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"