Tuesday, 8:18pm, Îlot B (An Urban Scenographic Mapping of Square Viger)
“It’s much colder today than the last time I was here. Sunset has not yet begun, but the light is dimming and the clouds are turning pink, gray + purple. The redwing blackbirds continue their song, though now they call longingly to one another, an extended note which sighs with the same pang as a broken heart or my cat before he gets his dinner. ”
My work is in direct reference to Larissa Fassler’s artistic practice of “psychogeographic” (Shipwright) mapping, which documents both the architecture and people in public space over time. Through long hours of observation and documentation, she produces incredibly intricate mappings of space and everyday life, recording how people interact day-to-day with their built environment. Her subjective approach to the action of mapping results in her relationality to her environment to be quite personal. With an effort to depict myself and my positionality more clearly in my work, I looked to Larissa Fassler for inspiration for my own personal mappings of Square Viger. Through exploring archives and creating my own subjective mappings of the space, I am questioning Square Viger’s fraught history of change as it relates to intended vs. actual use and the implications of my own presence within the space.
My relationship to urban spaces has often been through maps, time being conceptualized through shifting borders and structures within an environment that may otherwise be unrecognizable from change. In re-contextualizing the park through a scenographic lens, I found myself drawn to how the constantly shifting shape and use of the space was informed by the changes along its borders. My method of self-insertion into Square Viger’s boundaries came about through engaging first with the history of the space then examining my own place within that history. Through the process of site-writing and my own subjective mapping, I am looking to see how my own personal experience and history fits into the realm of a cartographic history of the site. Through overlapping layers of drawn history and personal experience, my work explores how these different layers inform one another and form patterns.
The piece is composed of many different layers of tracing paper, each with a different iteration of Square Viger’s history mapped onto it. Though these mappings represent objective understandings of the space of cartographers and urban planners, they are all superimposed upon my hand drawn interpretation of the park. Each further historical iteration is then informed by the layer that came before it. As the layers of history increase, some pages’ writing disappear or are obscured by the semi-opacity of the pages, creating a partial perspective or understanding of each subsequent time.
The mappings take a variety of forms in their presentation, both as an art object and a piece of performance. As an art object, the experience of the viewer is informed by their agency in the act of perusing the multiple mappings, choosing which sequencing of layers to engage with. With a flashlight in hand, the viewer is invited to explore Square Viger’s multiple histories through layers of transparencies. In performance, the mappings metamorphose into something resembling a cantastoria (an act of performance in which images are gestured to with a story or song), instigated by a storyteller who peels back layer after layer to make sense of the park’s history to an audience.
Shipwright, Fiona. “Unchartered Ground.” Uncube Magazine, Baunetz, 3 Mar. 2016, https://www.uncubemagazine.com/blog/16549313.
““I don’t think a place can be fully erased, regardless of the number of times it is demolished and rebuilt. Every time a sidewalk sweeper sweeps by to clean up the cigarette butts that litter the ground of the ilot, some get pushed into the edge of the grass and get combined with the flower petals that drifted off a tree that morning. They collect at the edges of the space + some will always remain, like glitter falling into the cracks of a hardwood floor.””
