over the Mississauga River north of Lake Huron,” Myers writes in “Rails and Ties,” “I think about my fear of the elevation, and how gusts of wind unsteadied my steps. Finding my footing meant looking down and seeing the river rushing 50 feet below the railway ties of that century-old steel bridge. The Mississagi River flows into Lake Huron, the railway crosses the river, and from my grandfather’s account of his journey this was the first place (after leaving school) where he heard his language and saw Anishinaabe people cooking and sharing food down by the river. They welcomed him, and fed him.”

During her walk in her grandfather’s footsteps, Myers also heard stories of other youth who had escaped the way he had. Ultimately, her works on this theme—which include both abstract and map-like prints made with blueberry pigments, as well as documentation of wooden spoons stained with blueberries she has shared with others, also speak to a complex intertwining of group and individual journeys, of landscapes that are real and imagined.

“The spoons represent sharing, sustenance and the gathering of people,” Myers writes. “When I line these spoons up side by side, the reddish-blue marks continue from one utensil to the next, recalling an imaginary topography or horizon line created by the trace of berry consumption.”

In this sense, walking and artmaking become different ways of tracing and “straining” an experience.

“Straining to survive, or even to be accepted, means the less digestible parts of stories need to be retained, traced, remembered and told,” Myers writes.

Of course, Myers is not alone in thinking about walking as a mode of Indigenous resistance and survival.

“There’s the water walk that is happening, and which is not directly art-related,” Myers said in a phone interview. “But I think Indigenous artists are wanting to also acknowledge that these forms of activism are happening. There was walking from a community in Nunavut, [Idle No More] walking to Ottawa to make a point.”

“Walking to safety is a really important narrative in talking about survival, and surpassing survival to freedom,” says “Walks of Survivance” curator Srimoyee Mitra.” [credit]


Lisa Myers, ‘Blueberry Spoons’, 2010, video, 7’37”

Camille Turner, Miss Canadiana Heritage and Culture Walking Tour (2011)

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Camille Turner, “Miss Canadiana Heritage and Culture Walking Tour” (2011)

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“In Miss Canadiana Heritage and Culture Walking Tour, Miss Canadiana acts as a tour guide to the hidden Black histories of Toronto’s Grange neighbourhood. You can View the photo Album here”

““For me, walks really bring awareness to the places that we’re in in a completely different way than any other types of artwork that I’ve seen,” says Toronto artist Camille Turner. “It really makes people see the space in a completely different way, and I think that’s really powerful.”

Turner would know—after creating her soundwalk Hush Harbour, which guides participants on a walk near King and Front Streets in Toronto to reimagine the city’s Black past and to remap Blackness onto the urban landscape, Turner conducted an online survey to get feedback on the piece.

“[The Hush Harbour participants] said they were looking in a new way at the space they walked through every day,” says Turner. “So that way of transforming space is something that walks really do well.”

Currently, Turner is working at one of the formal limits of walking-based art—trying to transform the mobile Hush Harbour walk experience into an installation for the Theatre Centre in Toronto.

“There are limitations to walks as well,” Turner notes, “because people have to come to the place where the walk is made to experience it. I’m trying to uncouple that, so it can be experienced in other places, and travel.”

Turner’s understanding of the power of walking to transform experiences of place started well outside of the art realm.

“I’ve probably gone on lots of different walks, and not necessarily ones that are done by artists,” Turner says, saying one of her favorites was “an amazing walk with Ed Mirvish and Sam the Record Man around Kensington Market” in the 1980s.

Perhaps it is the impact of such experiences that drives Turner to imagine how to make the remapping of space and reclaiming of place available via live, in-person walks, and transform that into something downloadable and reproducible.

For example, Turner has proposed that this year she create a digital version of one of the first art walks she ever did: her Miss Canadiana Heritage and Culture Walking Tour.

Originally performed live in 2011, the piece has Turner, in her Miss Canadiana persona, act as tour guide to hidden Black histories of Toronto’s Grange neighbourhood. (The area is home to the Art Gallery of Ontario and OCAD University, among other canon-building institutions.)

“I am going to do it as a Google Doc so people can actually do it as a self-guided walking tour,” says Turner, who will also remount the work live once more in November 2017.

