As a preliminary reaction to the territory in progress, I have begun to construct a hybrid cartography that addresses the relationship between observer and understanding fundamental to relevant critical projects in the landscape. This subjective attitude expands the context of the Assiniboine River past its provincial borders in an attempt to shift the time and scale of the fluvial channel. By the spring, the Assiniboine River will attempt to accommodate a deluge of snowmelt, precipitation and runoff drained from the vast territory mapped here in chalk. It is in these illuminating territorial moments where competing understandings of time come to the surface and spill into public consciousness. While rational approaches to flood design and engineering have focused on the controlling of the river, the fragmented approach described here aims to shift the discussion to the temporal state of the river and moreover the inescapable geologic agency of the land.
The scale of the prairie is almost unimaginable. I begin the drawing with a grid as a reference [image on p37] . Each segment represents 250 square kilometres. The Assiniboine River slides along the bottom of this drawing, collecting water from this vast region on its path eastward to Manitoba. The sketch captures the territory in a single view, expressed in chalk to connect to its temporary state. Philosopher André Corboz proposed the idea of the territory as a palimpsest, where uses and inclinations exist for a period of time and are subsequently erased with only traces of a former existence. 2 Transferring this logic to the Assiniboine River is to consider its current state as transitory, a result of sedimentary processes, erosion and increasingly, human intervention. Drawing out this territory is an active process, a way of synthesising experience and representation. The sketch offers insight between the river I can experience and the territory I can only imagine in fragmented segments. To understand the territory’s time dimension I add a layer to this base. I project the extents of the melting ice sheet onto the snow cover. The duration of ice sheet’s death is a long event, occurring over thousands of years. The melting of the ice sheet was in response to Earth’s rising temperature. Lake Agassiz appeared in the midst of this process to accommodate the waters once held up in the ice sheet’s mass. 3 Over the course of an hour I film, draw and represent the ice sheet, as well as the emergence and decline of Lake Agassiz careful to observe the shifts between stages. To mark the changes, I delineate their outline overtop of the base. In this action I compress these thousands of years into a duration I can readily perceive. Trusting this process I am able to reflect on the depth of the territory before me. Recording these actions allows me to visualise layers of the landscape I could not imagine.
c
1 Geological and Natural History Survey of Canada. Of Exploration of the Glacial Lake Agassiz in Manitoba. Montreal: William Foster Brown & Co, Upham, Warren, 1890
2 Corboz, André. Le territorie comme palimpseste . Doigène, 1983. pp 121, 14-35
69
3 Teller, James. Natural heritage of Manitoba: legacy of the ice age. Winnipeg: Manitoba Museum of Man and Nature, 1984.
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator