above: Invitation to dog parc gallery vernissage. pouf! art + architecture, 2011
below: dog park gallery vernissage at Parc Gallery, 27 August 2011
Cynthia Hammond presenting dog parc gallery, Maison de l’architecture du Québec. À qui profite l’espace public? Café des z’architectes, 21 February 2012
In all cases, we undertook these initiatives as artworks; the visual and symbolic aspects of everything we produced had intentional aesthetic qualities, top, designed to give continuity to all facets of the project. These vectors aligned in our August 2011 exhibition, dog parc gallery, a selection of twenty-five dog portraits, enlarged and printed on weather-proof vinyl, facing page top right, and hung on the fence so important to the park’s morphological and activist origins. The opening event brought over sixty people and just as many dogs to the park, above, reinforcing the fact that it would not only be humans who would lose this special place if condos were built here. Park users began to extend the activities that pouf! had begun; an inter-species community began to self-identify and mobilise around this half-acre of grass. In 2011-12 we accompanied a core group of park users to meetings with politicians and supplied materials —images, publications, powerpoints, right — to the community in their outreach efforts. As one regular park user, Jesse Fuchs told us, “before your project, we didn’t know we were a community. With your photographs, you helped us to see what we had in common.” 5 From the beginning, pouf! ’s aim was to foster and eventually hand the project over to the community. As the group solidified and gained confidence, we were able to step aside, ensuring that official response would be to local taxpayers and voters, not to us. We saw in real time how community forms; not, as Rosi Braidotti points out, around some essential idea of shared identity but rather around a matter, object, or place of shared concern. The Parc Gallery dog run was one such place.
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5 Jesse Fuchs, conversation with Thomas Strickland, 27 August 2011.
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