The national project LandMarks 2017 aims to celebrate monumental landmark projects and predominant national narratives linked to chosen historic sites across Canada’s National Parks.
Ryth Kesselring collaborated on a project with McGill sound artist, Tobias Moisey, entitled, Weaving Memories.
Interested in memories, traces and individual perceptions of time and space, Weaving memories is a project that archives the history, the memory and the souvenirs of a specific site trough the many different layers of its composition. In times, where high-resolution digital memories are compiled in infinitive quantities in a virtual space, we are loosing precious parts of the tangible world around us. Responding through low-resolution and slowly produced work, Weaving Memories aims to embody the complexity of the physical world.
Open Channel-Canal Ouvert is a collaboration between Maurizio Aristizabal and Lea Schwarz.
Thinking about the structures that inhabit the Lachine Canal after its main purpose has been lost, its formal limitations imply a directionality and a constant need to be on the move; they frame the space and shape the way information is being communicated. With this project we want to suggest structures “bridge” information across the canal, a communication/dis-communication system. By creating 2 structures that transmit sound and 2 that act receive and amplify sound, participants can decide to either send a message or listen to what is happening at the other side of the canal. Inspired by the existent forms of the space, and through the manipulation of metal, paracord and a hacked communication system, we are interested in creating a place of exchange; where we can intersect spaces and extend our voices across these formal limitations accepting the partiality of knowledge, we always risk of missing something.
These projects were developed as part of a course, entitled,
Making a Mark: Place and Site-Responsive Art Practices
Faculty: Dr Shauna Janssen
One of our objectives in this course is to consider the idea of ‘marking’ and what it means to make a mark. In studio we will experiment with ideas of (un)marking, the trace erasure as a mark, and the resonance of absence. We will explore the different contexts and scales in which landmarks are manifest (locally/ nationally), what they signify, and for who. How does scale play a role in legibility/ visibility of landmarks and commemorative/ historical monuments? And how in this course, then, can we make art in response to lesser known, interstitial, and over looked social and spatial histories that have shaped the sites you will engage with. In what ways can we use site-responsive art ma(r)king as strategies for displacing, interrupting, and unsettling existing perceptions of place and their spatial histories? As such in our studio workshops and assignments (and within the context of the National Landmarks 2017 project) we may focus on broad themes such as: memory and place, scale, site and context (as genre and media), and cultural identity.
As part of the project, Agustina Isidori worked on the design of a publication that portrays all the projects, produced by Shauna Janssen.
More info on the Landmarks 2017 website here.
textiles + materiality research cluster 