Scrapbook

At the end of last school year I was part of an exhibition titled You Are Here; its theme was showing possibilities that exist in the dilapidated state of downtown St. Catharines. It seems that artists have always been the first to spark the cultural change needed for wealthy developers to give blocks of cities a cosmopolitan makeover. Look at New York, for instance, and the now rich neighborhoods of Soho and Chelsea which had started from raggy studios and housing for poor artists. In Berlin this is still happening even though the wall has been down for a little over fifteen years; artists are buying cheap there and turning blocks into cultured art scenes according to Canadian Art Magazine (a few issues back).

In Utopia: Towards a Better Toronto, Alana Wilcox has put together articles regarding this state of change in her city. The writing is uplifting and reminiscent of the city that has just begun making international clout with its music scene, film festival, and newly revamped architecture. It has been giving me the sense of euphoria when looking where I live – St. Catharines. There is a world of possibility here that exists because it is not yet swarming with artists and then developers which would hike up the price to live or do anything. Thank God that I can still walk downtown and grab breakfast for less three bucks.

Back to this exhibition though… A fellow artist and I fabricated a scrapbook that held faux newspaper articles dating back from World War Two. We also came up with a fictional person, Katarzyna Sorokowski, who had been saving the articles creating an invented history for St. Catharines, one that is both glorious and tragic. The articles lead the viewer through the story of this city’s rise to success and fame all the way to its state today. The story was utopic – and perhaps how we would have liked St. Catharines to be - but to someone who lives here, the articles jab at the way the city is as it stands.

To further validate our lie, we placed Scrapbook in the Centennial Public Library in its appropriate section with fake library codes so that it might stay there for a while.
Unfortunately on a recent visit, the book was missing and on investigation found out that one of the library staff now owns it. According to one of the head librarians that I had talked to, there was a weeklong debate over the books validity. This excites me because we must have done a good job with the coffee stains and watercolour ink pen to make the book look as old as it said it was. Perhaps in their research for the truth, they got thinking about St. Catharines more critically and saw the possibilities for it. I can only hope.

Scrapbook, 2006

Secondary Moments

A map of Esmerelda should include, marked in different coloured inks, all these routes, solid and liquid, evident and hidden. It is more difficult to fix on the map the routes of the swallows, who cut the air over the roofs, dropping long invisible parabolas with their still wings, darting to gulp a mosquito, spiralling upward, grazing a pinnacle, dominating from every point of their airy paths all the points of the city.

- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities.

Before leaving to tree plant up North, I worked with my friend Shannon Doyle on a project dealing with urbanization; it was a flipbook idea that will appear in a York University publication titled "Urbanity, Culture and the Law: Reassessing the Global City" as a compliment to the text.

Initially, we had gone out to document the cycles of a downtown Toronto garbage can – its daily filling and emptying – when we saw birds avoiding traffic and fighting with each other to eat an oversized piece of bread lying in the road. There was something poetic about the whole situation so I immediately began documenting the birds in this primal act. As the shoot was going on, I also remarked at how unmercifully the cars would go by, neither swerving to stay clear of the birds nor slowing down. What we see in the images are the cars fulfilling their right to proceed down the road normally, not stopping for any non-human life; it was the primary functions of the city vs. its secondary moments.

Accompanying the images, Shannon wrote: “…they are active muters of boundaries, carefully digesting the networks of money and trade, nation and economy, throughway and sidewalk that comprise the urban ‘field’.” The cosmopolitan birds are tied to us, in that, their population increases with the population of the city as they feed on our garbage. They are the by-product of our own overpopulation and their “persistent and perilous traversal of alleyways, curb edges, road demarcations and exposed gum droppings (Doyle)” problematize the concept of ownership.

Frame from "Secondary Moments"

First Post

Well, it’s the beginning of a new school year for me – as well as my last. This blog is my adieu to St. Catharines, the city I have lived and gone to school now for four years, and coincidentally the longest I have lived in one place. For my final year here – I will be posting my interactions and observations with my environment. I will be looking critically at the city as the studio where ideas come from infrastructure, inhabitants, and movement. I hope, should anyone stumble upon this site, that they enjoy and benefit from my writing.

Sincerely,

Luke Ghyselincks