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.
12 on site review 47 :: standing still
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator