❶ SLUG DEVOURING CANADIANA
❷ OASIS AS A DIFFICULT WHOLE
❸ IT TAKES A VILLAGE
OBJECTS:
❹ HEART 2 HEART
❺ THE ROOM
❻ POINT THE KNEES TOGETHER
❼ BREAK
RESEARCH:
❽ ATHENS, AN EFFORT TO LOG
❾ ABOUT JUNK & HANGING OUT
A proposal for a museum at Crawford Lake,
designed under the guidance of James Bird, Trina Moyan, and prof. Francesco Martire,
as part of DFALD’s studio on Site, Matter, Ecology, and Indigenous Storywork.
The art piece investigated earlier this semester, serving as a starting point for this research, was Christi Belcourt’s Walking with Our Sisters. The work, involving approximately 4,000 vamps collected by the artist through an open call, was a grandiose collection of evidence of people who have spent hours puncturing leather, cutting and sewing. Their labour is an act of colonial resistance, and an act of commemoration - one that insists on making that which has been forcibly disappeared and neglected, visible.
The proposal invested in the human insistence on Making - all that is to be exhibited in the museum would be a product of this insistence.
Museum artifacts are marks of the Anthropocene, the marks that continue to haunt the land long after we are gone, made visible by being put on display. I approached the museum as a gallery of human activity. By looking at it through this lens, it became evident that there is a certain myopia present in a typical colonial museum; artifacts on white walls, behind glass partitions, are devoid of the context from which they are pulled—removed from the land and the people.
The proposed museum attempts to acknowledge the anthropocentric reality of the artifacts presented, but also simultaneously reveal our embeddedness within the systems we often overlook - the galleries would be resolute about the entanglement between human, human creation and the world. By putting us on display as much as the artifacts, the building acts as a podium. Everything that is seen is seen in its context. Just as artwork or archaeological artifacts do not exist outside of the context of the people, neither do we exist outside of the context of the land.
Everything is lifted above on stilts; the building form is dictated by its insistence on never cutting a tree, on trying its best to not disturb a root. The stilts densify, at times, to trestle, allowing various types of program and circulation. The layered boardwalk systems reconcile the site’s harsh topography. As the building slopes down towards the lake at a slower rate than the existing valley, the height provides views of the lake and the forest previously inaccessible.
The proposal is a network of boardwalks and galleries, three of which can be seen in the site plan. These would have multiple points of access - I propose a main hub with an hours-only gallery space, café and gift shop, as well as satellite enclosed and semi-enclosed galleries that would be operational 24/7, scattered deeper in the forest.
These would all come together into a porous constellation of spaces. A series of long, winding podiums meet at tangents, offering cross-views and space for the unexpected: I picture vines growing and birds settling on the stilts, while the people are allowed to explore, suspended in the trees.