Photographer Andrew Emond recently moved back to his hometown of Toronto after spending six years in Montreal. We spoke to him about urban water systems and the evolution of the art world.

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While I was living in Montreal, I took an interest in exploring the city’s sewer system. That was the result of me wanting to figure out the city from a different perspective. I did this for several years without receiving any permission from the city and built a substantial body of work.

And through exploring the city’s sewer system I realized that they were more than just pipes that helped remove sewage and stormwater from the city. They were conduits containing the water of rivers and creeks that had been been funneled underground over the course of 175 years. So I started to look more into water in the city and how we have transformed, or in some cases manufactured, its paths over time.

A lot of the creeks and rivers on the island of Montreal, let’s say 70%, have been pushed underground. In Toronto we’ve treated water in a similar fashion, but there’s still quite a lot left that we can explore on the surface: there’s the Don River, there’s the Humber River, and many other smaller watercourses that have managed to avoid the burial process. When I came back to this city, I was excited to explore these systems and immediately gravitated toward the stretches that been lined with concrete or have had their banks reconstructed in the name of flood protection and erosion control. They’re in a state that’s somewhat between a sewer and a river.

Whereas in Montreal I was working underground and forced to use my own lighting, in Toronto I’m photographing these places at night, but using only ambient light—from street lights, the glow of the city in general, light from passing cars, whatever I can get. They’re long exposures, and over the course of several minutes that electric light builds up to something that comes close to resembling daylight, but that has a slightly eerie quality to it.

I haven’t actually looked at a lot of these rivers during the day. There’s something about going out there at night that resonates with me. It’s the darkness mixed with the sounds of the city and the flowing water that draws me in.

So with this particular subject matter you just feel that shooting at night is more appropriate?

It’s more appropriate based on my sensibilities as a photographer and how I want to work for this particular project. I like the eerie and occasionally romantic quality that the night gives these locations, and I like the artificial light because it kind of mirrors the fact that these environments are artificial in their own way as well. I could very easily go to shoot these places during the day, but the photographs and the process of taking them probably wouldn’t interest me as much. The workflow would be much faster and less introspective.

With these photographs I’m often forced to stand still for five minutes or more over the course of a single exposure. There’s something about standing quietly, dead still, in the water at night that appeals to me, maybe because it offers a somewhat meditative experience. It allows me to feel more connected to the location, in a way.

Our upcoming Toronto issue shows some of Michael Cook’s work, which also deals with sewers and urban water. I’m wondering if there’s sort of a community of people in Toronto who are interested in exploring sewers and the like?

I wouldn’t say that there’s a community around this. Over the past ten years, I can only think of a dozen or so people in Toronto and Montreal who have explored the sewers and storm drains in Toronto on an ongoing basis. There are people who I go underground with, but that number has never exceeded more than five at a time. There have been a lot of people who have tried it once but have never had interest in doing it again. I think you have to have a certain temperament and a specific sort of curiosity to keep going with it. It is definitely not for everyone.

Do you do photography for your day job?

I work for a design consultancy studio as a web designer and developer. That’s my bread and butter.

How have you found the photography community in Toronto as somebody who’s working and then being an artist by night?

I’ve only been back for a year, so most of the photographers I know are living in Montreal. I don’t really have a good sense of the community here.

What’s your goal with art? Do you want to show it at art spaces, or do you want to kind of just do it yourself and get satisfaction of it that way, or—?

I love to show it as many ways as I can. This month, Michael Cook and I have our work on display in Toronto’s subway systems during the CONTACT photography festival. Having that sort of opportunity to get our work shown outside of a gallery is something that appeals to me, and I hope to be able to do more public exhibitions in the future.

The system for emerging artists is changing; the traditional trajectory is changing. We’re no longer dependent on art school and galleries to have work get recognized. There’s a lot more we can do now to get work out there and become noticed. The platforms have changed radically over the past decade and will continue to help give people opportunities to be seen, especially through the internet.

At the same time, there’s probably more competition than there’s ever been. This is especially true with photography now that digital cameras are in abundance. It think even this is a good thing, though, as it encourages people to try and work differently, to go deeper into the subject matter and hopefully be able to create better work as a result.

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Work from Utah-born, Kansas City-based painter Ricky Allman.

We visited British Columbia native Tristram Lansdowne in his Bloordale studio to talk about architecture, painting, and Toronto.

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I moved to Toronto for school from Victoria. I grew up in this sort of idyllic coastal city, and I started to paint watercolors, like seascapes and really traditional kind of Sunday painter stuff. That was really what informed my sense of landscape. And then I moved here and I was like, I don’t even know how to record this landscape! Not only is there no landscape in the typical idyllic sense, you can’t even see far if there was, because of all the buildings in the way. 

So I started becoming interested in architecture. Back when I was in school I started to read architectural theory, read Jane Jacobs. I started to look at buildings not as part of the landscape but as objects, because it helped me kind of understand what was going on. The only way I could think about it was: There’s a city, but underneath there’s a landscape. Like, dirt—the original dirt is under there. This is all just sort of infrastructure that rests on top. I kind of dealt with things as if they were removable objects, and that led into ideas of archaeology and stuff like that.

And you studied art?

Yeah, I studied drawing and painting. It was great. My teachers were able to steer me toward some of the reading about architecture that I wouldn’t have found otherwise.

What does being a Canadian artist mean to you in terms of possibilities and limitations?

I feel like you’d have to be outside Canada to even know what it means to be a Canadian artist. But I think it’s great, because it seems like it’s relatively well funded, and it’s a big enough scene, for a young artist at least, but I feel like it’s small enough that I can participate in it. I think Toronto’s probably got the biggest and most commercially viable art scene in the country, but it’s still not daunting, really. I can go out and meet everybody. It’s fairly approachable. And despite the fact that Vancouver’s so far away, we can still have dialogue because it’s small enough that it seems like one community. The New York art world seems bigger to me than the whole Canadian art world, at least in terms of intimidation and navigability.

Some people seem to think that it’s a little bit split—there’s the Praries thing, the Vancouver thing, the Montreal thing—but I don’t see it. Everybody moves around so much and goes to school all over the place, so it’s rare that I’ll meet someone that doesn’t know someone else somewhere else.

You’re represented by commercial galleries, but you can get grants as well. Does the business model seem reasonable to you for what people are able to actually achieve?

I don’t know. I think that generally the commercial art world system is not geared toward artists at all. I think our granting systems are pretty good. I do have friends that make paintings who say, “I don’t apply for grants because I can sell my work, I don’t think that I should get grant money.” I don’t really buy that. I know a lot of artists that make sellable things, but their practice isn’t any more financially viable than a performance artist’s, really, because it takes too long or the materials cost too much or something. No matter what you make, it’s never really a financially very viable model unless you happen to be that one person that makes it big.

I think if you compare it to other places and other times in history, it’s great. We have a lot of private collectors who like to buy art not just for themselves but to support artists, and that’s awesome. We have a good granting system. I’d rather do that then work for a church. I can’t be too picky.

Sometimes I get really cynical and think . . . I don’t think galleries used to take fifty percent. Fifty years ago they took twenty-five percent. It’s the only business I’ve ever heard of where commission is fifty percent. It seems insane. But that’s what it is, and we just make do. You can’t really not do that. You can’t opt out. Well, maybe you can, depending on what you’re doing. I think that if you were a painter it would be really hard to totally ignore the commercial system if you wanted to make a living at all.

It seems it’s one of the few industries where the internet hasn’t fundamentally changed the sales model. 

You’re right, the internet should have changed things. It probably has changed a lot, actually. I think it’s given artists a lot more power as far as promoting themselves and creating value for their work. Artists make names for themselves without dealers’ help now, and the dealers pick up on them after. You can make an art scene that becomes relevant and important with your friends. But then maybe because it’s such an artificially created system of value the people that do hold the institutional power are hesitant to let it go. And maybe all of us are hesitant to let it go. Even though you can do it with alternative models, if you took away the commercial system completely, I think the whole thing would falter, in a way. I think it depends on what kind of art you’re talking about and why you’re making art.

You’re working with galleries in Toronto and Montreal. Do you find that an easy, or doable, thing—accessing Canadian galleries and galleries in the States?

Yeah, the trick, I think, is getting connected with them. It seems like no matter how big the art world is, it’s usually just personal connection. Your dealer meets another dealer, or someone who knows you and likes your work tells a dealer. It seems pretty arbitrary.

But yeah, it’s doable. I mean, I can drive my work to Montreal. And again, maybe because in Canada the scene is smaller I fee like you can go to the city for a weekend or a show and actually engage with the art community there and get to know people.

The States is tricky because of shipping. The borders can be really a hassle. Even if you know how to do it properly it can still be a problem.

How do you see your place in the Toronto ecosystem?

I’m not sure. The art community here is much more commercial than other places, so on a bad day I could be really cynical and just think that I’m making wall decorations for rich people’s houses. But I’m not sure if I even think about my role in the ecosystem. I was talking to a friend recently about sort of what function do we have and is there any purpose to what we do, and he was like, “It’s not cancer research. We’re not directly contributing.” And I was like, “But if you took away all the art, the world would suck.”

At the end of the day, you can still go see art in any gallery for free, which I think is great. And I think that however cynical you want to be about where the work ends up or the forces of power behind the artworld or how much people engage with it, it’s culture that you can take in for free anywhere in the world. You can go to the biggest gallery in New York and just walk in.

I can’t remember his name. I remember his eyes, black and warm. And his short, sharp beard. Ordinarily, I didn’t like beards, but I didn’t mind his. He had two children: a daughter in grade six and a son who liked math. Every absurdly early morning, as I stood waiting for a brown Maruti 800 to trundle up the driveway and take me to school, he would pepper with me questions. The other guards, sleep still mildewed on their eyelids, groggily ignored me.

We were on holiday when he was killed by a rioting Hindu mob. What the mind’s eye sees is often more terrifying than reality, and I would be condemned to imagination forever. The pictures came to me in flashes: a saffron cloud, armed with swords and knives, rushing up the hill to my building. A blade being plunged into his torso until he falls to the ground, his khaki uniform slowly darkening with blood. Victory chants rending the air before the crowd skitters away into the slum next to my apartment. Later I found out that it was the beard, that tattoo of his filthy Muslim-ness, which gave him away.

I was ten. Mumbai was being cleaved apart by the worst religious violence in its history. We returned to a city that smelled of death. The streets were desolate, emptied by the exhaustion that the exorcism of demons brings. The only other car on the road was a hulking army patrol. When I rolled down my car window, the salty coastal air seemed to carry the metallic smell of death. Wounds of the violence were still festering—on the way home we saw a Muslim furniture shop burnt to its iron skeleton, its half-torn signboard swinging in the wind.

For months, I saw people only as Hindu or Muslim.

Just as the scars were beginning to fade, the Muslims struck back. Twelve bomb blasts rocked the city on March 12, my mother’s birthday. I came home to a taxi driver washing out blood from the back seat of his car. Stories came pouring in, of relatives stuck at the stock exchange when the first bomb went off, of a friend’s sister passing the Air India building at the moment its windows were blown out. Instead of holding a birthday dinner that night, we went, like gawking tourists, to examine the damage, only to be met with a gaping hole that had replaced the city’s passport office.

As I think back to that spring of 1993, I can’t seem to connect with the fear that must have swept over Mumbai. I write with an odd detachment. I see everything but feel nothing. Then I understand why. After the riots and bomb blasts, we weren’t scared. We believed that this was an anomaly, an exception in a city that had an even more exceptional past of religious tolerance. When the rest of the country was ravaged by communal riots after the India-Pakistan partition, Mumbai remained bravely cohesive. I remember my mother fearlessly sending me to school the morning after the blasts. Not for us the cowardice of lesser cities.

But by the time I turned twenty-three, Mumbai had seen unprecedented levels of violence—eight bomb attacks, including a series of blasts on the commuter trains, and innumerable riots over everything from Valentine’s Day celebrations to lesbian films. The city, it occurred to me one night as I watched footage of the jumbled remains of a ladies’ train that had been bombed, its metal frame twisted outwards like the arms of a monster, was in a permanent state of implosion, consumed by a desperate, hateful rage.

Much of the violence was pinned on the Shiv Sena, a political party that advocated regional chauvinism. The Sena wanted Mumbai to belong to the Maharashtrians, not the myriad religious and regional communities that had found a home in the city. The party was also notoriously anti-Muslim and had been convicted of fomenting the Hindu nationalism that led to the wrenching riots of 1992–1993.

Mumbai was a city ravaged from two extremes. The Sena attacked it from the inside, gnawing away the threads of religious tolerance that had bound the city together for so many centuries, while Muslim fundamentalists lobbed grenades at it from the outside, using it as a symbol for everything they believed was wrong with India.

For the city’s residents, living in Mumbai became a daily confrontation with their own mortality. Small, everyday events took on a monumental significance. I remember waking up one morning seized by the unspeakable fear that my sister would not make it to her suburban college—that her train would be bombed, or the station she was waiting at explode. When she came home that night, I begged her to start driving to school instead. Each new attack tore further at my sense of security.

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I found that security again only after I got married. I moved to Delhi, a vast, sprawling metropolis of ghosts and djinns, and found solace in its crumbling red mausoleums, its tracts of parrot-green forest, and its quiet elegance.

But security also breeds boredom, and soon I longed for the coastal chaos of Mumbai. Part of me was glad to not have to worry about a bomb going off while I was at a movie, but another part desperately missed the feral Bombay scent of sweat and the sea. I ached to plunge headlong into crowds at dirty Churchgate station and see tubby Ganeshas tumble into the sea.

Six months later, my husband and I moved halfway across the globe, started graduate school, and fretted over internships and grades. Mumbai sank deeper into parochial politics and ugly brawls over regional identity. There were reports of riots over a film star’s statement that he wanted India to play cricket with Pakistan and a scuffle in the Parliament over a minister’s refusal to take the swearing-in oath in Marathi.

Mumbai is not a good-looking city. It reeks of a slow, insidious decay. The international airport is carved out from inside one of the city’s biggest slums. The visitor’s first view of the city is often a squatting, naked bottom. The air is thick and clingy. It coats you like a wet suit and wraps you in the waste and sweat of 18 million Mumbaikars. The beaches are gritty, the color of yellow and ochre mixed in a palette, littered with old rubber slippers and candy wrappers, the detritus of a thousand memories. Sometimes, during the monsoon, the dull, corrugated face of the Arabian Sea winks at you like something from a sci-fi nightmare.

The city’s more charitable residents like to talk about the Queen’s Necklace, a crescent of lights encircling the southern bay, as the jewel in the British Empire. Then they will tell you about Marine Drive, the world’s second longest stretch of Art Deco buildings, but won’t mention the creeping moss on the buildings, the peeling paint, and the putrefaction caused by the corrosive sea air.

But living in cold, alien New York, where the winter stripped everything of color and rendered it in a flat gray monotone, my memories of Mumbai received an extra-glossy coat of paint; the city became brighter and bigger, and I missed it more than ever. My husband and I talked often about moving back to India. But I always wanted Mumbai and he didn’t. I knew the city’s many secrets—the way its energy never flags, the way it stays awake through the night, the way it is built on human industry and nothing else, and the way it always manages to stagger back to its feet—and he didn’t. He knew only of Mumbai’s fury.

My homesickness combined with Mumbai’s violence produced a marital problem of epic proportions. The arguments over our future became messier, more heated, harder to work through. My husband feared that the violence was part of Mumbai’s legacy, a personality trait firmly embedded in its DNA.

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Mumbai is the only Indian city with no significant pre-colonial history. Before the Portuguese sold the seven islands to the East India Company in 1668, Mumbai was only a small fishing hamlet. It had no feudal lord, no king feeding off the fat of the land.

In the 1780s, Mumbai was slowly transformed from village to town, primarily as a trading port due to its proximity to the sea. From the onset, it was a commercial city, unashamed of its materialism, its capitalistic impulses. Bombay (as it was known then) quickly attracted people from all over India: Parsis, Gujaratis, Marathis, Pathans, Muslims, Bohras, each community staking its claim to the city’s fortunes. Each group adopted a role in the city’s development: the Parsis became the liaisons between the British and the natives, the Gujaratis businessmen and moneylenders, the Marathis mill-workers, and the Muslim laborers.

When India revolted against its British rulers in 1857, Mumbai refused to participate. The booming metropolis was an unabashedly selfish creature—its residents thought it foolish to sacrifice lucrative trade opportunities brought by the British for unprofitable, emotional patriotism. Bombay carried on with its frenzied commerce even as the rest of the country mired itself in protests, riots, and murders.

The only pre-twentieth century incidences of violence recorded in the city’s history were the anti-Muslim riots of 1893. Even then, the unrest was attributed to “winds from the North, forces from outside the city.”

Bombay, it seemed, unlike Bengal—that tumultuous, cracklingly poor region in East India—was not given to the fervor of religion. It was no model of tolerance—communities divided along lines of religion and geography lived in firmly demarcated ghettos, and distrust between Hindus and Muslims was common—but it was a city that was more concerned with business than belief.

I finished reading Gillian Tindal’s City of Gold, a book that celebrates Mumbai’s nineteenth-century tolerance, on March 9, 2010. The next day, renewed violence erupted in Mumbai. Rioters had attacked cell phone companies to protest their playing recorded messages only in Hindi and English, and not Marathi. Angry, jeans-clad men were shown breaking into stores, smashing windows, and throwing stones at passersby. My husband—to whom I’d been reading out passages from City of Gold—smirked.

If colonial Bombay had been the coastal child of a mixed heritage, speaking only the patois of pluralism and trade, post-independence Mumbai was a furious, pubescent teenager who didn’t understand the brute force of his own strength. The rest of India, after its temporary flirtation with Hindu nationalism, had gone back to believing in the values of secularism and religious harmony. Why had Mumbai held on to adolescence while India strode confidently into adulthood?

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I remember the day I understood how pervasively the city had changed. I was twenty-five. Two thousand eight had been the year of politician Raj Thackeray’s provocations against North Indian immigrants in the city. He hated them, those coarse laborers from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar who arrived in trainloads and took over the cabs and street stands. He wanted them to leave, or at least try harder to fit in—to learn Marathi, the state’s official language, and to “respect the local culture.”

Finally, in the steaming April heat, the rhetoric peaked and he exhorted his men to take to the streets. Like slippery gasoline, his activists spilled out, red war-marks glistening on their foreheads. Images of their wooden sticks crashing into office buildings and cab windows raced across television screens. They pulled cabbies out of cars, beat up hawkers, and set fire to buses. People around the country stared transfixed at the spectacle that Mumbai had become.

That evening I drove home from work alone, my blood-red car matching the mood of the city. Over highways and past malls, I saw no one. Mumbai is not a city that scares easily, but this time was different. People had gone home, turning their city over to the ravaging crowds. The only other vehicle was a cargo truck filled with Thackeray’s men who jeered at me victoriously while their saffron headbands fluttered madly in the sea breeze. I raced home, refusing to stop for red lights, afraid for the first time that the city had morphed into an animal I no longer understood.

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Raj Thackeray’s party, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) is a breakaway faction of the Shiv Sena. Raj is also the nephew of Bal Thackeray, the man who founded the Sena. The story of the Shiv Sena’s rise to prominence is also the story of Mumbai’s transformation from the self-contained, opportunistic city of the early twentieth century to the fractured place it is today.

Bal Thackeray was born in 1929, the same year as my grandmother. They both grew up in a Bombay that smelled of belching cotton mills. My grandmother talks of a childhood in which strikes by the textile workers often brought the city to a grinding halt. Bombay was one of the most important cotton centers in the world, second only to New York and Liverpool, and much of the British Empire’s economy depended on Bombay’s cotton production. The predominantly Maharashtrian mill workers and their trade unions wielded an enormous amount of power.

When Thackeray was seventeen, India became independent from British rule and separated itself from Pakistan.

Thackeray spent the next decade watching the Maharashtrian mill worker’s importance in Bombay’s economic life wane as new industries sprang up. His father, Prabodhankar, would fight for Bombay to be divided in a way that mimicked India’s bloody partition in 1947—Gujarat for the Gujaratis and Maharashtra for the Maharashtrians. The city of Bombay, they fatefully demanded, would go to Maharashtra.

On June 19, 1966, Thackeray launched a political party that would change Bombay forever. He called it the Shiv Sena, or the army of Shiva, the trident-wielding Hindu god of destruction. The Shiv Sena’s manifesto was simple: the reclamation of the lost glory of the Maharashtrians. In the next few years, the Sena relentlessly targeted the Gujarati and Marwari businessmen who controlled the city’s finances and the South Indians who worked in the government.

The irony of such a movement in a city that would have been nonexistent without its migrants was lost on Thackeray, a former cartoonist. Thackeray cut an unforgettable figure in Mumbai’s political circles—frail, notoriously anti-intellectual, known for his incendiary speeches, saffron robes, and the dark, impenetrable sunglasses that he kept on even at night. He was reported to have liked Mein Kampf.

The Shiv Sena would have remained on the margins, a two-bit actor in the political theater of the state, had it not been for the support of the Congress, the state’s ruling party. For the Congress, the Shiv Sena presented a unique opportunity to enervate the Communist Party by eating into the Communists’ voter base—the mostly Maharashtrian mill workers. It was an idea that also appealed to the mill owners, who suffered economic casualties every time the workers went on strike. Together, the rich and the powerful silently encouraged the Sena.

The Sena didn’t just bring to Bombay a new regional chauvinism; it also brought into the mainstream the brawling street ethic that until then had been limited to the dark, labyrinthine dens of the mill workers. When Bal Thackeray first started the Shiv Sena, it was a political ideology that appealed mainly to middle-class Maharashtrians like him. But he recognized that if the party needed to expand its base, he needed to speak the language of the mill workers.

By the late 1970s, the Shiv Sena had decimated the trade unions so completely that when the mill workers launched a massive strike in 1981 for better wages, the unions were unable to negotiate a settlement. The strike ended in 1983, the year I was born. But by then, most of the mills had shut down, their owners preferring to close rather than endure constant labor problems.

With millions of workers disenfranchised and jobless, the Sena’s victory was inevitable. Its message of chauvinism was more seductive to the mill workers and their children than it had ever been before—how easy it was to blame their loss of income on the rogue Gujarati businessmen who had shut down the mills.

My mother remembers 1983 both as the year of her firstborn and a year of upheaval, of the disappearance of the once-unshakable symbols of Mumbai’s prominence, of political assassinations and the second coming of the Sena. In 1985, the Sena decisively captured the Bombay municipal elections.

Historians have accused the city’s elite of being responsible for the Sena’s ascent; after all, the businessmen and the politicians had quietly encouraged Thackeray when he was still a fledgling politician. It was the wealthy mill owners who had refused to entertain worker demands for better wages, leading to the eventual unemployment of 200,000 mill workers and the consequent consolidation of the Sena within the state’s political spectrum. “Nothing undermined the political culture of the city more seriously than the continuing failure of the cross-communal elite to accommodate the poor and manage labour more seriously,” said historian Rajnarayan Chandavarkar in his book History, Culture and the Indian City.

After reading Chandavarkar, I began to wonder if Mumbai’s violence could indeed be attributed to its elite, to their desperate accumulation of wealth and their neglect of the city’s poor. I called Anand Patwardhan, a Mumbai filmmaker who had been studying the city and making political documentaries about it since the 1970s. Anand said he agreed with the historians. “I remember the city when it wasn’t so violent. The violence only really began after the birth of the Shiv Sena,” he said. “Supporting the Sena was a game played by the rich, a way to break the unity of the workers.”

Was the solution then to strive for a more equitable distribution of wealth? Perhaps, but how would Mumbai, a city that has historically been driven by trade and commerce, suddenly become a selfless bastion of socialism? The country had experimented with socialism for forty-five long years, ultimately abandoning it as a failed idea. Activists liked to talk of social inclusion, but it seemed too far from Mumbai’s ethos to actually work. Mumbai’s reality, I thought, was too complicated for simple solutions.

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It was in the unlikely setting of a global history class at NYU, under the blue glow of a falling dusk, that I finally felt Mumbai’s secrets magically open up to me. We were talking about ecology and capitalism, and Jesse, a sociologist with a strong jaw and southern accent, said that capitalism had sowed the seeds of its own destruction. Man began ravaging the environment for greater profits, but decreasing natural resources drove up the price of those resources, and, in turn, decreased profits. Capitalism is a recursion—an endless cycle of lessening profits even as it attempts to increase them. And like capitalism, Mumbai, too, is a recursion, a circular paradox—as the city attempts to maximize its profits, to expand its businesses and corporations, it creates the conditions that lead to its greatest violence.

The elite, who have been accused of propping up the city’s biggest enemy, the Sena, only acted in the long tradition of the typical Mumbaikar, whose primary concern is money. Mumbai was founded on commerce. It grew through each immigrant’s cold determination to succeed, and it is based on the creed of capitalism and self-interest. Unlike other Indian cities, it seeks to constantly grow and regenerate, forever finding newer ways to make money.

Every year, one million people come to Mumbai, seeking fortune and sometimes finding it. It’s an inherently competitive megapolis, a beast driven by supply and demand, by men and money. Gentleness and quietude belong to other cities, to Delhi, Kolkata, and Chennai.

Mumbai’s tragic flaw, the thing that makes the circle complete, is its refusal to give up. The harder people try to pull it down, the more tenaciously it climbs back up. And the higher it reaches, the more resolute becomes the desire to destroy it.

“Many of the problems of present-day Bombay are directly attributable to her economic strength,” wrote Tindall in City of Gold. “If Bombay had not continued commercially prosperous, if engineering works and petrochemical plants had not been added in this century to its older textile industry . . . it would not have remained such a mecca for the incoming peoples, seeking work, seeking money, seeking life itself in an escape from the grinding, near-static poverty of India’s rural heartlands.”

Tindall wrote this in 1982, when the great mill strike was about to alter the landscape of the metropolis in ways the strikers would never have imagined. And her words became truer still after the strike ended. Had the wealthy mill owners not thought to modernize textile production by shutting down the inefficient mills, Mumbai would not be the economic powerhouse it is today. And yet, in taking those steps, they created the monster that is the Shiv Sena. The story of the city by the sea is heaped in irony, and it is yet another twisted quirk of fate that each time the Sena goes to war, Mumbai’s businesses lose a collective 100 million dollars.

* * *

On November 26, 2008, ten terrorists who had spent three days at sea entered Mumbai from a slum less than three miles from my home to carry out an attack that would affect the city more profoundly than any other. Violence fueled by Islamic fundamentalism traditionally took the form of bomb blasts and generally affected the poor and the middle-class, the street-dwellers and the ordinary train travelers, but never society’s uppermost layer. This time was different. My friends left the luxurious Taj Mahal hotel an hour before it was attacked. For three days, as Mumbai sank into a self-imposed curfew, I meditated on how easily I could’ve been eating dinner at one of those restaurants, how easily I could’ve been at the wedding party that was interrupted by a fusillade of bullets. Those seventy-two hours erased all doubt that Mumbai’s violence affected only a different class of people. Suddenly the city was flatter than ever before. No ivory skyscraper was tall enough, no income gulf wide enough to save you.

Terrorism first entered Mumbai’s lexicon in 1993. Since then, the city has come to know the term intimately. It rolls off the tongue easily now. There is a certain pride at having weathered so many attacks, a certain resilience that the media likes to call the “Mumbai Spirit.” Really, it’s just the Mumbai impulse for money—when a woman gets back on the train a day after a blast has killed a co-passenger, she’s not trying to stay true to the “Mumbai Spirit”; she’s just trying to get to work to earn more money.

Terrorists like Mumbai. They like to strike at its fabled spirit. “Why do they go after Mumbai?” Suketu Mehta asked in a New York Times editorial after the November 2008 attacks. “There’s something about this island-state that appalls religious extremists, Hindus and Muslims alike. Perhaps because Mumbai stands for lucre, profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness . . . Mumbai is all about dhandha, or transaction . . . The executives who congregated in the Taj Mahal hotel were chasing this golden songbird. The terrorists want to kill the songbird.”

Like the Shiv Sena and the MNS, terrorists hate Mumbai’s indomitable desire for bigger things, more money, more power. In the last seventeen years that terrorism has repeatedly visited Mumbai, it has chosen to strike at the symbols of Mumbai’s economic might—sometimes the trains that ferry office workers back to their suburban homes; at other times the stock market; and at still others, bazaars teeming with shoppers. Each time, Mumbai has picked itself up, dusted off the debris, and gone back to work.

In a sense, then, my husband is right. Violence is embedded in Mumbai’s DNA. As long as Mumbai continues to be Mumbai, the city of the migrant, the beach-fronted nib of land that is India’s richest metropolis, the home of the Bombay Stock Exchange and Bollywood movies—as long as it stays true to itself, the MNS, the Shiv Sena and the Muslim fundamentalists will try to destroy it. The very things I love about the city—the drumbeat of energy that courses through its arteries, the tenacity, the limitless possibilities it extends to every immigrant landing at its border, the blithe irreverence, the irrepressible desire to flourish—are no different from everything I hate about it.

Credit Jesse Louttit

Credit Jesse Louttit

Credit Jesse Louttit

Credit Jesse Louttit

Credit Jesse Louttit

Credit Jesse Louttit

Credit Jesse Louttit

Credit Jesse Louttit

Images of the working environments within the Toronto Harbour, courtesy of photographer Jesse Louttit.

The project was made possible in part with support from Harbourfront Centre as part of the exhibition project Uncharted Waters, with assistance from the Toronto Port Authority.

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For our collaborative project pairing artists & writers earlier this year, photographer Jen Kinney and writer Nick Kolakowski teamed to create Afterworld.

Artist Matt Shane has spent almost a decade living and working in Montreal. We spoke to him about the city’s benefits and drawbacks.

A print of Shane’s painting Cast Away is available through our collaboration with Circuit Gallery.

* * *

I was born and raised in a suburb of Vancouver. I did my undergrad in Victoria, BC, and I kind of grew up on the art scene there.

There are ups and downs to doing art school in a smaller city. I wasn’t exposed to much of what was going on in the wider contemporary art world, but I also didn’t feel the burden of having to place myself inside or outside of that world. I made a lot of work with my friends. We covered the walls of our basement suite with paper and drew all over the walls for a year.

In 2004, my roommate and best friend and I got a grant to show our paper wall installation in Montreal. We moved here, found a space, and decided to stay. The city felt large coming from Victoria, and exotic, given that most people around me were speaking a different language, but also familiar, due to the large number of BC expats. Making friends was not all that difficult, and there was a lot more happening here, art-wise, than in Victoria.

I had very little money, and I wanted as much time and space as I could get to make music and art. In Montreal, I could afford to work a job three days a week and still pay my share on a big loft or studio. Rent is cheaper here than in most large North American cities, and space can be found close to home, or in the home. Being an artist seemed more possible here than it did out west.

Growth Industry, 2010

Montreal’s a big music city. When I first arrived in Mile End, I remember thinking, bands have it so good here. Rent is cheap, venues are numerous, and there’s solid infrastructure in the indie scene. Some friends and I started a band called Think About Life and quickly found support in the way of a label and management. Back home, touring seemed like a far off dream, but here, it was closer to being the norm.

I played in bands for about five years, and then I quit to do my MFA. I’ve been mostly painting and drawing since then. The art scene is still a bit of a frontier for me. My community is largely centered around Concordia, which is one of two English schools. But schools are transient places. Every year a bunch of people leave and a bunch of new people arrive.

I think that what makes Montreal strange, maddening, and magical to newcomers is that it’s a city of two—and many more—languages. Although there is certainly linguistic crossover, there is still a lot of division between anglo- and francophone scenes. It often happens that you’ll wander into a show where everyone is speaking French, right next to a show where everyone is speaking English. That cultural and language divide is so firmly embedded in the city’s history that one can’t help but feel politicized as an Anglophone who moves here from elsewhere in Canada. I think that fact eventually drives a lot of people away.

Matt Shane and Jim Holyoak at the Triennal 2011 at the MusŽee d'art contemporain de MontreŽal

Where do people tend to move if they leave?

Toronto, Vancouver, New York.

And do you feel like here it’s possible economically in the long term to be an artist, with being able to work a couple of days a week? Do you feel like that’s something that’s decreasing as things get more expensive? Do you worry about it for yourself?

Yeah, I do worry about the long-term reality of being an artist here, but I would worry about that anywhere. I think it’s hard everywhere. It’s certainly getting more expensive to live here, and that does make things harder. But where in many cities, all developmental forces seem to work against artists, Montreal has some good civic forces as well. When my studio building was bought by a major development firm, a group of artists formed Pied Carré, a group who worked with the city to ensure the survival of affordable studio space in Mile End. Maybe I’m being foolish, but I’m optimistic about my own artistic prospects here.

Shane's studio building in Montreal's Mile End district

And in terms of getting shows here at the artist-run centers or other spaces, what’s the process that you go through? Is it people you know through your school, or—?

There is a wealth of artist-run centres in Montreal. They get submissions from open calls, and choose exhibitions by a peer-review process. They give artists a fee to exhibit their work. Since they don’t rely on sales to survive, they’re able to show work that isn’t intended for the marketplace. Canada doesn’t have a New York or LA. We don’t have a wealth of art collectors, or art stars, but what we do have is artist-run centres, museums, and a grant system that helps many artists make interesting work.

There are also a few unsubsidized artist-run spaces like WWTWO, and the old Red Bird Gallery, where I did a show a couple years ago. With those spaces, and with commercial spaces, you have to know people to get a show.

And do you find you like the mix of informal to formal here? Do you find that there’s a reasonable balance of things going on at a lot of different levels?

Yeah, I do. There’s a good variety of venues in Montreal, from museums to artist-run centres to commercial galleries to lofts and apartments. Fancy and non-fancy people mix and circulate. At times, it can feel claustrophobic, but then you meet some new people and realize the city is bigger than you thought.

Also, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal does a good job of keeping track of artists around town. For the Triennial show, they do hundreds of studio visits and show a good variety of local work.

Gulag, 2009

And do you feel like there’s much communication between the art scene and the general public? Do you feel like there’s interest and appreciation, or is it kind of like a corner that not a lot of people engage with?

It’s still a bit of a corner, but I think all art scenes are—there’s always a group of people who care more about art than the general public. But I do feel like said public in Quebec cares more about art than your average place. This may be due to Quebec having a unique identity in North America. There is a place for cultural mythology here, so there is a place for art. Even many small Québecois towns have decent museums and artist-run centres.

Is there anything else that you think is relevant?

I think Montreal is a fascinating place. I’m still struggling to wrap my head around it and I’ve been here for eight years. I also feel quite comfortable here. I can afford to live in a good neighborhood, with a studio a couple blocks away, and I don’t need a full time job. I have all I need.

But I would never want to confine my work to this city or even this country alone. I like to move around, do residencies and exhibit in other places, as I think a lot of Canadian artists do. We are encouraged to be mobile by the artistic powers that be. Artists who find recognition outside of Canada, have an easier time finding it back home. That might be different from being an artist in New York, where there’s a lot of room for upward mobility within the city. Anyway, it works for me. I love to travel, and having the ability to do that with ease only solidifies my relationship to the city I live in.

The point was clear to me, but someone had put it up there in black and white, just in case: an explanatory label on the wall gushed something about the military relentlessness of the anthem being in deep contrast with the sensuousness of the French tricolor. You see, it wasn’t a live performance I was watching, it was Zoulikha Bouabdellah’s video Dansons (Let’s Dance, 2003), on display in the Africa Remix exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery.

My friend Saara dismissed the video for its mundane juxtaposition of national and cultural signifiers. As the child of a French father and a Finnish mother, born and raised in London, she didn’t have much patience with what she saw as a simplistic display of identity politics. She could well appreciate the political and social difficulties of growing up as an immigrant in Europe, but didn’t think that her own frustrations with cultural displacement were necessarily all that different.

I agreed that the video was nothing special. There’s a lot of flag art out there, most of it made by bi-national artists, and most of it half-baked. But Saara’s comments lingered on my mind. As the son of an English father and a French mother, also born and raised in London, I began to think about the implicit hierarchies that govern the discourse of cultural and political identity, and the insipid political correctness that often comes with it.

Exhibitions of Africa Remix’s ambitious scope are fraught with the problems of representation, and they almost invariably offend someone. Africa Remix brought together more than sixty artists from twenty-five countries—including several who, like Bouabdellah, are based in Europe. At best, that’s about two artists per country, and each artist probably has only one, maybe two works in the show. This is scarcely enough to portray anything coherent about an individual artist, country, continent, or its diaspora, but shows on this scale are common now, largely as a result of museums all over the world striving to broaden the diversity of their programming during the past two decades. Yet, in spite of the criticisms of this collectivist, potentially reductionist or fetishistic approach, these survey exhibitions at the very least succeed in expanding people’s knowledge base at a time when the European and American public’s awareness of life outside of the Western sphere is for the most part rudimentary.

Coming to London from Dusseldorf, Africa Remix then traveled to Paris, Tokyo, Stockholm, and Johannesburg. I was living in Tokyo when the show opened at the Mori Art Museum in the spring of 2006, and saw how its presentation there significantly shifted its meaning. It was a rare opportunity for Japanese people to learn about the cultures of a continent with which they have relatively little contact, and since Japan had never colonized any part of Africa they were able to enjoy the art without the complications of postcolonial guilt. Yet at the same time, since so much of the art in Africa Remix addresses postcolonial identity issues, the full force of those works may have been lost on Japanese viewers. Maybe they could “get” the basic premise of Bouabdellah’s video, but could they really feel the resentment and the irony when the finger wasn’t being pointed at them?

Such slippages in cross-cultural understanding are unavoidable as people from different parts of the world learn more about each other. But can that divide ever be overcome anyway, considering how the perspective shifts so radically depending on where you’re standing?

The media in Europe and North America now place great value on diversity. Leafing through the New York Times, listening to the BBC, or reading about contemporary artists in Artforum and Frieze, one soon meets Iranian-Americans, Japanese Jews, Indian Muslims, and people of countless other hybrid identities. The growing prominence of these kinds of stories over the past few decades is natural and healthy: for too long, the world outside the Western sphere was treated either as a threat to be fended off or an exotic territory ripe for conquest. While discrimination and bias are by no means a thing of the past—no matter where you are, there continue to be problems of representation throughout the media—condescending portrayals of the “other” are in apparent decline in the mainstream press. More and more, people of multicultural, multinational backgrounds are treated as part of the norm. The media have recognized that collectively these “minorities” are the majority.

