Author: Hamilton Perambulatory Unit

HPU Strata-Walks (Buffalo Version) – Mapping Signs of Hope

Posted on by Hamilton Perambulatory Unit

I was in Buffalo again yesterday, having planned a long walk to see the beautiful architecture of the city. As it was only two days after the horrifying US elections, I hadn’t really wanted to go, but having already made the plans, I followed through. I did see architecture, many beautiful buildings and an interesting urban design, but what I ended up looking for was signs of hope.

I found it in the first café that I entered, looking for a coffee to begin the walk with. The signs are the door proclaimed that all was welcome, an LGBTQ+ safe space. Then I walked down “Millionaires’ Row” on Delaware Avenue, looking at the enormous mansions that have all become prep colleges, doctors’ offices, and organizational headquarters of NGOs. This, for example, is the Red Cross office:

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At another NGO mansion, I saw this in a window:

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Yes!

There were people giving away juice and donuts downtown, and I felt the human connection there warming.

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There was an art show of photographs “taken by members of Buffalo’s social justice community” that was raising funds for a leadership development program.

Yes!

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There was this Marxist/Leninist newsletter that I found in the foyer the re-purposed church where Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe Records has taken up residence on the second floor. Its front page shouted maxims that seemed at the moment to be exactly right (Yes! Revolution! We Must Unite!), though revolution how? Unite how?

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And this sticker strangely proclaiming “Community Beer Works”! I don’t know what that means but I think I like it. Let’s be a community and drink beer.

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These small signs of hope helped to lift my spirits a little, though hope is, perhaps, the wrong word or not the only word. Perhaps it is more like signs of resistance, signs of action, signs of love that can replenish, so one can continue on.

I had intended to write this final post for HPU’s residency at WalkingLab that would maybe condense some of the diverse and very different kinds of walks recently undertaken by the different members of HPU. But really, the concept itself is not so complex. Strata-mapping is in the end the art of noticing, naming, and imagining, which is not difficult so much as it takes practice (like love). It needs to become habitual (like love). It needs to be an everyday practice, it needs to be done everyday and routinely, like walking in the city and finding small signs of hope and love and community (beer). That, at least, is a start.

HPU Strata-Walks (Buffalo version) – (de)touristing

Posted on by Hamilton Perambulatory Unit

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Photo: “The Canoes” by Nancy Rubin outside the Albright-Knox in Buffalo.

I’ve come to Buffalo as an artist-in-residence with the Open Air Institute at SUNY Buffalo’s Department of Media Study. Open Air Director Teri Rueb is my mentor and guide. The first time I met with her, she drove me around the neighbourhoods of the Delaware Park System, pointing out the Frederic Olmsted-designed roundabouts and diagonal parkways that cut across the grid. The houses are big, inexpensive to rent but expensive to heat in the winter. Elmwood Avenue is where the restaurants and shops are in this part of the city. Built Environment Strata.

On my second visit, I cross the Peace Bridge into Buffalo in the evening, heading to a department dinner party, and the border guard is the friendliest I have ever met. She smiles, asks her questions politely, waves me through. The party is in Parkside, a national historic district that also contains two Frank Lloyd Wright houses. At the house, people stand in the backyard in the dusk, slapping hungry mosquitos that have come out in force in the humid, cooling air. Sensual Strata, Nature Strata, Geopolitical Strata. I ask people I meet to tell me stories about Buffalo and border-crossing. Our host tells me he lived in Toronto for 12 years and commuted here, and somehow got on some sort of list where they pulled him over for document control every single time, until after two years, his name must have fallen off the list. Storied Strata.

On my third visit, I cross the Peace Bridge late at night, only one kiosk open at the border. Again the guard is friendly. I have brought my funding papers in case they might prevent another document-control pullover, but he doesn’t even ask to see them. Navigating through the Buffalo streets in the dark, guided only by the disembodied female voice of GPS, I have no idea where I am. I feel like I am steering a spaceship through the void of the unknown. Red brick buildings, churches, laundromats. Finally she says, “you have arrived at your destination.” Technological Strata. Networked Strata.

