coming home to roost The 49th parallel that forms the border between much of Canada and the USA also runs through about four kilometres of Austria. A stone marker is located in a pleasant forest area near a lake, approximately 30 metres from where the Iron Curtain hung across Europe until 1989, making the border relatively inaccessible for almost half a century. Before the First World War there was no national border here at all, the area being part of the Habsburg Empire. The little monument also marks the intersection with the 15° East meridian, which makes it an abstract chronological border – UTC +1. The post-midday July sun streams through the trees illuminating the forest floor and reflecting off the little lake just beyond the border. Birds sing, insects buzz, water bubbles over stones and a butterfly cuts its own erratic and silent pathway through the air. The Austrian woods, that in two steps become Czech, are like a doll’s house version of British Columbia’s temperate rainforest. Both preclude the breadth and depth of vision normally associated with landscape views, and all of the countries involved in this triangulation network have another thing in common: the instrumentalisation of difference and relative powerlessness for gain, often distilled down into racism. Standing among the sunbeams I have to make an effort to conjure up the shades of those who were racially isolated, refused their civil rights, stripped of their property and, if they were among the fortunate few, managed to slip over the right border to safety. And on the other side of the world it may be right that, as George Bowering put it, people in British Columbia think in terms of geography rather than history. 8 But it might just be that, in certain places at certain times, geography is history. 1 Edney, Matthew H. Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India 1765-1843. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999 2 Vattel, de Emmeric. The Law of Nations , Switzerland, 1758 3 Merivale, Herman. Lectures on Colonisation and Colonies , 1841. 4 Spence, Thomas, William Ogilvie, Thomas Paine, M Beer. The Pioneers of Land Reform, 1775. 5 Brody, Hugh. The Other Side of Eden: Hunter-gatherers, Farmers and the Shaping of the World . Vancouver: Douglas & McIntryre, 2001 6 Thompson, E P. Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act. London: Breviary Stuff Publications, 2013. 7 Hyde; Lewis. The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (1979). New York: Vintage, 2007. 8 Bowering, George. Bowering’s B.C.: A Swashbuckling History. Toronto: Penguin Canada, 1997.
Chain Reaction is a piece developed from a Gunter’s chain, a measuring device named after its inventor and used by surveyors for measuring land (primary triangulation) from the seventeenth until well into the twentieth centuries. It reflects on commodity fetishism, the commodification of land and the shifts of power and culture that result. below: Tim Sharp. Chain Reaction | Gunter Chain (66 feet/22 yards/20 metres), car paint, padlocks, keys, red cable ties. Installation view in the former Kartographisches Institute, Vienna, 2010.
17
registration documents and hand-drawn maps of questionable accuracy. ‘Under the Soil, the People. On Site review 29:Geology 2013
S W: see Dustin Valen’s extended discussion of park evictions in ‘On the merits of bad behaviour’, this issue of On Site review, p 12 On the establishing of borders through oral testimony, see Joshua Craze’s discussion of border disputes in Abeyi, on the South Sudan - Sudan border, with court cases citing colonial
Tim Sharp
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator