What happens when we stop rushing and simply look? Architecture, landscapes, art and design slows down, considers how we might fix things that are not working well.
ON SITE r e v i e w fall 2025
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stand still + fix something
Patrick Barron, Manuela Mariani, editors. T errain Vague: Interstices at the Edge of the Pale . New York: Routledge, 2013
Marc Treib, Austere Gardens: Thoughts on Landscape, Restraint & Attending. Novato CA: ORO Editions, 2016
Sunaura Taylor, Disabled Ecologies. Lessons from a Wounded Desert. Oakland: University of California Press, 2024
ISBN 9780415827683
ISBN-10 : 9781935935384
As planners and designers have turned their attentions to the blighted, vacant areas of the city, the concept of terrain vague , has become increasingly important. Terrain Vague seeks to explore the ambiguous spaces of the city -- the places that exist outside the cultural, social, and economic circuits of urban life. https://www.routledge.com/ Terrain-Vague-Interstices- at-the-Edge-of-the-Pale/ BARRON-Mariani/p/book/978041 5827683?srsltid=AfmBOoqzfqWQ Wj6VU2ZSOUT _ GMMUOH7d38duqh- dOU5IueucgVbBY2whB
Austere Gardens suggests another way to look at the landscape, the garden, and perhaps the entire world around us. It suggests that being open to other ways of observing and sensing can yield new insights and rewards, and that interest is found in places unassuming and overlooked as well as those complex and assertive. https://www.dukeupress. edu/pollution-is- colonialism
ISBN: 9780520393066
Deep below the ground in Tucson, Arizona, lies an aquifer forever altered by the detritus of a postwar Superfund site. Disabled Ecologies tells the story of this contamination and its ripple effects through the largely Mexican American community living above. Drawing on her own complex relationship to this long-ago injured landscape, Sunaura Taylor takes us with her to follow the site’s disabled ecology—the networks of disability, both human and wild, that are created when ecosystems are corrupted and profoundly altered. https://www.ucpress.edu/books/ disabled-ecologies/hardcover
books that look closely at small things and large nuances
Anna Tsing, Nils Bubandt, Elaine Gan, Heather Swanson, editors Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017
Janice Gurney, All the Spaces . London Ontario: McIntosh Galler, Western University, 2016
ISBN 978-0-7714-3100-5
ISBN-10 : 1517902371 ISBN-13 : 978-1517902377
Janice Gurney’s paintings based on the sixteen translations of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Book 10.17 that have been published since 1634. Instead of focusing on the nuances of the translator’s words, as one might expect, Gurney looks at the differences in punctuation.
As human-induced environmental change threatens multispecies livability, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet puts forward a bold proposal: entangled histories, situated narratives, and thick descriptions offer urgent ‘arts of living’. https://www.upress.umn. edu/9781517902377/arts- of-living-on-a-damaged- planet/
https://mcintoshgallery.ca/ exhibitions/past/2015.html
Kenneth L Helphand, Defiant Gardens. Making Gardens in Wartime . San Antonio, Texas: Trinity University Press, 2008 Defiant gardens are created in extreme social, political, economic or cultural conditions.Helphand examines gardens of war in the 20th century, including examples built behind the trenches in World War I, in the Warsaw and other ghettos during World War II, and in Japanese-American internment camps, as well as gardens created by soldiers at their bases and encampments during wars in the Persian Gulf, Vietnam and Korea. https://tupress. org/9781595340450/defiant- gardens/
Jamelie Hassan and Ron Benner, editors. An Alternative Cultural HIstory of London, Ontario: Art and Activism . London ON: Embassy Cultural House, 2024 This anthology reveals the vibrant yet often overlooked cultures of London, Ontario. The history of collective action within the city is narrated through essays, conversations, poetry, and archival images. The emphasis in this anthology is on art and activism and presents a historical perspective beginning in the 1950s through to the present. https://www. embassyculturalhouse.ca/ and two commodious websites
Liboiron, Max. Pollution Is Colonialism . Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4780-1413-3 eISBN: 978-1-4780-2144-5
In Pollution Is Colonialism Max Liboiron presents a framework for understanding scientific research methods as practices that can align with or against colonialism. Liboiron draws on their work in the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR)—an anticolonial science laboratory in Newfoundland —to illuminate how pollution is not a symptom of capitalism but a violent enactment of colonial land relations that claim access to Indigenous land. https://www.dukeupress.edu/ pollution-is-colonialism
Places Journal is an essential and trusted resource on the future of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. We harness the power of public scholarship to promote equitable cities and resilient landscapes. https://placesjournal.org/
Joseph Heathcott, Global Queens, an urban mosaic . New York: Fordham University Press, 2023
ISBN: 9781531504519
Dan Hicks, Every Monument Will Fall. A story of remembering and forgetting . London: Penguin (Heinemann Hutchinson), 2025
Remade by decades of immigration, Queens, New York, has emerged as an emblematic space of social mixing and encounters across multiple lines of difference. Heathcott makes primary use of documentary photography to bring these social and spatial realities of everyday life into relief: notions of citizenship and belonging are negotiated across multiple lines of difference; a sense of getting along—however roughly textured and unfinished—has taken hold in the everyday life of the streets. https://fordhampress. com/global-queens- hb-9781531504519.html
ISBN-10 : 1804950009 ISBN-13 : 978-1804950005
Established in 2005, the European Architectural History Network supports research and education by providing a public forum for the exchange and dissemination of knowledge of the histories of architecture. Based in Europe, it is open to architectural historians and scholars in allied fields from all countries. https://eahn.org
Every Monument Will Fall offers an urgent reap- praisal of how we think about culture, and how to find hope, remembrance and reconciliation in the fragments of an unfinished violent past. Refus- ing to choose between pulling down every statue, or living in a past that we can never change, the book makes the case for allowing monuments of all kinds to fall once in a while, even those that are hard to see as monuments, rebuilding a memory culture that is in step with our times. https://www.danhicks.uk/books
of human breath andy patton
photo courtesy of the artist
Of Human Breath , 2023 54” x 30”, oil on canvas
The rise and fall of human breath becomes a long complaint.
https://www.andypatton.ca
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47 : stand still for a minute
us
On Site review is published by Field Notes Press, established in 1984, which promotes field work in matters architectural, cultural and spatial.
Resistance to ‘moving fast and breaking things’ does not necessarily indicate revolution; it could be a slowing down, a stopping of relentless progress that rushes ever-forward, like a flood sweeping away much that stands in its way. This particular urgency is being, slowly, replaced by the urgency that we must stop, as industrial progress has endangered life itself. Repair, rejuvenation, re-use, renovation — many things beginning with re-, depend on stopping for a moment, looking at what we have materially, here, now, on the ground, and in the process of looking, finding ways to rethink how we might fix a few things. The essays and projects in this issue refocus our environment of architecture and landscape with all its histories, its problems, its tropes and metaphors, to find resilience and opportunity to proceed with remediation in mind.
f i e l d
notes
contributors contents
For any and all inquiries, please use the contact form at https://onsitereview.ca/contact-us
Andy Patton
4 8
Of Human Breath, 2023 Georgetown Curve, 1994
ISSN 1481-8280 copyright: On Site review . All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopied, recorded or otherwise stored in a retrieval system without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of Copyright Law Chapter C-30, RSC1988.
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introduction, contents masthead
Stephanie White
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Mining architecture
Tim Sharp
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Documentary happens, 2007
Each individual essay and all the images therein are also the copyright of each author.
Anne-Catherine Lemonde
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Pausing in the site analysis
back issues: www.onsitereview.ca editor: Stephanie White design: Black Dog Running printer: Kallen Printing, Calgary Alberta
Arthur Nishimura
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Roots, 1976
Tomas Jonsson
19
Letters to an absence
Anne O’Callaghan
22
Two projects, 2013, 2015
Corey Watanabe
24
Dancing with ghosts
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Angela Silver
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Place des Montréalaises: repairing torn urban fabric
Chloë Watkinson and Sierra Dustin
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Making urban fabric
call for articles
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On Site review 48: building materials
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mining architecture stephanie white
globalisation suppy chains resources reuse
May 17, 2025
No matter what our personal belief system, we all grew up and practiced our trades in a rapacious capitalist system, and our cities are a reification of the display of capital power and domination. What are we to do with them? Given that the greenest building is the one already built, we must not demolish architecture because it is out of style, or out of programme, or out of wasteful materials. These buildings are great lumps of embedded energy, embedded carbon, embedded ambition. They must be re-configured, re-appropriated, re-claimed as built space that can be filled. I would like to forget all the considerations of their troubled politics, economics and ideology and simply look at them as material formations. I’d like to throw away the notion that configured space is tied indubitably to behavioural determinism. We thought this once; it was a strong part of my twentieth century education that well-designed space itself determined happiness or contentment, badly configured space made people confused and murderous. What if, instead, we treat existing buildings as materials to be mined; structures to be re-configured; programmed space to be ignored. They might be seen as something like land masses, islands of resources, limited by scarcity and isolation, which is, it is said, is our long-term global future.
If, hypothetically, but possibly not, we take the premise that the global trade system of the nineteenth, twentieth and first quarter of the twenty-first centuries, whereby building materials travelled farther than most people did, where steel, timber, glass, aluminum, marble, concrete rarely were sourced locally, but imported from some other region, (i.e., Italy for all the coloured marble chips that made the spectacularly popular terrazo floors of the International Style of the twentieth century), we might see that there were inherent dependencies built into the global production and trade of building materials — dependencies held together by a loose agreement to specialise in one material, say steel for structure, knowing that someone else would provide the aluminum for the curtain wall. The universalism of modern construction transcended environment, geography, geology, human rights, economic advantage and disadvantage: anything was available anywhere if one had the will to order it. Economies of scale meant that although everywhere had a steel industry, or could make bricks, or could find the ingredients for concrete as all landmasses bordered seas and oceans at some time in deep history allowing for great strata of limestone formed from the calcium of small shells; although trees grew everywhere at one time, and all such materials made local building traditions, local architectures, all this was upended by trade and exchange. The industrial revolution changed trade and exchange from spice and silk, wool and linen, to industrial materials, transported at an industrial scale. Despite the predictions that the global rules of law for democratic ambitions, peace not war, trade and tariffs, the 80 year-old United Nations, NATO, World Health Organisation, UNESCO and numerous other goodwill efforts to balance power with obligation — despite the demise of all of this, or alternatively continuing on with all these structures without the willing wealth of the USA, power relations will still exist, land will still be seized, people will still die in wars, all in a more naked way than under the delusion that there actually was a world order. There was a ‘world’ order for the West, and with hegeomonic hubris, dubbed itself the only world worth dealing with.
1 As an example, Canada mines iron ore, processes it into steel (Fe+C)which is then sent to the USA as coils to be manufactured into profiles, such as I-beams, which are then sent back to Canada to be used in construction. It is more than exporting and re-importing raw iron, it is exporting and importing manufacturing capacity.
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and when things were local
There is a Lime Kiln Lake near Pincher Creek in southern Alberta, the Lime Kiln Trail in Ottawa, the Hart Road Lime Kiln Conservation Plan in View Royal near Victoria BC, Lime Kiln Bay in New Brunswick – when you start to look, lime kilns once were everywhere. In Agatha Christie’s The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim , written sometime before 1924, Mr Davenheim walks to the post office and vanishes. However, there is a lake, a path, a gate, and beyond it, a lime kiln. Ah. This is how a body can be disposed of – throw it into quicklime which will dissolve everything except Mr Davenheim’s distinctive gold and diamond ring – well, it didn’t happen that way, but it does indicate that lime kilns were local, ubiquitous and in use. Every town, every estate, every builder probably had one, for lime is essential for all cement work: mortar, parging, grout, stucco, pathways, foundations, floors. It was also used as fertiliser and so essential to agriculture. The process: you burn limestone, or calcium carbonate (CaCO3), which gives you quicklime, or calcium oxide (CaO). You mix quicklime with water to get slaked lime, or calcium hydroxide (Ca[OH]2). This is used in cementitious building products, including whitewash, which is slaked lime and chalk. Over time as slaked lime dries and hardens, it loses water and absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, reverting back to limestone. What a process.
Brick is not always made of clay. Gabriola Brick and Shale Products operating from 1910 - 1954, used Gabriola Island blue and brown shale. While fireclay, a glacial clay that produces a much harder brick, was found in conjunction with coal seams near Victoria and Comox on Vancouver Island, Gabriola brick used shale, crushed by millstones made from local sandstone, plus diatomaceous earth and sand. One can find perfectly round basins on Gabriola where the millstones were drilled out; and there is a Millstone River nearby in Nanaimo, another coal centre. Brick must be fired. One can map early brick production to coal mining, coke ovens and brick kilns. Up until the early twentieth century, many cities had brickworks, just as they had a lime kiln. Evidently there is either shale, clay shales, or clay throughout the western provinces, but it is only deposits near cities that were developed – it says something about the cost of transportation in the early to mid-twentieth century: punitive relative to the cost of developing a local brickyard. Transportation seems key: Cretaceous shales of ceramic value from the Pleistocene era, are sedimentary, have a low fusion temperature and a short vitrification range. China and stoneware clay, rare in BC, was the basis of the large pottery industry in Medicine Hat, Alberta, which, unlike other local brick production sites, was given a national reach facilitated by the post-1884 Canadian Pacific Railway. It seems obvious to say it, but the colour of local brick gives a specific and often unique colour to a city that derives directly from the kind of shale or shale clay the city sits upon. Most shale and clay deposits in British Columbia turn out pink to red building brick. Today, in Canada, all brick, none of it red, comes from one source of brick manufacture in Ontario. Even I-X-L of Medicine Hat, the once-dominant brick manufacturer in Western Canada, is gone. According to the 1952 BC Department of Mines bulletin (No. 30): Clay and Shale Deposits of British Columbia , clay and shale are everywhere in abundance – it is impossible that they are mined out. There must be some other economic equation in operation that makes one vast centralised brickyard with extreme delivery costs more efficient than a local industry. The histories and processes of manufacture of building materials are endlessly interesting, and in this era where global supply chains are tested by a number of things: climate change and energy consumption, political disruption, war, the corporatisation of the building industry, we might do well to think about local capacity, whether that be local as in down the street, or in this city, or that region or by country. There is nothing artisanal about this, rather a distribution of centralised plant, rather like small nuclear reactors: small, efficient, local, pulled-back technology, rather than an enormous, vulnerable installation such as the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. Perhaps, like the nineteenth century idea of a lime kiln down the road but for different reasons, centralised consolidation is no longer efficient in the twenty-first. £
left: Hart Road Lime Kiln, Atkins Brothers Silica Lime Brick Company. Enough lime was being produced to justify a spur line from the E&N Railway, shipping a thousand barrels up island in 1899. Lime operations continued until the 1930s when the land was purchased by the Department of National Defence.
below: Stacking brick at Gabriola Brick and Shale Products, ca 1914.
Robert Duffus: 1977
GHMS Archives 1996.040.006
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georgetown curve georgetown ontario 1994 andy patton
Outside of Georgetown I found an abandoned industrial building. I made a long painting there, and successfully avoided being arrested. I’m not sure that it shows in a photograph, but I attempted to make the painting recede in the centre, as though the painting section of the wall bent away from you in the middle. I was surprised to see that sometimes it looked this way—the darker area would seem to recede. But sometimes it flipped—the darker areas would appear to advance because they were so much more intense and saturated. Like the Grand Valley Silo, the painting is made with coat after coat of very dilute acrylic paint. It was more than 60 coats where it’s darkest — and something like 25 where it is lightest. I used two different shades of the same Golden Phthalo Blue acrylic pigment: a red shade and a green shade. The whole painting looked blue but had it had internal contrasts that acted on the eye and made the experience perceptually intense.
When I was doing those works, I felt as though I were nurturing abandoned buildings.
Georgetown Curve, 1994, 7 feet x 70 feet, acrylic on concrete
photo courtesy of the artist
ANDY PATTON is a painter who lives in Toronto. He represented Canada in the Fifth Biennale of Sydney. His text paintings were included in ‘The Transformation of Canadian Landscape Art’ in Xi’an in 2014 and Beijing in 2015. https://www.andypatton.ca
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documentary happens gondar, ethiopia, 2007 tim sharp
watching time l ife people
Tim Sharp, The Green Bag , 2007. mp4. Please click on image above to open.
www.timsharp.at/films
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TIM SHARP lives and works in Vienna. His photo and installation works explore the relationship between image and text; his films explore the mutability of the documentary assertion made by lens-based images. Recent work is concerned with the mechanisms and patterns of power involved in the (re) construction of historical, cultural and personal memory. https://www.timsharp.at
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souped and soiled: pausing in the site analysis ann-catherine lemonde
photography settlement colonisation palimpsests
Through what geographer Max Liboiron 3 calls small-l land colonial relations to capital-L Land that selectively separate and focus on only some aspects of relationships, the in- between landscapes of Montréal/Tiohtià:ke are viewed as nothing more than a holding space for settler goals – symbols of socio-economic unproductivity, awaiting a technology infused re-industrialization. Yet, these spaces offer much to local society as rich ecological layers, as temporary refuge for people that are unhoused due to socio-political failures, and as social and cultural spaces for spontaneous creativity and informal uses. They counter the dominance of commodified urban space and offer a venue for alternative experiences, inclusivity and resistance. My project here, through an experimental analogue photography process and informed by attending community events, makes visible what is already there, what is ongoing, what is quietly resilient. Photography has traditionally taken part in the aesthetic norm of positioning sites as small-l land by ignoring places cast off as soiled, injured and abandoned, unless representing them as some romanticised a-political ruin. Scholar and artist Sunaura Taylor 4 coins the term ‘disabled ecologies’ through her work with injured environments and their entanglement with living bodies of all kinds. Her writing and paintings of the contaminated aquifers in the Arizona desert invite us to critically engage in world-making by centring human and more-than-human relations, by learning to live with instead of abandoning, by valuing repair without cure ideologies, and by challenging and shattering systems of injury that cause damage in the first place.
This project began when a friend invited me out to a guided tour and lecture series hosted by the community group Mobilization 6600 1 at the east end of Montréal also known as Tiohtiá:ke in Kanien’kéha. 2 It was different than the concrete- heavy city streets or the carefully manicured and controlled eye lines of places like Parc Maisonneuve or even the national park further east off island where my parents lived. With time this initial encounter grew into a slow, immersive research- creation project, sparked by a curiosity for how we come to know and represent places as designers, especially those framed as unproductive, in-between, abandoned, or awaiting development. Rather than offering design solutions, this project pauses in the site analysis and refuses to rush, to resolve, or to ‘fix’ in the conventional sense.
1 Since 2016, Mobilisation 6600 has organised protests, hosted lecture series, mobilised participation in public consultations, conducted spring clean-ups in collaboration with encampment residents, offered educational tours and more. Their website carefully collects stories and documents their resistance to Ray-Mont Logistic’s large industrial development project; Résister et Fleurir , accessed October 29, 2024. 2 I acknowledge that I live and work as a white French settler on the unceded territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation. As someone who grew up moving within and across many Indigenous territories on Turtle Island, my relationship to Land is shaped by both movement and privilege. This project is a small, yet significant and personal part of a continued unraveling and reimagining of what it means to live and work in Tiohtià:ke— a place I tend to return to —and how we come to know a place, professionally and otherwise. The Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) Nation, part of the Haundenosaunee Confederacy, are recognised as the custodians of the unceded territory of Tiohtià:ke, which remains an important gathering place for First Nations, Inuit and Metis peoples. The territory also holds significant historical ties to the Anishinaabeg, who call the area Mooniyang in Anishinaabemowin. These categories are not fixed nor rigid, they are intersectional and plural. As Audra Simpson points out, there also exists a ‘defiance of categorization [which] causes them to stretch beyond and perhaps destroy what is a pre-given anthropological matrix, simple: Iroquoian language group’ ( Mohawk Interruptus , 2014, 31).
3 Liboiron, Max. Pollution Is Colonialism . Duke University Press, 2021. 4 Taylor, Sunaura. Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert . Oakland: University of California Press, 2024.
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A range of artists have experimented with photographing landscapes in ways that make visible this entanglement, while purposefully allowing traces of technological mediation to add depth to their work. 3 Matthew Brandt’s project, Lakes and Reservoirs , shifts and warps photographs by submerging the images in water collected from the actual site. There is no sole signatory of the event, the photograph decays in response to its specific image density and the properties of the water in which it is immersed. Broken Spectre by Richard Mosse subverts technologies such as military-grade thermal imaging cameras to document the destruction of the Amazon basin and the displacement of Indigenous peoples at microscopic, human and colossal scales. Benoît Paillé’s The Kitsch Destruction of Our World uses exaggerated lighting and theatrical compositions to amplify the surreal absurdity of normalising ecological injury. Stan Brackhage’s analogue film, Garden of Earthly Delights , conveys a day through the cycle of light, where the crunch of petals, grasses and leaves is almost audible as a visual poem flickers on screen. The work evokes a living, sensory experience while resisting static, conventional identification.
Inspired by such scholars, artists and activists, my current project aims to centre the entangling of people, ruderal plants, soils and other dynamics of the terrain vague , allowing the material reality of the site to co-create a visual language. Spontaneously double-exposing analogue images mirrors the dynamic energy and multiple public uses of the site. A second series follows only after the first is complete, often occurring during an entirely new season, and embraces spontaneity with no predetermined pairing. Through a limited set of frames, the process asks the photographer (me) to slow down and produce less, as I also carefully look for ruderal plants to create vinegars and teas for souping, a method where film rolls are soaked with materials found on the site itself.
all images Ann-Catherine Lemonde
3 Brandt, Lakes and Reservoirs , https://matthewbrandt. com/lakesandreservoirs Mosse, Broken Spectre , https://www.richardmosse.com Paillé, The Kitsch Destruction of Our World , https://gbuffer. myportfolio.com/the-kitsch-destruction-of-our- world Brakhage, T he Garden of Earthly Delights , https://vimeo. com/244464831
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below: Image souped in Virginia Creeper berry vinegar for one week. The first exposure shows a metal table flipped in the snow—traces of a relocated encampment in La Friche. On the right, a fence marks the edge of a construction site for the new Vertica Condominium, a 12-floor luxury and ‘green’ development just north of the site near the L’Assomption metro station. This development, along with the proposed condos for the adjacent site, sits on a proposed green corridor that citizens and activists have advocated for over many years. Their efforts, which include multiple proposals to the city, aim to connect green spaces across the east end of Montreal, linking major rivers. The silhouettes of sumac buds in the winter are visible throughout the second exposure.
above: Image ‘souped’ in sumac tea for 24 hours. In early September, the outline of new traffic lights entering the expanding industrial port terminal faintly creates the first exposure. The second exposure consists of a narrow strip of Erigeron annuus (daisy fleabane) and the top half of a Junko sculpture. The sculpture is in a community garden adjacent to a co-op that is blurry yet visible in the background. Built from site materials, the sculpture appeared in 2021 and became a symbol for the community group Mobilisation 6600. The sumac tea is made from berry clusters collected on-site; the site’s soil conditions have been drastically altered by chemicals used by the now- demolished steel industry and by Roundup (glyphosate), which is still sprayed by CN along the tracks.
all images Ann-Catherine Lemonde
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Image souped in Virginia Creeper berry for 24 hours. Sunflowers from the Jardin Vague, a community garden in La Friche, are exposed over piles of cement blocks that have become a popular meeting spot. These blocks sit on part of the site now owned by Ray-Mont Logistics, a logistics and transportation corporation that purchased a large portion of the former Canadian Steel Foundries grounds in 2016 to develop an economic activity zone along the Saint Lawrence River/ Kaniatarowanenneh. Despite strong community opposition, which led to a legal battle and a multi-million-dollar settlement in 2024, Ray- Mont continues to develop the site.
Image souped in Virginia Creeper berry for one week. On the left, sumac trees are shown at the end of November. On the right, the wall of l’Achoppe in Hochelaga, where a panel discussion took place with Célia Izoard, a French journalist and philosopher. Izoard’s work explores the social and ecological impacts of new technologies, with a focus on the extractivist ideology behind the energy transition. The second exposure was taken along rue Notre-Dame, just south of the site, where the Vopak Terminals of Canada — handling petroleum, chemicals, and other bulk liquids — are visible along the Saint- Lawrence River (Kaniatarowanenneh).
all images Ann-Catherine Lemonde
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In late summer of 2024, Virginia Creeper berries drape over chain link fencing that borders the Steinberg woodland and are carefully and minimally collected to make a vinegar. While poisonous for humans, these berries are a food source for migratory birds and other creatures that frequent the woodland. The sumac near the gashed fence is also in season and its bright, fuzzy berry clusters can be seen all over the site. The final sumac tea is poisonous for different reasons; the site’s soil conditions have been drastically altered by chemicals that were used by the steel industry in the 1900s and the glyphosate still sprayed by the Canadian National Railway along the tracks. The undeveloped double exposed rolls of film are souped in either this deep burgundy berry vinegar or tart sumac tea for hours, or days at a time. The rolls of film are then left to dry for a month before being developed. Final developed photos include an inter-frame gap that is usually cut out. Here, this in-between space is included, exposing elements of the landscape into the folds of the frames. In the end, this photography process contributes a position of slow witnessing and relational practice. The images show layered, enmeshed traces of what Liboiron’s capital L-Land: ruderal plants, encampments, celebrations, repair, industrial histories, protests, chemical transformations and more. Fully submerged or souped in the site itself, these images embody a refusal to abandon the actual site and the vibrant life of the so- called meanwhile. It’s a reminder that to stand still is not to do nothing, but to recognize the work of noticing, of refusing to abandon what doesn’t easily fit within dominant ecological and small-l land frameworks. As architects and artists, this might be one of the most urgent things we can do. £
Image souped in Virginia Creeper berry vinegar for 24 hours. Barbed wire fencing located on the outer edges of the Steinberg Woodland exposed over openings along a steel building located next to L’Antenne. The Steinberg forest was recently acquired by the City of Montreal from Hydro-Quebec. Mobilization 6600 helped stop plans to build a transformer station and later prevented the extension of the Assomption Blvd through Steinberg.
Image souped in sumac tea for 24 hours. The first exposure, taken in early September, shows the ground along the edge of a path in the Steinberg woodland with the folds of a dark blanket. This serves as the backdrop for the sky in the second exposure, taken in October, where we see the tops of trees from the same woodland.
un-captioned images on pp 14-16: Double-exposed analogue photographs, souped in either berry vinegar or sumac tea harvested from the site. Images were taken between summer 2024 and winter 2025.
all images Ann-Catherine Lemonde
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Azoulay, Ariella. Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography . Verso, 2012. Barron, Patrick, and Manuela Mariani, editors. Terrain Vague: Interstices at the Edge of the Pale . Routledge, 2014. Cools, Dillan. ‘Tent City Narratives: A Rights-Based Approach to Encampments as a Temporary Housing Solution’. Master’s thesis, McGill University, 2024. Clément, Gilles. ‘In Praise of Vagabonds’. Translated by Jonathan Skinner. Qui Parle , vol. 19, no. 2, 2011, pp. 275–297. Clément, Gilles. ‘Manifesto of the Third Landscape’. Edited by Michele Bee, translated by Michele Bee and Raphaël Fèvre. Trans Europe Halles , 2004. Dehaene, Michiel, and Lieven De Cauter, editors. Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society . Routledge, 2008. Gandy, Matthew. ‘Unintentional Landscapes’. Landscape Research , vol. 41, no. 4, 2016, pp. 433–440. Gandy, Matthew. ‘Zones of Indistinction: Bio-Political Contestations in the Urban Arena’. Cultural Geographies , vol. 13, no. 4, 2006, pp. 497–516. https://doi.org/10.1191/1474474006cgj372oa. Hogue, Martin. ‘Matter Displaced, Organized, Flattened: Recording the Landscape’. Material Culture: Assembling and Disassembling Landscapes , edited by Jane Hutton, vol. 5, 2018. Lévesque, Carole. La Précision Du Vague . 2018, https://issuu.com/ mnc.levesque/docs/la_pre_cision_du_vague. Lévesque, Luc. ‘The ‘Terrain Vague’ as Material: Some Observations’. TEXT(E)S , 2002, https://www.amarrages.com/ textes_terrain.html. Accessed 11 Dec. 2024. Liboiron, Max. Pollution Is Colonialism . Duke University Press, 2021. RÉSEAU de la communauté autochtone à Montréal. ‘Do You Know the Indigenous Community in Tiohtià:Ke?’ https://reseaumtlnetwork. com/en/tiohtiake/our-community/. Accessed 11 Dec. 2024. Résister et Fleurir. https://resisteretfleurir.info/. Accessed 29 Oct. 2024. Simpson, Audra. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States . Duke University Press, 2014. https://doi. org/10.2307/j.ctv1198w8z. Taylor, Sunaura. Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert . University of California Press, 2024
ANN-CATHERINE LEMONDE , an MArch and an MSc in Mental Health is an architect intern with the City of Montréal’s cultural sector and emerging artist in research-creation. Their practice explores questions of power, equity and care in the built environment.
all images Ann-Catherine Lemonde
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roots arthur nishimura
memory migration rootedness photography
Collection of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, used by permission from Arthur Nishimura
Arthur Nishimura. To my father, 17 years in memoriam, Roots up-roote d (Dedication Series) 1976 silver gelative print on paper
ARTHUR NISHIMURA was born in 1946 in the small rural town of Raymond, in southern Alberta. His parents immigrated to Canada in the 1910s and were among the first generation of Japanese people to settle permanently in Alberta. Nishimura works in traditional film-based photography. This image was part of Mystical Landscapes by Arthur Nishimura , an Alberta Foundation for the Arts Travelling Exibition program.
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letters to an absence tomas jonsson
memory place material return
At the same time as my father’s deteriorating health, the culmination of a long process of development in the neighbourhood my family had lived in for 40 years occurred. Through periodic transfers between home and hospital, we witnessed the uprooting of trees, the construction of roadways and subdividing of properties, including our own. Our house was soon marked for sale and redevelopment, and our effects moved to a new location following his passing. These materials, an archive of ephemera, photos and letters that tell the story of our family from their journey from Denmark and eventual settling in Canada, now sit in cardboard boxes and Tupperware containers. Using these personal ‘affects’, I am involved in a long-term performative engagement, using them as a lens to interrogate larger conditions urban development, migration, colonial histories— logics in which our history is implicated. These are teased out of the contents of the material and texts in my family’s collection. Familial objects, gathered from my mother’s archive are mailed to our former address. As this house no longer exists, the materials are redirected, wearing the imprinted marks of the journey on their eventual return.
all images Tomas Jonsson
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all images Tomas Jonsson
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Nothing has been organized
That’s fine
You can see my room, the doors open, you can come in If we begin from one end, you can see that all this furniture fits, it’s amazing, isn’t it? Just precisely, unbelievable. This is the way Dad organized, I couldn’t figure it out, I organized with binders
Here is all the fine things Here is my clothes Here is dad’s old things What my aunts made, my jewellery This is my fine things This too Plates That’s that In here, photo albums,
And here I’m trying to divide all of everyone’s things. And… And these are negatives And these are pictures I’d like to put up Weddings Songs Letters Finances Old things that don’t work anymore Our Denmark trip Dad’s various things Things to throw out What was on the desk in old days The guitar is gone, Lars has it Old things New things are here All my ‘hjemme’ That’s that Much to throw out Everything in the basement Nothing really here, our clothes and yours Toys Photos here, all Kare’s binders here Downstairs, when I don’t have anything else to do
In the innermost room, nothing important, ok, it’s your comics and… Here, yeah, all my Christmas boxes and
And Dad’s clothes, I don’t know what to do with Our suitcases This is nothing Lars’ magazines This is yours, mostly All of these are boxes that were emptied, upside down This is all toys This is from Grandmother
When I organize this I’ll put all in your boxes
So there is all these boxes, all these, all these, them, I don’t know what they are, Most are likely letters, when Dad was sick.
Kind of exciting, I’m looking forward to looking at Drawings Some are from Dad’s school, his students These are cameras I don’t know what they are There is a lot of interesting things Mixed up What one will you take?
Oh I have one
These are letters, you can see, family letters, New York trip, Are these interesting? So what do you think? you can see how much we have you can’t imagine how much I want to go through this, but I want to throw out you can see, in Grandfather’s box… some are letters we got back maybe I want to throw out, because you get sad, right? Maybe? If I’m in the right mood I may throw this out, but only when you are done. if you see from here and then the next that is this one, this is from our yard, this one, is from our yard this one, from our yard This much at one time that blooms
all images Tomas Jonsson
TOMAS JONSSON has curated, presented and performed work in Canada and internationally, including Estonia and Finland. Tomas’ family came to Montreal from Denmark in 1969, living and travelling west until eventually deciding to stay in Calgary, where he was born in 1975. A large part of his practice has been unraveling and understanding this trajectory, and his relation to a place he now also knows as Mohkinstsis, among other names. Tomas is currently living in oskana ka- asasteki, also known as Pile of Bones, also known as Regina. https://tomasjonsson.ca
Isn’t it beautiful? All of this £
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here there nowhere, and traversée anne o’callaghan
migration identity displacement home
@ The Art of Gallery of Peterborough, Peterborough, Ontario
Here There No Where (2013 and 2015) Found cart, and suitcase, photographic image and downloaded images on digital display
here, there, no where 1
This hand-built, rudimentary trolley fashioned out of old bits of wood and used tyres to transport goods and belongings functions as a metaphor of forced migration. Here there and No Where makes reference to the victims of war, greed, famine, hurricanes, religious persecution, abuse and neglect, who are expelled or driven from their homes, bundle up their possessions, pack a suitcase and move on. From Pikangikum to Darfur from ‘here and there and no where’ to go.
Here there and no where, a small way to bear witness
Say this city has ten million souls, Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes: Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us. — W H Auden, from Refugee Blues
found images from Here There No Where, 2015
ANNE O’CALLAGHAN is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans over three decades. In creating her artworks O’Callaghan uses a range of media, including photography, installation work, video, and sculpture, most recently. Born in Ireland, O’Callaghan immigrated to Canada in 1968, and lives and works in Toronto. https://anneocallaghan.ca
1 Easy Come, Easy Go, a Tree Museum Off Site Exhibition, 2013. You Are Not Here – Daniels SPECTRUM Cultural Hub, Toronto, Ontario, 2015 2 Attraverso l’arte at La galleria IL GABBIANO 1968-2018. Cinquant’anni di ricerca artistica, Centro di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, La Spezia Italy, 2022
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traversée 2
Traversée: crossing. From Middle English traversen , from Old French traverser , from Latin trans (across) + versus (turned), perfect passive participle of Latin vertere (to turn). traverse (n.): ‘act of passing through a gate, crossing a bridge, etc.’, mid-14c., from Old French travers , from traverser (see traverse (v.) Meaning ‘a passage by which one may traverse’ is recorded from 1670s. Military fortification sense of ‘barrier, barricade’ is recorded from 1590s. Flora and fauna species have correlations to policies regarding immigration, migrants: Latin migrare ‘to move from one place to another’; alien belonging to a foreign country or nation; an invasive species or an organism that is not indigenous, or native, to a particular area; an animal or plant living or growing in a region to which it has migrated.
As a gardener and artist exploring the buried socio-political history of gardens, Traversée crossing , is based on my response to readings and research in poetry, politics and the history of plants and herbariums. I started my hunt for the history and origin of plants some 25 years ago, The history and the journeys of these plants tell us as much about culture, politics and the monetisation of humans, as it does about home, place, memory, identity. 1 the artichoke: in Arabic al-qarshuf equals thistle; in Italian: articiocco , French: artichaut , English: artichoke. The Saracen of Syria and Palestine introduced artichokes to Italy. The artichoke is spoken of as a garden plant in Sicily by Homer, Hesiod, Pliny the Elder. It was mentioned in Carthage (now Tunisia) and then taken to Cordoba in Andalusia by the Moors. It travelled from Naples to Florence in 1466, and to Avignon 1532, and then to the English court of Henry VIII. The Spanish took it to United States in the nineteenth century. 2 the Columbian Exchange. The exchange of diseases, ideas, food crops and enslaved peoples as commodities between the New and the Old Worlds from 1492 to the present. It describes Europe’s, and later America’s fight for the control of territory, and what those territories had under the ground, above the ground. Gardens, flowers and trees are a cultural history of place, of land clearings, of transplanting, of writing out a people’s history and culture of changing the landscape of a newly acquired territory. Botany has long held a relationship to both exploitation and acts of resistance, and how plant life has and may intervene in the rejuvenation of contaminated environments. We have long been aware of nature’s role in determining the course of history — we see it through nature’s ever-shifting response to human intervention. £
Anne O’Callaghan
A society without strangers would be impoverished; to live only among ourselves, constantly inbreeding, never facing an outsider to make us question again and again our certainties and rules, would inevitably lead to atrophy. The experience of encountering a stranger – like the experience of suffering– is important and creative, provided we know when to step back. — Elie Wiesel
The distance between Syria and Germany is about 3,700 kilometres. For refugees fleeing civil war, the journey can take weeks, even months. No one travels thousands of miles, carrying children if not for HOPE. —Anne O’Callaghan
Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places. — Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
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dancing with ghosts corey watanabe
dance liberation migration rejuvenation
It began as dance among the stars. My spirit longed to leap towards the cosmos but my heart felt so heavy. A mysterious energy, something beyond gravity seemed to capture me. I was a dancer that could not move. A river that could not flow. An artist that could not speak. My body to sank towards the cold boards of the studio floor. Visions of hay stuffed mattress in a horse stable, the sound of desert crickets and rolling train cars beyond shaded window panes, the glimpse of a distant mountain shrouded by dust and barbed wire. Ghostly memories—so visceral—rose from deep within, silent and contained. — June Watanabe
Rooted across and in between all geographies, our landscapes holds troves of entangled human and non-human experience. Buried beneath the surface, these stories speak to moments of joy, care and interspecies relationships as well as to the ghosts of ecological disturbance, trauma and displacement. As a landscape designer, I often find myself facing sites haunted by these ghosts. When given the ruins, I’ve begun to ask: what does it mean to acknowledge a wound that may never – and perhaps should never – be fully healed? As frightening as they may seem, these ghosts might be the root of something beyond ourselves. Though trained as a landscape designer, I see myself more as a maker tied to a generation of creatives whose practices unfold through personal histories in relationship with the land. One story close to my heart is the relationship between myself, Corey Watanabe, and my grandmother, June Watanabe, a modern dancer. Bound by a creative practice rooted in spiritual repair, we’ve entered a lifelong journey: learning to dance with our ghosts. this page: June Watanabe Sketch of Phragmites australis , in the west considered an invasive plant with origins in eastern Asia, initially brought to the east coast of North America with ship ballast — discarded earth often used to stabilise ships during voyages overseas. facing page: Japanese American incarcerees in the Santa Anita Racecoure stables, ca 1941. My grandmother June (bottom left), her sister Mayumi and mother Mariko (right), and a family friend at Heart Mountain, ca 1943.
Arne Folkedal
Heart Mountain Concentration Camp, 1941-1945
Corey Watanabe
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below: Santa Anita Horse Stables My grandmother (bottom left), her sister Mayumi and mother Mariko (to the right), and a family friend at Heart mountain
My grandmother, June Watanabe, a Nisei, or second- generation Japanese American born to immigrant parents, has been immensely influential in shaping my practice as a designer. Since I was very young, she has told me stories of ‘camp’, what I would later come to understand as the Japanese American incarceration—a history that left a deep scar on the American landscape and the collective memory of Japanese Americans. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, my grandmother, along with her father Naoyoshi Tsukida, mother Mariko and sister Mayumi, were forcibly removed from their home in Los Angeles. Under Executive Order 9066, all persons of Japanese ancestry along the West Coast were ordered to evacuate. Our family was first incarcerated in the horse stalls of the Santa Anita Racetrack and later relocated to the Heart Mountain concentration camp in the high desert of Wyoming where they remained until released in November 1945. Throughout this hardship, my family embodied gaman , a Japanese philosophy of enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience, stoicism and dignity. It became their inner strength in a nation gripped by fear and war hysteria. My grandmother was only three years old at the time, but her memories are vivid. ‘I remember my mother pulling me away from the barbed wire fence, but I didn’t want to go, I was very short, and all I could see were the lower halves of soldiers marching, their rifles swaying back and forth. I remember looking up into the clouds – the watchtowers loomed like giants in the sky. Every morning, we said the Pledge of Allegiance. We lived in small tar paper barracks, ate in mess halls, carried coal to the stoves at night. It felt like a long summer in the desert.’ And yet, amidst barbed wire, dust storms, freezing nights and scorching sun, June witnessed something remarkable: landscapes of incarceration being transformed into spaces of resilience, beauty and joy. ‘Our communities built beautiful gardens with rocks and plants scavenged from the desert. We held movie nights, baseball games, dances, family dinners. Creativity became our grounding force. I remember my father carving sculptures from scrap wood salvaged from our barrack. He was a sensitive, creative man, deeply rooted in his Japanese heritage.’
Everett Collection
family archives
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