There may also be a digital or downloadable sound component of the new version of this walk. Turner herself is a great admirer of sonic-walk pioneers like New York’s soundwalk.com, which has created a 9/11 memorial walk with Paul Auster, among other pieces.

“I also really love the sonic walks, because for me, it’s like time travel—you can bring people backward and forward in time,” Turner says. “I use binaural microphones that I put in my ears, so [the recording is] picking up space exactly as I hear it.”

And it’s not just sound technology that is surfacing in Turner’s recent work—in Freedom Tours, a recent collaboration with Cheryl L’Hirondelle for LandMarks2017, Turner organized boat tours around the Thousand Islands area to provide a different kind of mobile storytelling experience. (Turner and L’Hirondelle are also working together on a walk for June 24 in Rouge National Park near Toronto as part of LandMarks2017.)

Ultimately, it is the ability to intervene in history that draws Turner to walking in her practice—especially when it comes to surfacing Black and African experience in spaces constructed by the canon, and by society at large, to read as white or European. (Meetings of past and present Black history also come to the fore in some of Turner’s works in other media, like the combination of contemporary photo-portraiture and historical “runaway slave” notice texts in her series Wanted, co-created with Camal Pirbhai and opening in “Every. Now. Then.” at the Art Gallery of Ontario on June 28.)

“Walking can be an intervention into history—it’s a way of practicing public history, and in bypassing the institutions that create history, you can be a producer of history,” says Turner. “I really like these kinds of ways of working, of intervening in space and in the way that power is kind of written itself in the land.” [credit]

 

Carmen Papalia, White Can Amplified (2015)

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Carmen Papalia, “White Cane Amplified” (2015)

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“Realized in East Vancouver in 2015 as part of the experiential research that Carmen Papalia undertook prior to his collaboration with Sara Hendren’s Adaptive and Assistive Technologies Lab at Olin College of Engineering, White Cane Amplified is an improvised process in which Papalia replaces his detection cane with a megaphone that he uses to identify himself and hail support from passers-by. An effort to reclaim the social function of the white cane, the process is an opportunity for Papalia to practice accessibility and disclosure as an ongoing exchange with his community.”

Robert Watts and students, The Human Celebration (1969)

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Credit: Hendricks, Geoffrey. Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia and Rutgers University 1958-1972. Rutgers University Press (2003).

The Mayday Protest (1971)

Mayday Protest 1971 Poster

Mayday Protest 1971 Poster

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“The 1971 May Day protests brought tens of thousands of anti-war demonstrators to Washington D.C., the culmination of weeks of anti-war activity in the city that spring. The announced goal of the protests was to disrupt the basic functioning of the federal government through nonviolent action; the immediate focus of the protesters was on snarling traffic to prevent government employees from getting work on Monday, May 3. Their slogan was If the government won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government.

By the end of May 3, more than 7,000 Vietnam war protesters had been arrested across the city; 5000 more were arrested on May 2, 4 and 5. These represent the largest mass arrests in U.S. history. Ultimately, however, only 79 people were convicted of any offense related to the protests.

In a Washington Post article dated September 23, 2019, longtime political organizer and historian L.A. Kauffman called the event the most influential protest you’ve never heard of and noted that It contributed to helping end the Vietnam War and pioneered a new model of organizing that would shape movement after movement in the decades to come.”

The First Secession, Ancient Rome (494 BCE)

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Lucius Sicinius Vellutus organized the first of the Pleb strikes. Source: (quora.com)

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“In 494 BC, the plebs were fed up with the senate passing tax laws that increased the debt of the working class without offering them useful services in return. Lucius Sicinius Vellutus, a working-class pleb, suggested that the workers unite in a walk-off to protest the doings of the senate. In large numbers, the plebs walked out of the city and congregated on the Mons Sacer (“sacred mountain”) while Vellutus and others negotiated with the patricians.

The strike was a rousing success, resulting in the expungement of many plebs’ debts and the creation of the Tribune of the Plebs, the first government position to be occupied by a member of the plebeian class.”

These early strikes show civil rights have always been a human interest.

Bloody Sunday, Selma to Montgomery March (1965)

Edmund Pettus Bridge

Edmund Pettus Bridge

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“On March 7, 1965, the civil rights movement in Alabama took an especially violent turn as 600 peaceful demonstrators participated in the Selma to Montgomery march to protest the killing of Black civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson by a white police officer and to encourage legislation to enforce the 15th amendment.

As the protesters neared the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were blocked by Alabama state and local police sent by Alabama governor George C. Wallace, a vocal opponent of desegregation. Refusing to stand down, protesters moved forward and were viciously beaten and teargassed by police and dozens of protesters were hospitalized.

The entire incident was televised and became known as “Bloody Sunday.” Some activists wanted to retaliate with violence, but King pushed for nonviolent protests and eventually gained federal protection for another march.”

Atul Bhalla, Yamuna Walk (2007)

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“Atul Bhalla’s digital slide presentation ‘Yamuna Walk’ is a photographic account of the four-day walk that the artist undertook along the banks of the Yamuna River which passes through his home town of New Delhi in India. The 53 km walk reveals how the river shapes the life of the city across its different zones. The images include some grand projects of civic engineering – four-foot wide overland pipes built on a vast scale. They also include the most ramshackle or absurd constructions, including a temporary kitchen built (if that is the word) on top of the pipes.

Bhalla’s walk captures contrasting aspects of modern India in all its beauty and brutality. Waste and breathtaking beauty sit side by side. Indeed, the work begins with a photograph of a riverbank covered with litter. Bhalla alerts us to the contradictions of polluting the natural resource that allows the city to exist. He also alerts us to the fact that, while it has a sacred character in the culture, being associated with rituals of purification, it is also used for refuse disposal. The river is the primary symbol of the divine – and yet it is treated in ways which would suggest the opposite.”

bags of marigolds on a walking path

Atul Bhalla, Yamuna Walk (2007)

Documentation of this walk is available as a photo book: “In Yamuna Walk, photographer and multimedia artist Atul Bhalla documents a five-day trek along the sacred Yamuna River as it passes through his home city of New Delhi, India.  Through his vivid and haunting photographs, Bhalla explores the myriad ways that modern life along the Yamuna is shaped by water, from the rural outskirts of the city to the polluted landscape of urban Delhi. Climbing over fences, crossing concrete overpasses, and navigating between blooming fields and piles of waste on his journeys, Bhalla also shows the diverse marks of human development that can be read in the image of the river.

Bhalla describes his practice as an attempt to understand water, the way he perceives it, feels it, drinks it, swims in it, and sinks in it. The personal and humanized but still mysterious Yamuna that emerges through his photographs sheds an unusual and compelling light on issues of water and the urban environment.”

Francis Alys, When Faith Moves Mountains (2002)

“Five hundred volunteers with shovels gathered at a huge sand dune on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, and over the course of a day moved it by several inches. Alÿs developed the idea after first visiting Lima in October 2000. The political context was inescapable: “This was during the last months of the Fujimori dictatorship. Lima was in turmoil with clashes on the streets, obvious social tension and an emerging movement of resistance. This was a desperate situation calling for an epic response: staging a social allegory to fit the circumstances seemed more appropriate than engaging in a sculptural exercise.” The principle that drove When Faith Moves Mountains was “maximum effort, minimal result.” The most apparently minimal change was effected, and only by means of the most massive of collective efforts.

The action itself, as documented in photographs and video, is extraordinarily impressive, but in the end the “social allegory” takes over from the work’s undeniable formal presence. The action was completely transitory. The next day, no one could recognize that the huge sand dune had been moved. The true aftermath of the work lies in the ripples of anecdote and image that radiate out from it.” [credit]

Christy Gast, Goldenrod Transect (2021)

Woman pausing during walking performance

Christy Gast – Goldenrod Transect – 2021

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Christy Gast presented a durational performative walk around a native plant found in several locations throughout the High Line, goldenrod. Gast brought her giant soft sculpture of a goldenrod, as a prop for educational, creative, and interactive collaboration with the public. They met on the High Line at Gansevoort Street, and traveled to 16th Street. Gast unfurled a monumental goldenrod stalk and revealed lessons from the hundreds of insect species that call it home.

woman with bug eye and mic

Christy Gast – Goldenrod Transect (2021)