However, as a European bi-national who specializes in contemporary Asian art, has spent the past six years living in Tokyo and New York, and has no particular intention to return “home” in the foreseeable future, over the years I have felt a slight twinge of cognitive dissonance when I come across many such accounts. While on one level I identify with these stories’ subjects, they remain deeply unfamiliar. Coverage of this type tends to focus on those who have migrated from poor or politically oppressive countries to rich, democratic societies. In practice, this predominantly means from East to West, and from South to North. But although I have always lived in safe, comfortable circumstances in wealthy countries, issues of migration and cultural displacement have also been vital and immediate throughout my life.

And as the demographics of global migration change, experiences such as mine are becoming increasingly relevant to the discussion of multicultural identity. As once-poor countries in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia have joined the ranks of industrialized nations, bolstering their economic and political influence, migration patterns have altered with them. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the cross-border migration of highly educated people from upper-middle income countries rose by 44% between 2000 and 2006. (In low-income countries, cross-border movement also jumped significantly, by 28%.) The majority of this activity takes place within multinational companies and governmental organizations, which provide their employees with the assistance they need to make these challenging transitions, but independent individuals from developed countries are also relocating in greater numbers.

* * *

When I think about the forces that have formed my identity when moving between countries and cultures, I return again and again to language. In particular, growing up speaking French without ever living in France, I was aware from a very young age that “home” was a relative concept. It’s only now, at age thirty, that I’m starting to understand how these issues have shaped my life.

My upbringing began in a mishmash of French and English—largely the result of my parents’ multicultural backgrounds. Though my mother is French, she only spent about five years actually in France; she was born in Algiers before Algeria gained its independence. As a young adult, she moved to London, where she met my father, who shared a similar background; he was born in Malaya (now Malaysia) when it was part of the British Empire, and spent his early years there until the Japanese invaded in 1941. I was inspired by their stories. They moved to California together when the hippie movement was at its peak, and I grew up looking through the thousands of photos from their travels across the United States, Latin America, Europe, and Africa during the ’60s and ’70s. Their world of camels and bedouins in the Sahara, the rushing waters of the Iguazu Falls, and the arid expanse of the Grand Canyon seemed unlimited and endlessly exciting.

Yet, while my parents adored the US, they lived here in rough times. The hippie dream began to sour, Nixon betrayed the country, the oil shocks rocked the economy, and the dire consequences of the Vietnam draft were laid bare for the world to see. Even though conscription had been discontinued by the time my parents first thought about having a child, US citizenship still seemed a liability. Feeling that British and French nationality was already more than enough for me to juggle, above all they wanted to give me roots in a specific place. So they left America, and I was born in England.

When I started school, I was sent to the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle, a private school in South Kensington, the heart of London’s French community. The primary section centers on a large courtyard where kids play tag in the shadow of a monolithic red-brick building. The school covers the whole spectrum of primary and secondary education. By the time they reach the end of their time at the Lycée, some of the eighteen-year-olds there have known each other since they were four.

Illustrations by Alis Atwell

I wasn’t particularly engaged with my surroundings back then. Classes were big—thirty to forty pupils—and I often felt lost and left behind while the teachers focused on the more eager and successful kids. Much of my frustration came down to the fact that I kept running into linguistic walls. I remember having to give a presentation on what I’d done during the holidays, and when I wanted to say how much I liked going abroad, I just couldn’t think of the French word for “country.” I stood there in front of the class, gawping for what seemed like an eternity, feeling completely helpless. Ironically enough, another time it was the word “translation” that eluded me. Instead of saying traduction, I pronounced the English word as though it were French, hoping those hoity nasal tones would do the trick. The girl I was talking to was only eight, but she looked back at me with incredulity of a dismayed schoolmarm. Mais tu dis quoi, là?

At that time, my linguistic identity was a bit blurry around the edges. At home, my mother didn’t want my father to feel excluded in any way, so aside from helping me with some of my French homework we mostly spoke in English. I was also an only child, so I had no brothers or sisters with whom I could speak French. English gradually became the dominant language, albeit with some foreign tints. As my father discovered to his slight alarm, when I first mastered the alphabet, I said “X, Y, Zee,” rather than “X, Y, Zed.” That was the influence of Sesame Street. This moment of linguistic Americanization was brought to you by the letter Z!

My lack of confidence at the Lycée left me wanting something more. One evening at home I watched a TV documentary about the Dragon School, a classic British public school in Oxford. It was an enthralling sight: boys and girls in smart uniforms milling around grand, 19th-century buildings surrounded by pristine playing fields. The school’s quirky traditions—pupils addressing teachers by their nicknames, chapel congregations standing up and sitting down in choreographed waves while they sang hymns—made me giddy with excitement when I thought about how bored I was at the Lycée. People who went to boarding school typically say it was their parents who sent them there, but in my case I demanded it. My father was skeptical because he knew the difficulties that come with that environment, and it was painful for my mother to imagine not seeing her only child for half the year, but they respected my wishes and took me to see a similar school in Hampshire called Highfield. We went during the spring holidays, so there were no pupils around, but I fell in love with the sheer difference of it: the music hall, the theater, the art room and its seemingly unlimited supplies, the wide-open skies over the flat expanse of the grounds, and the mysterious allure of the woods that lay beyond.

* * *

In retrospect, however, to commit to the school without seeing it during term time may have been a mistake. When I started a few weeks later, not long before my tenth birthday, it was less than idyllic. Though overall I had a positive experience in my four years at Highfield—above all it gave me a sense of self-sufficiency—I’ll never forget the profound culture shock I went through during my first few weeks there. Not only was I the focus of attention as a new boy, but I was a treated as a curious oddity for being half-French. This difference was instinctively challenged. On my first day, a couple of senior students tested my vocabulary. “How do you say ‘dolphin’?” “What about ‘clouds’?” One of them pointed at a clock on the wall but I was at a loss for the word, and that was all the proof they needed that I could be pushed down in the pecking order.

In the first fully English-speaking environment I’d experienced, it sometimes felt as if my French was co-opted by other people, that it was no longer mine to own on my terms. Latin was the first language I had to learn from scratch, and I found it unbearable. I felt it should have been as instinctive as French, and yet its grammar was completely alien to me. I couldn’t believe that French had evolved from this language and yet it didn’t help me understand it. Moreover, I couldn’t muster the will to figure it out. When speaking another language was such a vivid, intuitive experience for me, how could I care to translate sentences about farmers working the fields of a civilization that no longer exists? As I plodded through my textbook in class one day, I had no idea how to translate the example sentence “She ate in her house,” so, totally uninterested in looking it up, I wrote it in French. I knew Elle a mangé chez elle would be a little too French, so I went with the clunkier, more literal Elle a mangé dans la maison and pretended that I had gotten my languages mixed up when I showed it to the teacher. When he read out my answer, there was uproar among my classmates, and dans la maison became a taunt that persisted for the next four years.

Predictably, people called me “frog.” I wish I could say it was all good-natured banter, but teenagers love to exploit each other’s weaknesses, and some of the teachers were complicit in this goading, too. Having known nothing but a warm, loving home environment and a sense of bland anonymity at the Lycée, I was now exposed and vulnerable, always potentially in someone’s crosshairs, never fully able to trust someone’s intent. The kids would talk up all kinds of stereotypes about the French and derisively imply that I couldn’t speak English properly. Teachers rarely intervened in any kind of verbal aggression unless it got so bad that a formal complaint was made. It became farcical at times. One afternoon when I was riding my bike, I turned a corner and narrowly avoided crashing into another boy on his bike. “We drive on the left in England!” he yelled as he sped past. Even then, it struck me as bizarre that my peers, none of them older than thirteen, had already acquired such a nationalistic taste for insulting a people they barely knew—something they had surely learned from their parents or picked up from TV. But then it didn’t stop them from asking me for help with their French assignments. “Thanks, Ashley!” they’d say, all chirpy. Yet, if their essays came back with corrections, they’d be indignant. “You got stuff wrong, Rawlings. Can’t you speak French?”

I wasn’t the only bi-national child there. There was Harry, from Rio, but his tales of bikini-clad girls on the beach made him a bit cooler than me. The white sands of Copacabana had a more sympathetic allure than the carnage of D-Day on Normandy beach. School trips took us not once, but twice in two years to the American War Cemetery in Normandy, where we wandered through the seemingly endless grid of white cross tombstones. Our deranged history teacher consistently portrayed Europe as a site of profound trauma. One day, he made us watch Schindler’s List. A failed military man with an endless store of pent-up aggression, he predictably coopted the film’s lesson for his own disciplinarian ends. When one of my classmates let her attention wander for a moment, he singled her out and screamed, “If people forget the Holocaust, it’ll happen again!”

Every time this skewed portrayal of France or Europe came to the fore, that part of my identity would shrink a little, hoping not to get noticed. It’s true that my ability to speak French better than anyone else in the school helped me out in a couple of ways. Highfield took part in a French drama festival hosted by another school; I’d always get the lead role and our play won the two years I was in it. Toward the end, when it was time to take the entrance exams to my next boarding school, the A+ I got in French compensated for the predictably terrible D– I got in math, admitting me to Winchester College, one of the country’s most exclusive high schools. But to mention these perks feels like a cursory attempt to make the most of what was really an anxious period of enduring other people’s neuroses, hypocrisy, and double standards. Born and raised in the same country as my peers, I should never have had to surmount any language or cultural barriers, and yet somehow they were imposed on me.

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The distinction between merely being able to speak a foreign language and developing a multinational identity came into better focus in my mid-to-late teens. When describing Winchester to those who aren’t familiar with the arch-Englishness of this institution and others like it, such as Eton and Harrow, all I can say is that it its culture and traditions gave the Harry Potter stories their setting. However, the romanticism of that aesthetic belies these schools’ real purpose. Winchester’s six-hundred-year-old flint-walled courtyards, intimate cloisters, and well-worn flagstones have seen countless young men educated to run the Empire. While Great Britain may not exert that kind of power anymore, in effect the imperial outlook remains the same. These extravagantly expensive boarding schools still aim to push their students to the peak of their potential, offering them an unparalleled array of academic, cultural, sporting, and social training. To the revulsion of those who think that such advantages should not be the exclusive perquisites of the very wealthy, these schools instill their pupils with a profound sense of confidence—and in many cases, outright entitlement—allowing the majority of Old Boys to work their way into the best universities and subsequent positions of power and influence, whatever their fields of expertise.

In contrast to Highfield, being half-French was hardly a big deal at Winchester. Most of my closest friends were from Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, and Japan. Listening to them talk in their native languages was fascinating. Unlike the romance languages, their words were opaque and inaccessible, their meanings conveyed in inscrutable tones and characters. Perhaps it was the reclusive only child in me, but I liked the idea of encoding a part of my identity in a language that seemed more ambiguous and obscure—something ostensibly more private than French. I ended up gravitating toward Japanese and started to take classes. Somehow I had an intuitive conviction that one day I would live in Tokyo.

All the while, my parents and I would go on holiday to France every year, usually to the Cote d’Azur and Provence. During my early childhood, these were mostly camping holidays in which we’d go from town to town in our VW campervan. Until then, it was second nature to speak French with the grumpy old women who ran the campsites, and sit with my legs hanging out of the van’s side door, eating baguettes smothered with pate. France was an idyllic land of bakeries, winding cobbled streets, castles, and pine forests. But by the time I was at Winchester, it was a more self-conscious experience.

I had one French friend at Winchester, Charlie, and one summer I spent a few days at his house in a small town near Aix-en-Provence. We spent the days rollerblading around the empty streets, and though I tried to talk with him in French he’d always answer me in English unless we were with his local skateboarder friends who didn’t speak it. I learned new words from them that I’d never heard before and would never hear again because slang evolves so quickly in France—or, at least, it seems that way when you only visit from time to time.

I began to sense the cultural gap between the straitlaced order of a boarding school upbringing in rural England and the slightly gritty, listless life of teenagers in small-town southern France. One of the kids’ older brothers welcomed us into his home with the words salut, les voyous. Since he meant it nicely, it roughly translates as “Hey, troublemakers,” but in the context of suburban malaise in France, voyous means “delinquents.” Even though he meant nothing by it, I found it jarring. It conjured up images of a life spent spraying graffiti on walls, stealing from grocery stores, and dodging the police. It implied a them-and-us rebelliousness that I didn’t have—I grew up knowing that you didn’t have to fear the police in London; they’d be friendly if you asked them for directions. When Charlie and I were in Aix one afternoon, looking for whatever it was and not finding it, I was surprised by how much he balked at my suggestion that we ask a policeman for help. He let me ask, but the policeman seemed equally taken aback by the novelty of a teenager trying to talk to him.

It was a shame that Charlie and I didn’t speak French much, because I find French humor hysterically funny. The glib, derisive sarcasm, often fired off when you least expect it, cuts right down to the driest bone of human wit. Yet, at that time it seemed to me that in everyday situations this sarcasm masked a deeper problem. Over the course of several trips to France as a teenager and young adult, I began to perceive the country as having a culture of barely suppressed resentment. The cutting humor would often skew into passive-aggressive retorts to innocent questions, dished out by seemingly every waiter,
waitress, pharmacist, and museum receptionist I encountered. It seemed that all too many French people imbued everyday interactions with a venomous scorn for their fellow human beings, particularly in Paris. Later, I learned that this disposition has even generated a medical condition called Paris Syndrome. Though it can affect people from anywhere, the Japanese are especially susceptible. The Japanese tourist, who for so many years has envisioned Paris as a genteel citadel of beret-wearing men painting impressionist scenes on the banks of the River Seine, arrives there only to be rudely confronted with the reality of the middle-aged Parisian’s blunt lack of sympathy for those who speak little or no French. According to the Japanese embassy in Paris, around twenty people a year return to Japan exhausted—traumatized, no less—suffering from hallucinations, dizziness, and anxiety, and very much in need of counseling.

Looking back, I see things a bit differently: the French sharpness of tongue doesn’t have to be interpreted as an attack; the French love to comment, even if it’s not their place; and unlike the British, they don’t make silent judgments. Meanwhile, Paris Syndrome says as much about the naiveté and unrealistic expectations of some Japanese travelers as it does about the dismissive temperament of French shopkeepers. But at that time, given how appalled I was by this vitriol, I wondered what my future involvement with France would be. At some point in my mid-teens, there appeared the specter that in order to keep my French nationality I would eventually have to do a compulsory year of military service, though it could be delayed for university studies. What a horrendous prospect, I thought, and how ironic that while my parents left America partly out of fear of the draft, my mother seemed willing to let the French military have me for the sake of a second EU passport. All in all, being French seemed more trouble than it was worth.

Nevertheless, I was determined to at least maintain a connection to this culture by keeping a firm hold on the language. A couple of years later, I decided to cut Winchester short. Students typically do five years there, but I left at the end of the third because my French had become so stagnant. I craved a multilingual environment, so at age seventeen I went back to the Lycée for my last two years of high school.

What a relief that turned out to be! Pretty much everyone was from somewhere else. It was an almost utopian community of European, North African, and Middle Eastern multinationals—English, French, Anglo-French, Irish, French-Canadian, Franco-Polish, Franco-Spanish, French-Algerian, British-Moroccan, British-Lebanese, British-Iraqi, Egyptian-Russian, and of course, my best friend, the one and only Franco-Finn. We studied in the British section, meaning that we took English A-level exams and not the French Baccalauréat like the rest of the school. It meant that I could continue my education on the same track as at Winchester but surrounded by a more diverse group of people, many of whom had known each other since their primary days. But unlike those days, the pressure to speak in either French or English was gone. We spoke to each other in our own intimate lexicon of Franglais. I was so happy—not only to have become fluent again, but to be surrounded by people who were as keen as I was to play with expanding the language.

When visiting France during those years, I encountered interesting reactions to my accent. People couldn’t really place it. Sometimes it was a small grammatical error, or a slightly awkward turn of phrase that gave away the fact that I wasn’t a native speaker, but those kinds of mistakes don’t necessarily reveal where you’re from, so usually people would hone in on the accent. They could tell that it was clearly a French accent, but that there was something subtly Anglophone about it, and yet it definitely wasn’t Quebecois French. I look as though I could be Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese, but my accent clearly wasn’t from any of those countries, either. That led some people to ask me if I was East European. But what tends to be overlooked in these situations is that accents don’t have to be tied to a place. My French accent is just my French accent, one of infinite possible permutations of diaspora French.

Meanwhile, the threat of compulsory military service had, thankfully, subsided. The French government had finally wised up to the lack of commitment among its conscripts—a drain on the morale of officers and other sincere and eager recruits—so now all you had to do to retain your citizenship was attend an afternoon of lectures by senior military personnel. Conveniently, the London venue for this turned out to be the Lycée, so one Saturday I sat in a darkened classroom and watched a dazzling series of presentations about France’s formidable air, sea, and ground forces. Picture the prowess of French fighter planes streaking through the sky, and the angular gray bulk of battleships plowing through the Pacific. When it came to promoting the nuclear deterrent, though, the admirals merely alluded to that one part of French military might that cannot be portrayed tastefully on screen in words. Emerging into the bright light of day two hours later, I thought about how Jacques Chirac had only just ceased his country’s nuclear testing in French Polynesia in 1996, following years of international protests. I had no political ax to grind with France, but the vile hypocrisy of that afternoon’s propaganda did nothing to endear me to the French nation-state.

Since then, my French has been on the back burner, as my attention turned to Japan. Unlike Winchester, the Lycée didn’t offer Japanese classes, so I had decided to drop it until I could study it in earnest at university, which turned out to be Cambridge. During my four years there, Japanese language, history, culture, and social studies was all I knew. After graduation I moved to Tokyo.

* * *

To my delight, being able to speak Japanese wasn’t just about talking to Japanese people—at times it replaced English as the lingua franca when I met people who had come to Japan from disparate parts of the world. I had conversations in Japanese with Chinese and Koreans, and most memorably, a Russian woman. The sight of two white people talking to each other in Japanese turned heads on the subway. In the West, people wouldn’t think twice about seeing two Asian people talking to each other in non-native English—it’s taken for granted that English is now the global lingua franca. But there’s something poignantly symbolic about this kind of communication, which often occurs between people whose countries have a postcolonial legacy with Great Britain.

Coincidentally, the French language was also a recurring presence in my life in Japan. Not long after I arrived I found myself working with a bunch of Francophones from all over the world—French, Quebecois, Acadian, Belgian, Belgian-Australian, Polish, French-Japanese, and Japanese. Even when French wasn’t the de facto lingua franca among us, it trickled into our English and our Japanese. I once had to do Japanese-French interpretation for a Korean artist who lived in Paris and was exhibiting her work in Tokyo one summer. And I chatted with Kawai-san, the owner of La Jetée—a tiny Shinjuku bar named after Chris Marker’s post-apocalyptic sci-fi film—who practices her French with the many foreign customers who make the pilgrimage to this now-legendary hangout for filmmakers and photographers.

It was these interactions with people who speak French as their second language that I enjoyed the most. When talking to a non-native speaker, I feel less self-conscious of the small mistakes I make and can actually enjoy the communication without obsessing about the delivery. Ten years after leaving the Lycée, my French remains fluent but not native. It feels iced over. Starting a conversation with a native French speaker breaks the ice, but then I’m going for a cold swim.

Nevertheless, the French somehow managed to seek me out. They’d come up to me in the street or at a party and strike up a conversation in French. I’d ask how they knew, and they said they just assumed. I guess I have that swarthy French look. But when I told them (or anyone else for that matter) that I’m half-English, they’d generally be surprised and say I don’t look typically English.

Casting aside the fact that there’s essentially no such thing as a “typically English” look, it was becoming more and more evident to me that no matter where you are in the world you can’t avoid the fact that people make assumptions based on your appearance—even in your hometown. One day when I was about nineteen, I was walking down Bond Street and saw a sign outside one of those old-school antique stores advertising a couple of rare Turners on display in their private back-room gallery. I was keen to take a look, but you had to ring the bell to get in. The aging doorman, dressed in a tailcoat and a top hat, peered at me warily through the glass. My spiky hair and baggy cargo pants were at odds with my smart jacket and glasses, so he wasn’t sure what to make of me. The manager opened the door. He was a man probably in his late twenties but already groomed for his early forties: a neatly combed lick of blond hair over a narrow, upturned nose, and skin so shiny it looked like he’d just been varnished—a real public-school type, dressed in his dark pinstripe suit. “Can I help you?” he asked, a little tentatively. About three vowels into my reply a look of relief flashed across his face. My accent said it all, and access was granted.

On the other hand, no matter how fluently you might be able to speak Japanese, it doesn’t necessarily offer the same kind of access. While it does open up the potential for dialogue, and enables you to achieve all kinds of things that might be harder otherwise, it doesn’t facilitate social integration as much as one might assume. In the end, you’re still a foreigner—you’re just in a more privileged category. Even half-Japanese people (hafu) and Japanese people who have spent large parts of their youth abroad (kikokushijo, known in English as “returnees”) often find themselves faced with infuriating double standards. Many of my half-Japanese and returnee friends have described being shown off by their Japanese friends as a cool international buddy, and yet when they make a social faux-pas—be it an opinion expressed too bluntly or inadequate deference shown to a senior figure—they are reprimanded because “as Japanese people” they should know better. Attitudes are gradually changing as the demographic of half-Japanese people living in Japan increases; one in thirty babies born in Japan today is of mixed parentage. But at the time I felt that if it was still this hard for those who have much deeper ties to the country, then I could never expect to integrate fully.

Living in Japan was one of the most treasured, formative experiences of my life, yet being a white person there is a paradoxical, conflicted existence. You’re a minority, but you’re put on a pedestal. The most basic interactions are treated with reverence and trepidation. Friends of friends and random strangers alike would start up conversations that went like this: Where are you from? London. Have you been in Japan long? Three years. Wow! How come it’s only been three years and you speak such good Japanese? I’ve been learning English for ten years and I still can’t speak it. Well, I studied Japanese at university for four years, and then I came here. Ah, I see. What got you interested in Japan? I was interested in Japanese contemporary art. Hmmm, I don’t know much about contemporary art. Do you like Japanese food? Yes, very much. Can you eat sushi? Yes, I can. Can you use chopsticks? Yes.

And so on. This exchange occurred countless times, almost always in that exact sequence. The order of questions was delivered with such uncanny uniformity, no matter what part of Japan I was in, that I couldn’t help wondering if the government had issued the entire nation with a script to refer to when faced with a foreigner. While these encounters were always kind, always well-meant, it was very difficult for me to accept being treated as some kind of cultural ambassador for England, and sometimes even the entire West, when all I’d wanted was just to live my life as I had before, but in Japan. Even though I knew Japan was a homogenous place before I got there, its enduring global image as a technologically advanced country that has embraced so much of Western culture had led me to assume that Japanese people wouldn’t need to ask these kinds of questions. I rationalized it by telling myself that while I was interacting with Japanese people all day every day, the average Japanese person doesn’t necessarily see foreigners on a regular basis, let alone talk to one, much less one who speaks Japanese.

In a handful of more unpleasant cases, discussions were driven by stereotypes and nationalistic projections. The Japanese real-estate industry is notoriously racist. When I was looking for an apartment, I turned up in a suit—as you have to if you’re a foreigner who wants to make a good impression—but one realtor turned me away before I even opened my mouth. “Sorry, we don’t have any information for foreigners here.” But his attitude shifted when he realized I could speak Japanese, and the more he learned about my background the more he opened up. Eventually, relieved to find he was talking to a British graduate of Cambridge who was working for a respected gallery in Tokyo, he opened up a little too much. “Americans, British, Germans, and Australians—they’re the ones you can trust. But not the Chinese and the Indians—they’re the worst!” What a specific list, I thought. Who knows what he might have said if I’d told him I was half-French.

Another time, an artist I was working with asked me if I liked tea, and I told her no, I prefer coffee. “Ah, that must be from the French side of you,” she said. Actually it’s not, it’s the Yankee-loving British side of me that fell for the American-style coffee bars that popped up all over London in the late 1990s. On another occasion, a Japanese art dealer and I were discussing Zidane’s headbutt and Europe’s troubled history of football violence. “Football is very popular in Japan,” I observed, “so how come there’s no football violence here?” “Well,” he said without a shred of irony, “Europeans are historically a hunting people, while the Japanese are historically a farming people. We are an inherently more peaceful culture.” Though archival images of Japanese soldiers decapitating civilians during the Nanking Massacre flashed through my mind, I was too dumbfounded by his answer to reply.

Such absurd incidences of cultural reductionism were relatively rare, but they occurred often enough as jarring reminders that whatever “norm” I might have been hoping to inhabit in Tokyo, if I wanted to stay in Japan for the long term I’d have to adjust my expectations. As it happened, during the time I lived there, I managed to find my own way of fitting in. While I had numerous Japanese friends and colleagues, my social circle ended up being mostly multinational. In addition to all the Francophones, I hung out with returnees from Melbourne, London, and Los Angeles, some Brazilian-Japanese, a Colombian, and several Americans—all of whom had varying degrees of fluency in Japanese. It wasn’t a deliberate choice, but my time in Tokyo was spent living in a beautiful bubble of internationalized Japan.

* * *

Now that I live in New York, these issues of integration are much less pronounced. It’s in many ways the ideal city for me, because being a foreigner is no surprise, since almost everyone is from somewhere else.

Still, it’s not effortless. Even the most basic interactions can stir up feelings of cultural displacement. Things as simple as self-introductions can be awkward, just because of my name. Sorry, what was it? Ashton? Ashley. Austin? Ashley. Asher? It’s Ashley—you know, like that guy in Gone With the Wind. Sometimes, if the encounter is just in passing, I let them think it’s Ashton, since it’s easier than explaining that the emergence of Ashley as a female name is a recent phenomenon that originated in the US. When even fellow native speakers of English trip up over my name, it’s a constant reminder of my difference. That said, I could see it coming. The phenomenon stretches well beyond America’s borders. The global prominence of US culture means that fewer and fewer people worldwide realize that Ashley was originally a male name—like Hillary, Lindsay, and Cameron—and sometimes people in Japan were confused by it too.

Meanwhile, to ask someone where they’re from should, in theory, be a less charged question in the multicultural US than it is in Japan. Yet, when I tell people I’m from London, they often feel compelled to double check. “Like, actually London?” they ask. It’s tempting to be sarcastic—“Sorry, I meant Karachi. I’m actually a Canadian Inuit by way of Pakistan”—but that’s the way it goes these days. One has to accept that in this age of mass migration toward cities, people who are actually from a major metropolis like London and New York are increasingly rare, and people often say London or New York when they’re really from a satellite town or an adjacent county or state. In the end, in my case, it’s exactly as it sounds: London is now simply where I’m from. I can’t really call myself a real Londoner anymore; on return visits, though I can remember my way around the city without any trouble, I’ve forgotten many of the smaller street names. While living in Tokyo, I knew more about contemporary life there than in London, and now that I live in New York I know more about present-day life here than in either London or Tokyo.

The longer I live abroad, the more my English shifts and adapts. Ever since I lived in Tokyo, where I was contributing to US-based magazines and Japanese publications that use American English, I’ve defaulted to using its spelling and idioms. Only when writing to my parents and my friends in the UK do I revert to British English, to hide the degree to which this aspect of my identity is in flux. I would never attempt to adopt an American accent, but nor will I be stubborn and speak only in Britishisms. So I end up drifting between one and the other. I’m proud of my English accent, but ever since my first few weeks in New York, when I went into a deli to ask if there was a B&J electronics store nearby and the guy thought I was ordering a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, I’ve modified my speech from time to time, adopting those typical Americanisms. I take out the trash instead of the rubbish. I use the elevator, not the lift. I patiently stand in line; I don’t queue. I marvel when water comes out of the faucet, not the tap—except when I order tap water. Reverting to my early childhood preferences, I say “Zee” not “Zed” when I spell things out. Certainly, I could get by on the Britishisms, but when I do, all too often people point out how cute it is that I used a funny word. I’m convinced that if I asked for a sandwich with lettuce and tomahto and not tomayto, a wry smile will creep across someone’s face. There are some exceptions, though. While feet and miles are familiar to the British, pounds and ounces are alien to Europeans. I should take the time to learn how to talk about the weather in Fahrenheit, but I can’t really be bothered. I know that “it’s in the seventies” is warm and “OMG, it’s in the nineties” is hot. It’s like knowing two words of Cantonese.

All the while, France seems ever more remote and my understanding of French culture is increasingly hybrid, filtered through other agents and catalysts. Visiting Montreal for the first time one weekend, I had to wrap my head around this intense mix of French and North American culture. It was weird to see French billboards and signs on generic skyscrapers—a kind of architecture that you don’t really see in France. Like even native French speakers from France, I had a hard time understanding the Quebecois accent, and it was bizarre to suddenly feel like a beginner in my own language. This mild form of culture shock was instigated by the slightest details. I was taken aback to use an ATM and see Queen Elizabeth’s placid face pop out on the banknotes.

* * *

For all the frustrations I’ve had with reconciling what it means to be half-French, my feelings toward France are still mostly of warmth and curiosity. I know that if I were to move there I would soon adapt, my French would improve quickly, and much of the self-imposed pressure I feel to be more in touch with that society would finally dissipate. But until I make that commitment, France remains a theoretical proposition, refracted though a kaleidoscope of French friends, books, films, concerts, and news reporting. Earlier this year, I voted in the French presidential elections for the first time—something that gave me a great sense of satisfaction, even if the act of casting a vote is only a small gesture made from afar. In any case, the longer I live in the US the more these feelings of cultural and political distance apply to my relationship with Britain and Japan too.

It’s all up in the air. As an individual you cannot embody a culture, and you cannot be in all places at once, maintaining all identities in equal measure. Those identities—your sense of self—remain divergent, untethered, and adrift. They take on new forms with each new place you live in. It’s an existence that marries the unparalleled joy of freedom with the angst of facing the unknown. And you have no choice but to embrace it.

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Puns, pop culture, and fights between improbable opponents, courtesy of Manila-born, Brooklyn-based artist Ernest Concepcion.

Still from Oliver Husain's "Squiggle"

We interviewed German expat Oliver Husain about living and working as an artist in Toronto. (Husain’s work can be seen at TWP R&D through February 23.)

* * *

You’re from Germany originally.

Yes, I’m from Frankfurt. But my father’s side is from India and my mother’s side is from Poland. I grew up in Frankfurt and then moved to Toronto six years ago.

I guess one of the reasons why I like I it here after Frankfurt is that it is so multicultural. Which is a cliché to say, but it’s true! That is a really different thing.

Is the arts community very multicultural here as well?

The community itself, I think so, yeah. Although the power positions in the arts are not equally diverse, I would say, that’s for sure.

And the discourse here is so much more advanced around those issues than in Europe. Toronto, especially, went through this whole identity politics phase way before I got here, and I feel that in Germany that is still not done in many ways. You still have to fight for that voice. And here it’s moved beyond that.

So you’re a filmmaker, but you work primarily in a fine arts context.

Yes. My latest film was shot in India. I travelled there a year ago and I completed it in May. I went to Bangalore, but the film is a studio production. It doesn’t show much of Bangalore. The film is set backstage in a theater two minutes before the beginning of the show, an actress is waiting for her performance.

Still from Husain's "Item Number"

Is Bangalore where your father’s family is from?

No, I had friends there, and I had always wanted to work with them. So that was very cool. It was such a luxurious thing, it had never happened to me before like this—there is this gallery here, the OCADU gallery, they came up to me and were like, “Hey Oliver, we have this funding to send an artist to India to do something there. Do you think you would be interested?” It was really cool.

So will OCADU show the film?

The idea was to do an exchange, they also invited three artists and a curator from Bangalore and they did a show in their gallery here in town. I was also part of that, but the film wasn’t done by then—I showed a related project. My film premiered in Bangalore, I went there a second time.

Charles Reeve, the curator, said that the one thing that Toronto artists don’t need is another show in Toronto. I think that’s a really good idea—he realized that it’s hard to connect to other places from Toronto, because it is a little far away.

Yeah, that’s one thing that everyone I’ve talked to keeps telling me, is that it feels a little parochial, the art scene.

Yes. Films travel easily, they can be send out on a DVD. But with my more space-based work, that has become an almost local practice. It’s much harder to make that travel.

Is it like a Canada thing, or is it a Toronto thing?

I don’t know other Canadian cities, but it seems like the art world in Toronto is really interested in the local.

Do you think it’s sort of the institutions for more international exchange, that that needs to be boosted? Or just that people are more interested in the local scene?

Compared to Frankfurt, where I lived for a long time, one big difference is the art school. I think the Toronto art schools don’t draw people from around the world to come and work here. That would create a flux of people and a different dynamic.

I’m always curious about if what work is made in a certain place is reflective of what will sell. Do you think the work in Toronto is different if it’s sort of understood that it will be aimed toward a local market?

One thing that’s really interesting, that I like about Toronto—the commercial gallery world is not that dominant here. The art that gets made here is the art that gets grants, and that’s a really different kind of dynamic.

Still from Husain's "Shrivel"

The commercial galleries sometimes show work that has been produced with a grant and that has been first shown in an artist-run center or public institution, and then it’s almost like a second-hand use when they try to sell the work. It’s really different than like Berlin or New York, where exciting commercial galleries are pushing the vanguard forward with experiments. That’s not happening here a lot.

I would imagine that the work in that case would tend to be less object-based? Or just harder to sell, physically?

Yeah. Ideally, right. On the downside, the work that comes out of grants often feels journalistic to me. Because you start with writing, the content of the work is expressed before you start doing it.

I myself don’t even know how to work that way. Of course there are things that make me angry that I want to address, but I have a very different approach to how art can be political. I think I have to address people in a different way.

And when you first arrived to Toronto, did you find it very welcoming? How did you get to know people in the arts scene?

Yes, I found it very welcoming. It seemed like a good fit from both sides. I made a lot of friends here but also found a lot of interest in what I was doing. It happened really fast—by the end of my first year here my video Squiggle was included in a Toronto survey show, “We can do this now,” at the Power Plant. That was of course a great intro.

And what do you think about how integrated the visual art scene is in the city as a whole? From what you’ve seen, how much of a part of Toronto as a whole is the visual art scene, or is it kind of a small scene that the rest of the world doesn’t really care much about?

I think it’s sort of similar to other cities. Of course, it’s its own island; that’s what art is, somehow. But for a city like Toronto, the number of events and the number of people who come to an art opening, I’m always surprised. Even for screenings of difficult films or stuff like that, you can have a full house in Toronto. When the artists from Bangalore were here they were amazed that some nights you could actually choose between that obscure screening or the other one, and both would be super busy.

Still from "Shrivel"

Anything else you think would be good to mention?

When we moved here, Markus [Oliver’s partner] and I, we made new friends through going out, and then we also started our own party with some of them. It’s a drag and costume party called Hot Nuts. It started in a tiny record store, then it moved into a bar, and now it’s in a huge club. We and our friends were always dressing up for it in elaborate, full-on mad outfits. But each time there were more strangers who came to the party who also put the same amount of work into their costume. It’s been really exciting to see that grow. And it was such a good fit; it seemed to work well with the city. We were like, where else would that happen?

As part of Satellite’s recent Show & Tell collaboration pairing artists and writers, writer Beth Ann Nyssen and photographer Jeroen Akershoek spent several days documenting the development of a new sustainability-focused community in the Netherlands.

* * *

Although sustainable design has become a driving force in the architecture field only within the last decade, some models of eco-friendly building developed during the hippie era are still going strong. In the 1970s, New Mexico architect Michael Reynolds created the Earthship, a building form designed to be constructed with recycled materials and operated off the grid. With zero carbon footprint, Earthships are nine times more efficient than traditional homes.

I recently had the opportunity to witness the birth of a modern-day Earthship community while helping the Vereniging Aardehuis—Earthhouse Association in Dutch—create a new 23-unit settlement in Olst, Netherlands.

Earthships use dirt- and sand-filled tires to create insulated, fire-resistant walls that are then surrounded by earth berms. A glass conservatory filled with plants on the south-facing side maximizes the sunʼs warmth, directing heat into earth mass walls and floors that radiates within the house when the temperature drops. High-performance wood-burning ceramic heaters provide additional warmth as needed. During summer, inhabitants can lower temperatures by blocking windows. Temperatures are maintained at around fifteen degrees Celsius because of the stable temperature of dirt surrounding the building. Cool air enters through the front windows, and warm air is ventilated out through skylights.

The structure of the building is created with items such as straw, tires, dirt, wood, glass, aluminum, and plastic—typically locally sourced, preferably recycled. Solar panels provide electricity. Ground water is purified for drinking, grey water filtered for irrigation by a reed bed filtration system, and composting toilets employed for waste management.

Vereniging Aardehuis is the brainchild of Paul Hendriksen and Ruurdtje Van den Berg. Interested in sustainable practices, Paul volunteered at a Swedish Earthship building site. Upon his return to his hometown of Deventer, he gave an informative slide show presentation for friends. Soon 30 families had expressed interest in creating their own Earthship community, motivated by the desire to decrease their environmental impact while creating a better atmosphere for raising children.

Paul Hendriksen (left) and Ruurdtje Van den Berg

In 2012, six years after the formal creation of Vereniging Aardehuis, ground was broken and building of the first home began. Several families dropped out over the years due to the stresses of finding a location and securing finances, but Paul Hendriksen and Ruurdtje Van den Berg (together with their two children, Marlinde and Jovanna) remain dedicated to the project, living in one of several small caravans along with other families while working to realize their dream. “I want to be an example of how to be connected with each other,” Ruurdtje told me. “In harmony, in a community.”

The adults of each family financially invested in the project are committed to four hours of communication and organizational work, in addition to one day a week of labor on the building site. Most put in more time, despite often having full-time jobs and families to care for. To keep costs low, a few paid professionals guide families and volunteers, most of whom have no previous construction experience.

Martin Blind

Volunteers come from all over the world. One former volunteer, Martin Blind, was offered a paid position as a lead builder due to his skills and experience in carpentry. He has a patient and deliberate presence while he tells fresh volunteers how to build the roof, which is of a more complex design than most professional builders come across in their daily work.

When the team pounds tires, the most common phrase heard is “More dirt please!” The process consists of lining up old tires, inserting recycled cardboard circles inside to cover the hole, and then filling the tires with a mixture of dirt and sand. Sounds simple enough, but the pounding and compressing of the dirt and sand into the tires to properly fill them and create a stable wall is exhausting work. However, the team dynamic on the Earthship building site is upbeat and energetic despite the heavy labor. One day as we worked, Edion Jake and Peter Van der Kuil kept things lively by singing songs ranging from Harry Belafonte’s chain gang tribute “Swing Dat Hammer” to Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It.” “The people are the most interesting part of the project, not the houses,” Peter told me.

Edion Jake (left) and Peter Van der Kuil

One volunteer, Eelke Bontekoe, a teacher and researcher of wind energy and sustainable technologies, is currently teaching life-cycle analysis at the Netherlands’ Noordelijke Hogeschool Leeuwarden University of Applied Sciences. Eelke, who has been involved in similar projects in the past, explained that he hopes to some day live in a community like this one. As a teacher, he encourages students to actively seek out ways to decrease their carbon footprint. “I try to inform them of these topics and ways to make a change, to inspire them by walking the talk, to find solutions and live solutions.”

I watched Mirjam Burema as she sawed away at old nails to make wood beams safe for reuse. Although she said the work was sometimes tedious, she remained positive by thinking of the day when she and her daughter, Isa, would be able to call an Earthship their home. The years of investment in this project have been draining on her family, but as she made soup to share at lunch the next day with members and volunteers, she spoke warmly of the way the community has come together, with differences between people only adding to the creativity, sense of purpose, and joy of the group.

The association uses a consent-based method called Sociocracy to ensure quick and respectful interactions while considering important decisions. Using this method, groups of members are formed to address particular issues, inviting anyone within the association to join in to ensure transparency. Decisions can only be made when no one within the group has a significant evidence-based objection.

The morning meeting is a time for sharing food and drink, conversation, and some good laughs.

“We are building the community while building the houses. We donʼt have to start a new life when we move into our home; we already have,” Marloes Gelsing, mother of Noa and Amy, told me. The Gelsings and two other families home school their children. Others look forward to their children going to school in Olst, where class sizes are smaller than those in the city.

There is an understanding that children are not just the parents’ responsibility, but that of the community as a whole. On the building site, it’s common to see children running in the grass, waving at trains, reading books, and playing imaginative games. One day, I watched as two small friends spent the day investigating strange occurrences around the area, collecting clues while wearing an oversized hat and dark glasses. Workers had a hard time keeping a straight face. Peter Van der Kuil, married to Willy and father to Julia and Lisa, chuckled. “When you see them playing here, in the trees, behind the dirt, you know itʼs right.”

Marlinde Van den Berg (right) and friend

Future visions for Vereniging Aardehuis include serving as a community center for family gatherings and a visitor center to educate the public about Earthships. Members are hopeful that the surrounding land can be bought and used for planting trees, permaculture gardens, and play areas with animals for children.

Wendy Sasse, who still lives two hours away by train in Den Haag with her two sons, Auke and Wessel, and husband Gerard, is eagerly awaiting the day her family can be settled in their new home. “I look forward to seeing what it looks like, all the energy and love. The air is different here.”

Chiney Man and Friend

Photographer Beth Lesser, a native New Yorker, has lived in Toronto since the ’70s. With her husband Dave, she documented the reggae scene both in the city and in Jamaica through their magazine, Reggae Quarterly, and his local radio show. Her photographs will be on display at the Gladstone Hotel in February in an exhibition organized by Wedge Curatorial Projects. Her work will also be featured in our upcoming Toronto issue.

We spoke to her about her experiences in the Toronto and Jamaica reggae scenes.

* * *

How did you come to document the reggae scene?

It was interesting exploring the reggae scene in the late ’70s and early ’80s, living in Toronto. Because it isn’t like the US—it’s very different. They talk about the US as being a melting pot and Canada as being a mosaic, meaning that immigrants to the US are quickly assimilated and become American, whereas immigrants to Canada tend to stay in their own communities, retain their own identities, speak their own language, maybe never even learn English.

So it was different here in terms of the Jamaican community keeping their culture very separate, whereas in other places it had maybe crossed over more. Reggae was a bit harder to find locally, but when it was found, it was very pure, very authentic.

We were always interested in all different kinds of music, so it wasn’t strange for us to find a new music and go, “Oh, this is fabulous.” But of all the musics that we listened to, reggae had this compelling thing to it. It was just the most . . . musical kind of music we found. It had the depth, layers. It had a kind of a complexity to it, even though it is theoretically a pop music.

Eek-a-mouse

So we would hang out in the Jamaican record stores, which you didn’t see a lot of white Canadians in. It was really a very separate scene. We got a lot of—not hostility, but a lot of stares, and a lot of, like, who are you and what are you doing?

But a lot of people were friendly, too. We found that there were a lot of people who were wiling to take us into that community and show us around.

But it was really through being interested in musician and producer Augustus Pablo and getting in touch with his people and going down to Jamaica to see him, originally to set up a newsletter—that was really the catalyst. We tried to contact musicians and artists that we were interested in, and Pablo contacted us back. And then we found out that a good friend of Pablo’s, Micko McKenzie, used to come to Toronto to visit his wife who was living here. So we got acquainted with this gentleman, and he said, yeah, come on down and I’ll introduce you to Pablo. This was our first trip to Jamaica, in 1982.

So we went down and met Augustus Pablo and told him about the idea of starting a fanzine. And he was interested. A little skeptical, because I think a lot of Jamaicans had been ripped off and taken advantage of through the years by people from other countries saying I can help you, I can do this for you. But he was willing to at least let us interview and promote his artists, if not him directly.

So for the first issue of what became Reggae Quarterly we interviewed a lot of Pablo’s Rockers Internationals artists, including Tetrack, Delroy Williams, Norris Reid. But we also wrote about some other artists.

Supercat

But what surprised us is that although we had gone down to Jamaica with this idea in mind of getting in touch with Augustus Pablo and this very heavy roots kind of music that he was involved in, when we got there that wasn’t what was popular; that was kind of fringe. What was popular was the dancehall stuff, which had not yet crossed over to white Canadians who were still listening to Bob Marley and Black Uhuru. Dancehall was very much still guarded secretly in the Jamaican community. The roots material had crossed over, because various groups had done covers of more roots reggae stuff—like Eric Clapton covering I Shot the Sherriff and The Clash doing Junior Murvin’s Police and Thieves. You could, say, go to a “cool” record store that sold punk in Toronto and get some of the roots reggae stuff. But dancehall hadn’t crossed over.  And it didn’t until Greensleeves Records came into the picture; that was what brought the real dancehall sound to non-Jamaican communities around the world.

Although dancehall was a complete surprise, we thought it was great. Whereas a lot of roots fans were looking at it and going, “This is the worst garbage ever! What happened to Jah? What happened to fighting for socialism and fighting to uphold the rights of the sufferers? This is just silly music for going out to a party.” But we thought it was very vibrant, fun music.

And there was just incredible talent there. When they hold the dances, the selectors choose records to play for the DJs to toast over. These DJs have to go all night. They might start at 10 and finish at 6 in the morning, DJing straight through, with a couple of breaks to go around the back and smoke the chalice. You can’t possibly sit down and write that many lyrics; you have to be able to invent them on the spot. And there were masters at this skill running all around Jamaica. The kind of talent that was out there on this tiny island was just unbelievable. We found it fascinating. So we said, we want to use the magazine to treat this equally and respectfully—the way roots music was respected. So we started interviewing people like Yellowman and Sister Nancy.

Noel Ellis (right) and friend

So you were going back and forth between Toronto and Jamaica all the time looking at the crossovers?

Yeah, what influenced that was the fact that in 1982 my husband started doing a radio show on CKLN, which was listener-sponsored radio, coming out of Ryerson University. So we were traveling both to interview people for the magazine and collect music for the radio show, so that when promoters would bring artists up to Toronto to perform, they would bring them to the radio show. There were so many rip-offs, so many false concerts—people would say “So-and-so’s coming on Saturday night” and put up posters, but the artists would never show up, even though everyone had paid for their ticket. It got to be a bit of a tradition that when a promoter brought an artist to Toronto they would show up on Dave’s radio show and say, “Hey, we’re really here, the concert’s real.”

Can you say a bit about your understanding of the Jamaican community in Toronto at that time and how this music fit into that?

The way immigration worked was that right after the Second World War Jamaicans went to England—because it was part of the British Empire, so they were allowed to go. Then in the ’60s that immigration door closed off, so they started to go to Canada. Trudeau was the prime minister at the time and he was very liberal and very open about immigration. It was easy. You just called up and said “I need my card,” you got your card, and you came to Canada. People came from all over, and there was a huge influx of Jamaicans throughout the ’60s, and into the early ’70s even. Especially during the ’70s, when things got really bad in Jamaica, a lot of people left.

So a lot of the people who were here in the ’80s had come up in that time. They were more recent immigrants than they were in England, where there was already a second generation of kids. Here there wasn’t yet. There certainly is now. Now, you go to a Jamaican reggae music concert, they might play the national anthem first, and all the Jamaicans stand up and sing O Canada. It’s a new generation now that was born here and identifies as Canadian.

Youth at Channel One

But back then it wasn’t. They were still first-generation people and they were very linked to Jamaica. They went back and forth all the time. Everywhere you went on the Jamaican strip along Eglinton Avenue you could buy barrels. Barrels were always being sold so that people could fill them with clothes or whatever and send them back to Jamaica.

Artists and producers came through Toronto regularly. There was a viable market in record sales and local stores would release local pressing of either original or already popular records. And, when Jamaican artists came to Toronto to perform, local producers would take them to the studio to record. Because the scene was so insular, many of the artists who made the trip came to perform with local sound systems that played in basements or small venues in the Jamaican areas that surround the downtown core. They didn’t come to play stage shows backed by a band. Only the biggest name artists could do that. But the local sounds made a good living bringing up the young artists for dance “session” just as they were at their peak of popularity. But those sessions stayed within the Jamaican community.  Other communities only came out for the stage shows.

What did Jamaicans mainly do in the ’70s and ’80s in Toronto for jobs?

All kinds of things. Auto mechanic, cable TV, all kinds of things. Trades. A lot of Jamaicans in Jamaica tended to study trades. They would go to school for a number of years and then go into a trade school. There were a lot of people fixing air conditioners, a lot of tradespeople.

Stranger Cole

Was there enough of an economic activity among the listener base to support the music on that level, or was it all kind of very scrappy?

There was never an economic basis to the music. Even in Jamaica, artists were just . . . poor. The lucky ones held jobs—postman, whatever. They would hold jobs when they could. But a lot were just hungry.

A few artists, like maybe Leroy Sibbles, could make a living off music, because he was internationally known and could tour a lot and make recordings. But not many. It was never a money-making institution.

But it was a popular force in the community on a kind of mass scale? 

In which community?

I guess I’m trying to think of it in terms of today’s music scene. Was it fragmented to the degree where in a high school you’ll have kids that like, you know, punk and kids that like goth, or whatever it is that they like these days? Was it like, if you were Jamaican, this was the music?

Even inside the Jamaican community, dancehall, like the roots reggae before it, belonged to a certain segment of the population. Back then Jamaican radio played foreign music. It was during the ’80s that a couple of radio DJs that began to introduce more local music (meaning reggae and dancehall) into their radio program, and it was quite revolutionary. Jamaica was always a kind of foreign-looking country, for the elite, anyway. It was always like, the English music is better and the American music is better. So they listened to a lot of soul, R&B, and country.

But out on the street and in the actual communities, they were listening to dancehall and reggae. It was huge. It was played on all the buses and cars and in stores. Everywhere you went, you just heard music. So on a popular level it was there. And the artists themselves were the heroes in the communities.

Johnny Osbourne

So how long did you continue with this project, and what was the stopping point?

We continued throughout the ’80s, and the stopping point was primarily economic. My husband finally had to get a regular full-time job and we didn’t have flexibility to travel anymore. So we began to kind of phase out the magazine. He still continued to do the radio, and I continued in the community, writing press releases and doing bits and pieces.

But our daughter was born, and within a year after that, doing the radio show every week started to take its toll. And the scene was changing, and it was getting more violent. It was not the same scene that we had come into. And the music was changing too.

It was just time, time to move on and worry about raising a family and working – staying in touch with the music, with the community, but not doing it on a professional level anymore.

We talked to Mark Sengbusch about the pros and cons of being an artist in New York, where he currently lives, and Detroit, where he spent the previous decade.

* * *

There must be a huge difference between the art scenes in Detroit and New York.

Yeah. Any city you go to, you can get into a group of people or whatever, you can make your way up. But who’s in that scene, and the levels of pretention . . . the line is less blurred in Detroit, because there’s a lot of artists that stayed in Detroit. Whereas in other cities, once artists make it to a certain level in their career or their age or with their family or whatever, they go to larger art scenes or better jobs. But a lot of people in Detroit stayed. There are a lot of people there in their 50s, 60s, 70s who were there during the riots in ’67. And into the Cass Corridor movement—a lot of my professors were in that scene. I didn’t really know that much about it when I was learning from them in undergrad, but then I’d go to the Detroit Institute of Art or read a book or catalog from the ’70s or ’80s and be like, oh my god! This is my professor’s work—and these cats are still chilling around town at the bar or at openings.