In the morning I go to the Albright-Knox. Driving up Elmwood, I see a store called WE NEVER CLOSE! It has been about 15 years since my last visit. I walk around the building, looking at the sculptures. Shapes and colours in the landscape, Delaware Park across the way, the water gleaming in the sunlight. Inside there are drawings by the artist Joan Linder: a map of toxic waste sites, panaromic drawings of landscapes and chain-link fences which I feel an immediate kinship with (as I myself had a long-standing relationship with the L’Acadie Fence). I am in awe of these drawings and her project, called “Operation Sunshine.” Industrial strata. Storied Strata. There is also a 2 channel video installation by Claudia Joskowicz called “Every Building on Avenida Alfonso Ugarte—After Ruscha” (that included a copy of Ed Ruscha’s fold-out accordion book, “Every Building on the Sunset Strip”, something I have referenced often and was delighted to see). Joskowicz’s work takes the mundane drive down a street in El Alto, Bolivia, punctuated with scenes from a protest and a celebration. I watched the video twice, entranced by the rolling cinema of the street. What else could I call these brushes with the thoughts and obsessions of another, this feeling of kinship, this view of the world from another’s perspective that has now overlaid itself on the landscape of this place? Connection Strata. Emotion Strata. Spark Strata.

Naturally, the first sites tend to be the tourist spots, the places that build the bones of the city image. I am a tourist, yes, but I am developing my de-touring skills so that I can be a (de)tourist. De-touristing implies an attempt to move past stereotypically tourist practices, which tend towards sight-seeing and spectacle. Shifting emphasis from “sight to site” (as Guilana Bruno recommends in her Atlas of Emotion), my conception of detouristing uses these stratigraphic methods to found a de-touristing practice that promotes the deeper understanding of place. Filling in the blanks of the map is an endeavour of years, decades, lifetimes. In my short tenure in Buffalo, I can hope for no more than the slightest and most tentative sketch of the city, but already my cognitive map is so much clearer than just two months ago.

 

 

 

HPU Strata-Walks (Buffalo version) – the city-image

Posted on by Hamilton Perambulatory Unit

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The image of the city, as Kevin Lynch pointed out back in the 1960s, is different for each person, changing according to socio-political factors including class, race and gender. The city-image is, in part, a cognitive map, made up of layers of images and stories, different kinds of knowledge. Preferably it should be open-ended and adaptable so that the individual can continue to fill in details, to “extend the drawing.” Other layers of city-image include landmarks, tourist spots, appearances in media such as film and television, and the physical map that proposes boundaries, neighbourhoods, and geographical shapes. As well, there are networks, clouds, armatures, flows, and other envisionings of social or ephemeral infrastructures that make up the city. Developing a deep knowledge of place is like the mapping of these layers, a stratigraphy that notes the way places are formed through accumulation: history, story, experience, networks, vectors, the natural and built environments.

One of Lynch’s final thoughts in The Image of the City, in “Directions for Future Research,” is to suggest the study not only of images as they exist, but also how they develop: “how does a stranger build an image of a new city”?

My test case: Buffalo, New York. It’s about an hour and a half drive from my home in Hamilton, depending on the border crossing. Usually it takes me 10-15 minutes, but last week I was pulled over and sent into the offices for “document control.” This took 45 minutes.

The first city-image that I had of Buffalo before I had ever visited was similar to that of Hamilton’s: rust belt steel city, and not much more. Also, I visited the Albright-Knox Art Gallery once, and saw an exhibit of quite wonderful Modigliani paintings.

The second city-image I have is from Google Maps. The cartographic image gives me the shape of the city, but leaves me with questions: Where are the interesting neighbourhoods that I should visit as a tourist? What parts are significant to the citizens who live there? Where is the financial district, the arts district, the old city?

Where does GoogleMaps locate its city centre marker?

And now, the layers begin to happen with each successive visit.

For now there are highways and greenery, bridges and scenery
of waters and dams and shores, more roads and malls, it could be no-place, non-place

Over the next couple of blogs I will map how these layers grow.

 

 

HPU Strata-Walks with Brock University Sculpture Students-Walk #1

Posted on by Hamilton Perambulatory Unit

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For these strata walks—-I asked my Sculpture students from Brock University in St Catharines Ontario to go on three directed walks.

The first two where around a city block in downtown St. Catharines close to our studio and the last was a walk over to Rodman Hall Gallery on the other side of the river

For the first walk participants followed the Strata Prompts that HPU have used for other walks.

This is a stratigraphic walk to map the different layers of meanings, stories, and systems that make up a place.

Students were invited to map the “strata” of that city block in St. Catharines

  1. Signed Strata: Identify texts and the systems they belong to (street signs – civic, colonialist; advertising – capitalist; graffiti – poetic or interventionist etc.)
  2. Architectural Strata: Identify architectural periods. Note lovely buildings, or intriguing buildings, or decrepit buildings and broken curbs.
  3. Non-human animals Strata: Look for non-human creatures on the street. Pet a cat. Who else lives on the street? Birds? Insects?
  4. Inanimate Strata: Identify plants (native, invasive, useful, ornamental, etc.), note the rocks.
  5. Pre-urban strata: Imagine what was here before, the landscape without the city. Do this without resorting to the trope of “untamed wilderness.”
  6. Electrical Strata: Trace the power lines (where does the electricity come from?).
  7. Shiny Strata: Look for things that are shiny and where the light comes from. Draw or write about them.
  8. Attraction Strata: Notice what is repulsive to you and what attracts you. You can draw or take pictures. Try to use each of your senses for this!
  9. Olfactory Strata: Notice the smells of the street. How can you map sound without using words? If you do use words try synaesthesia.
  10. Audio Strata: How does the street sound? What does the street sound? Where does the street sound? Record audio or take notes.
  11. Speculative Strata: Map what the street could be. Revamp it according to your imagination.
  12. Tactile Strata: How does the street feel? Make rubbings, drawings of felt strata.
  13. Storied Strata: Interview strangers (or yourself) on the street and gather stories about the street. What is the street’s history? Any anecdotes?

 

Donna

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hamilton Perambulatory Unit – Introduction to the Strata-Walk

Posted on by Hamilton Perambulatory Unit

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The HPU’s Strata-Walk begins with a series of prompts or instructions that are designed to develop the art of noticing as a process of mapping the strata of place. The metaphor of stratigraphy allows the use of many diverse kinds of knowledge, and is inherently interdisciplinary.

Ephemeral strata can be various shades of made-up and true, incidental or mythic, scientific fact or historical fiction. They can leave traces in the landscape, or they can be invisible and in need of explication.

The Strata-Walk urges you to identify different layers of strata as a way of provoking your attention, and can be adapted to any method of mobility.

Ephemeral elements such as smell, sound, weather and time make up strata that are difficult to map but essential to space and place-making. Each of these main kinds of strata can be sub-categorized into smaller strata (“botanizing on the pavement” after Baudelaire and Benjamin). There is no end to the strata.

As participatory workshops, the Strata-Walks function as public pedagogy and relational art, where the emphasis is on the inter-relationships between people and environments, and the creative element does not lie in the making of an object, but an event. The prompts can also be used in groups, or by the solo walker, the commuter, the newcomer to a city, or the tourist.

Our Strata-Walk (Victoria Street/Avenue Version) was a participatory event aimed at highlighting different ways of seeing placenames as vestiges of colonialism, and to propose strategies of decolonizing place. Our Strata-Walk (Mile End Montreal version) was presented in the context of Montreal Monochome IV at the artist-run centre articule, with a specific theme of decolonializing knowledge production.

During the upcoming summer months, HPU will develop further explorations and expand our methodologies. We invite you to participate, beginning with the Strata-Walk.

To map the strata, draw your route with paper and pencil or an electronic device, and attempt to map as many thoughts, sensations, and stories as possible on your walk, using two or more of the following strata-probing-prompts (or make some of your own):

Signed Strata: Identify texts and the systems they belong to (street signs – civic, colonialist; advertising – captialist; graffiti – poetic or interventionist etc.) Why is the street called Victoria? Did it ever have another name? Should it?

Architectural Strata: Identify architectural periods. Note lovely buildings, or intriguing buildings, or decrepit buildings and broken curbs.

Non-human animals Strata: Look for non-human creatures on the street. Pet a cat. Who else lives on the street? Birds? Insects?

Inanimate Strata: Identify plants (native, invasive, useful, ornamental, etc.), note the rocks.

Pre-urban strata: Imagine what was here before, the landscape without the city. Do this without resorting to the trope of “untamed wilderness.”

Electrical Strata: Trace the power lines (where does the electricity come from?).

Shiny Strata: Look for things that are shiny and where the light comes from. Draw or write about them.

Attraction Strata: Notice what is repulsive to you and what attracts you. You can draw or take pictures. Try to use each of your senses for this!

Olfactory Strata: Notice the smells of the street. How can you map sound without using words? If you do use words try synesthesia.

Audio Strata: How does the street sound? What does the street sound? Where does the street sound? Record audio or take notes.

Speculative Strata: Map what the street could be. Revamp it according to your imagination.

Rhythm Strata: What is the rhythm of the day when you move through place? Are you in rush hour or is it slow? What other rhythms can you sense where you are?

Tactile Strata: How does the street feel? Make rubbings, drawings of felt strata.

Storied Strata: Interview strangers (or yourself) on the street and gather stories about the street. What is the street’s history? Any anecdotes?

If in a group, you may wish to designate different prompts to different members, or collectively decide on a few that everyone focuses on (best for smaller groups). You could colour-code your strata and have them on the same map. Or make different maps, or no map! Return your maps to HPU if you please. hamiltonperambulatoryunit@gmail.com