Even if many know it as a Colonisation Road it is not often interrogated as such. I chose to document the Monck Road, and my being there, because it most represents what I call infrastructure blindness – where the roads we use for daily communication become a flat neutral background where car travel is the event, not the supporting infrastructure. This leads to a knowledge gap in the meaning of roads, especially Colonization Roads. The origins of Monck Road are lost, but the road itself continues to be defined by processes of status quo maintenance, a constantly reworked and re-materialised landscape in support of quotidian vehicular travel. Construction, maintenance and use defines the Monck Road as an example of the ubiquity of infrastructure and the normalisation of processes of colonisation. You are there , and under foot or under wheels, is the material of an infrastructural colonisation project. The images – portraits, context and details – map my perspective as I travelled back and forth between Cardiff and Bancroft. The portraits locate myself there , isolating my position in the landscape, grounding me there . Context images are recordings, if fragmentary, of my perspective, fixing the location of the view. Detail images are a sharpened crop of ground, gradients and material make-up of the road and its adjacencies. Context, portrait, detail; locating , grounding , there . You may not know your particular coordinates, but being on the road gives you a sense of locational value in place and time. The confines, convention and act of conveyance that a road prescribes to its user might conceal its origins, however what it does provide is a material situational experience. A road can be there , sited in the landscape, and you can be there , too. p
1 Primary documents and a general body of research is difficult to come by on the topic of colonisation roads, however if it is to be found and discussed it most likely is mentioned inRhys E. Steckle's great dissertation on road development in Ontario and Quebec in the 1800s in their contemporaneous political and social contexts. Steckle analyses this particular period in the process of colonisation that inspired the push for roads and road networks stitching together areas that previously lacked in settler communication infrastructure. I use it here to introduce the topic. Rhys E. Steckle, 'Rule of the Routes: Infrastructure, Colonization, and ‘the Social Science’, in the Canadas from Conquest to Confederation series. Carleton University, 2020. 2 The overlays of the colonisation road networkon a Google Earth aerial image is adapted from a map found in the three-volume series, Men and Meridians . Men and Meridians is an unironic (but informative) look at the triumphs of surveying and mapping technologies used in the Canadian colonisation process. Don W. Thomson, Men and Meridians: The History of Surveying and Mapping in Canada. Volume 1. Toronto: Thorn Press Limited, 1966. p 240
Christian Stewart is a landscape designer in Guelph, Ontario, where he lives with his partner, son and dog. Amongst many interests he especially enjoys capturing the processes of landscape with a camera when he can.
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on site review 41 :: infrastructure
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