Yaletown, Vancouver (looking south) 49° 16’ 22’’ N 123° 07’ 11’’W
Plaza of Nations, Vancouver (looking east) 49° 16’ 30’’ N 123° 06’ 31’’W
To talk about land is also to talk about place and one’s relationship to it. I like to think of this series of photographs as having its origins in a drive northwards along an island road lined with trees and pleasantly exotic-looking but unattractively scented skunk cabbage. Every now and then I caught sight of a plastic ribbon tied to a shrub, a low branch or even, at times, closer to towns, to a white post driven into the earth. Sometimes these ribbons fluttered in the breeze, mostly they lay inert on the ground, forming loopy hieroglyphs on the land, shouting their presence in fluorescent shades of red, green and yellow. It turned out that the process of putting them there was called flagging and, although they were frequently used as trail markers, they were more often indicative of territorial boundaries – the edges of individual plots of land, the border between one timber licence areas and another but also smaller work zone markers: cut this area, leave this area alone . Flagging language is somewhat limited, misunderstandings occur, and sometimes the wrong trees fall. Deeper into the forest, away from the surfaced road and well-trodden paths, they seem even more artificial – gnomic interrogation marks in the surrounding landscape, minimal sculptures of possession deriving their validity from a purely abstract, intellectual system imposed on, but not of, the land. Defining the territory Since the island we were driving across was Vancouver Island, there is one sense in which the ground here is not as solid as it looks.As in the rest of the northern part of the continent, it was, and often still is, contested territory, land taken away from its original inhabitants in a concerted, often aggressive and sometimes genocidal campaign of colonial appropriation. The issues that are alive and volatile here encapsulate the exploitative essence of the colonial system which ‘legally’ transferred all the land to the Crown which in turn made it available for re- distribution amongst European settlers.
identification | measurement by tim sharp
first contract landed immigrants
‘First Contract’ is a series of 9 photographs concerned with the complex ramifications of the Western insistence on quantifying land, which transforms land from being primarily a place to live into an object of trade and speculation.The photos also reflect on the colonial dispossession of the original inhabitants of the North American continent, especially the First Nation peoples of Canada. Flagging – plastic ribbons normally used to mark property borders – mark the lines, triangles and Euclidian geometries of the surveyor in rituals of appropriation and possession. All of the photos were taken in the proximity of the 49th parallel – 49°N, the border between Canada and the USA which also runs through a few kilometres of Waldviertel,Austria, where it crosses the 15°E meridian, turning place into time.
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