So as a result there’s not all this worry about, “Oh, where does my work fit in?” or “Who do I have to impress? This gallery is interested in my work, I need to make my work like this.” I never really experienced this until I was in grad school, and even more so in New York. Artists go crazy worrying about shit. That’s the biggest difference that I can see.

I try to bring some of those positive Detroit vibes to my practice/life here in New York. It’s unfortunate when you can tell artists who are making work for a certain reason other than their own purposes. Whether it’s their fellow artists, professors, gallerists or collectors—or even the artist’s own inner struggles—these voices can and do influence your work, and it’s hard to sort through.

Sengbusch in his Ridgewood studio

Do you find that that’s your impression a lot of times here?

Not a lot, but I think it’s in the back of people’s heads. I think it’s part of the larger picture.

So you came here basically because that’s where the art world is?

Yeah. Just to be able to go to galleries, have studio visits, work with people from other places was really important to me.

I had this window of opportunity after grad school. I went to Cranbrook for painting. Having been in Detroit for 11 years and then gone to grad school with a little time off, I felt like I had this short window of . . . if I stayed I would stay, start a family, start a business, settle down. And I thought, well, if I don’t go now—I would have been fine being a medium-sized fish in a medium-sized pond, but I thought, I gotta strike the hammer while the iron is hot.

It was kind of a ridiculous conversation in grad school—“Where are you going, LA or New York? LA or New York?” It was always like, wait a minute, are those are only options? A lot of people came here. I was at a party last night and there were like seven, eight generations of Cranbrook painting, and current students were here on their trip from grad school. So it’s nice to have that deep of a network here.

Do you think that the scene here is positive and helpful?

Yeah, so much. When I first moved to New York I had my studio in my apartment for a long time, because I felt like I had two options: either have roommates and have an exterior studio or live by myself and have my studio in my apartment. And I chose the latter. I didn’t think you could get a studio for under $400, $500. In my head, that was the number. But then I just found this place on Craigslist, and I was like oh, you can get a studio for $200? So now I have both those things—living by myself and an exterior studio—which I think is kind of rare. And I’m grateful, lucky. It’s great to have studio mates.

What do you do?

I work in galleries, art handling, and also event production. A lot of small things. I had a full-time thing at a gallery for a while—it was the first time I had a salaried job. And it was just too many hours. Which sounds—you tell your mom and dad or something like that and they say, “Wait, five days a week? That was too many hours?” But if you’re trying to do other stuff—

Yeah.

Because really, when it came down to it, it was 9 to 6:30 Monday through Friday. Then I’d come into the studio and work for a couple hours. And on the weekend I had to, like, do dishes and stuff. I wasn’t getting enough time in the studio. I was making it work, but I had no other time for anything. And I told myself when I started the job that if I wasn’t getting enough time in the studio I would be like, “Peace!” And that happened, and I bounced.

But I haven’t had to look for work for like three years. Freelance work just falls in my lap. There’s no security, but I learned from an early age from my grandfather that if you’re good at what you do you’ll never be out of work. And I sell a painting here or there too, so that helps.

How does that end of things work? Are you with a gallery?

I had a gallery in Detroit for two years. It’s funny—after I moved to New York, that’s when I get my Detroit gallery, a gallery that I had been wooing for a good few years. There’s not many big galleries in Detroit, and this was one of them—Lemberg Gallery. They just closed their doors, unfortunately, but the director, Darlene Carroll, is heading up a new space opening soon called Wasserman projects. They gave a lot of my work to a different gallery in Detroit, which was good.

So yeah, that was good. Every year I think I progressively make more money off my art practice. I’ve just been having a lot of small group shows. I had a show in Philadelphia at Grizzly Grizzly gallery a few months back. I had work at Nudashank Gallery in Baltimore. I have some work going to a gallery in Houston, and then it’s a travelling show, so it goes to a gallery in Portland, both shows curated ny the collective French Neon in NYC. And I had work at NURTUREart’s benefit show at Charles Bank Gallery in the Lower East Side. And a big show at Storefront Bushwick’s project space in November and December, so that’s pretty exciting.

From your perspective, are galleries still the way to go?

Yeah, yeah. I think that how the galleries sell the work has changed a bit—art fairs, blah blah blah. But yeah. I mean, what’s the other option? Selling work on your own?

It just seems like there are all these new distribution methods developing—like Costco selling art, to give sort of a stupid example—and I’m curious whether they’ll provide new opportunities for artists.

Yeah, I guess there are other parties who could sell your work besides a gallery, whether it’s a consultant or Etsy or Saatchi Online, which is so terrible—but I know people who are on it, and they sell a lot of work. But it’s like, come on. I think once you align yourself with a certain way of selling your work you lose a little bit of your street cred, or at least you become aligned with that trajectory.

But it’s tough to not be seduced by the possibilities of selling a lot. I make a lot of paintings, and I have a huge backstock. And it’s like, what am I going to do with them? Even when work is like a year old, when can I show it? I’ve moved on and am feeling the new work. When can I sell the work? Well, not really until I have a gallery.

I’m hesitant to do anything else besides just show at galleries. I trade work with my friends and I’ve done a couple of commissions for relatives, but—I don’t know. I think maybe in the last five years those lines have blurred between art and fashion, art and advertising and design, art and graffiti. Banksy, Shepard Fairey, Ryan McGinness—there are people who can cross back and forth fairly smoothly and not be hurt by it. The opposite: that’s their thing, that they can do both.

I feel like you have to be at a certain point when you can cross that line. There are a lot of big galleries who work with artists who have that crossover with fashion . . . I feel like you have to get to a certain point and then people approach you and then it’s ok. But to go out before you reach that level and approach people just seems kind of desperate.

Do you think people would just take you less seriously as a fine artist?

Yeah, I think it’s like, pick a horse.

Is the idea that you can’t be good if you spread yourself too thin?

Yeah, jack of all trades, master of none. But like I said, I don’t know if that’s necessarily true anymore. I think you can probably get away with that—it might be just some kind of stigma I have in my head. I know a lot of galleries, especially younger galleries and museums, are taking that risk of bringing in people who are not “artists” and talking about things that are outside of the artworld to keep the discussion fresh and new and not just be so pigeonholed into the artworld.

But having said all that, when I’m in the studio and I’m making my work, I just make my work.

We interviewed artist Vanessa Maltese, who was recently named winner of the 2012 RBC Canadian Painting Competition, about life as an artist in her native Toronto.

* * *

You’re from the suburbs of Toronto?

I grew up in Newmarket. It’s about a 40-minute drive from the city.

Is that a very suburby suburb?

Yes, it’s full of concrete and malls.

And how long have you lived in the city proper?

I moved to the city for my undergrad at OCAD, and I’ve been graduated for two and a half years. So I guess I’ve been here for about six or seven.

And have you thought about going elsewhere, or do you think that this is the place for you?

I’ve thought about going elsewhere. I probably will. I think I’ll have to before I decide where home is. I feel like I’m home, but I have to try living elsewhere. And there’s other things going on that aren’t here, so it would be nice to see what those things are.

How do you feel about the art world here? Generally speaking, have you found it to be supportive? Is the gallery scene sort of accessible to different kinds of people?

Yeah, I think it is supportive, and I think it is accessible, if you access it. At first I found the social aspect a bit challenging. I think that has to do with the nature of me—I was nervous or shy to introduce myself to people. But once you overcome that fear it becomes a lot easier, and you realize that everyone is a nice person just like you.

So your community is OCAD—a big part of it?

Yeah, some are OCAD alumni, and I’ve met other people through friends that I developed during my undergrad. I guess I am part of a specific community that is OCAD-heavy, for sure, but the diversity expands as time passes and my connection to the university becomes less on the forefront.

How do you think of Toronto’s art scene with respect to both the Canadian art scene as a whole and the global art scene?

I feel like it is important for any artist working here to get their work outside of Canada. You can only go so far here. But I guess that’s any way with any other city—you always want to have your hand in different scenes. I guess it also depends what you want your career to be like. For me it will be really important to get my work outside of Canada.

And what is the most natural way to do that?

I don’t know, I haven’t done it yet! It’s has to do with how you network. Perhaps your Canadian gallery introduces your work internationally though art fairs outside of Canada. There is access to tons of art via the internet, on gallery websites, artists websites, blogs etc. I have done a few studio visits during my travels with artists whose work I like and got in touch by e-mailing them. This year I was shortlisted for the RBC Canadian Painting Competition, which has promoted my work on a scale I would never have been capable of on my own. All of the things add up.

I’m really interested in the future of art distribution, in artists’ opinions about whether or not the gallery model is going to change. Do you think that for an artist is the gallery model something that makes a lot of sense to you as sort of a primary way to get art out there, get your name out there? Or do you see the internet or other things being a real option . . . ?

Having gallery representation helps alleviate some of the administrative responsibilities. The association with the gallery name and the rostered artists ends up being an alternative form of promotion in itself, as well. There are plenty of alternatives to the gallery system and the internet is definitely one of them.

Yeah, I’m interested in if other things are happening that seem like they’re sort of an exciting way to be an artist, to live as an artist.

I think that the commercial gallery is interesting, and it’s maybe not necessarily the ideal for anyone, but it is a reality and a pre-existing system that we can interact with if we choose to. I don’t know what an alternative for me would be. I don’t make work to fit a space, but I do play on architectural nuances of that space when given the opportunity.

It is definitely interesting to speculate about other situations for presenting work. I’ve been thinking about myself as a painter, and how the rituals I participate in are strange. Like, me working on the rectangle which has been so inherent to painting for such a long time. So I call up my wood guy and say, make me some rectangles!, and then I bring my rectangles to the studio and make paintings on them. It’s all these things that have been put in place that we work within. You have to acknowledge these traditions, for sure—you have to be aware of what you’re doing.

Has most interest in your work come from Toronto? How does that work? Do you know who’s buying your work, in terms of geography?

Yeah, we keep a list of where the work is. I think for the most part the clients are Canadian.

It’s interesting that every place is so particular.

Yeah, and everyone is always like—oh, New York, I’d love to go there. Yet I’ve never lived there. What’s happening in that city seems great, but I don’t know. It’s really expensive.

But rent in Toronto is fairly expensive too, right?

Yes, it is expensive. I have to work a few jobs to maintain my practice.

Among the artists you know here, what do people complain about?

People complain about cost and people complain about the scene being very Canadian and very conservative.

Conservative artistically in terms of what they expect the work to be like?

Yeah, I think they respond to more conservative work—whoever “they” are. Maybe Toronto doesn’t take that many risks. But I feel like Toronto’s changed significantly over the past few years. We have little galleries popping up that are showing international work, which Toronto doesn’t do very often.

But then everyone has to find something to complain about all the time. “What am I supposed to be complaining about? The weather? Oh, it’s not sunny today. Can’t think of anything else to complain about. Might as well complain about that.”

Yeah, it seems trivial, but I do think the kind of stuff people say varies a lot from place to place. It often ends up being very indicative of the place.

Yeah. I think a lot of the people that I interact with are mostly, you know, Canadian. I don’t really come across that many people moving from New York or elsewhere, to here. Lots of people from Vancouver are moving here, which is interesting.

The Vancouver scene is good, though? Well respected?

Yep, for sure. And then, I mean, Montreal’s getting expensive too, right?

And to them, like you were saying, it’s a question of having to work at a job versus having time to devote to their work.

It’s so frustrating to have to work so much, and then at the end of the day you arrive at the studio and you’re like sleeping on the floor, just taking a little nap. I don’t want to do that. I’m ready to be here all the time! The key is to go for broke. Literally.

So from what you’re hearing from people who are moving from Vancouver, is it because it bigger, or—?

I think so. Or it’s just a different scene. Toronto is changing a lot. I’m excited to be here I think for the first time since I’ve moved here. There are just so many things that have been happening, especially in the art scene. Hopefully I’ll be here for another few years, and I’m excited to see what will happen. But I’m also probably going to get out at some point, just to try it.

Visit the gallery’s website for more details, and keep an eye on our site for stories about what it’s like to be an artist in Montreal and beyond.

Electric #14, Thomas Kneubuhler

Electric #15, Thomas Kneubuhler

Cast Away, by Matt Shane

Marie-Claire Blais, Neutral Density 02

A few months back we put together teams of artists and writers and sent them off to create collaborative works. The results will be revealed on January 9 from 8-10 at Bed-Stuy’s Bedford Hill Coffee Bar. Everyone is welcome.

Featuring work by Jeroen Akershoek, Colin Asher, Michael Baccam, Adam R. Burnett, Isa Encela, Baseera Khan, Jen Kinney, Davy Knittle, Nick Kolakowski, Stephen Knezovich, Geraldo Mercado, Michael McCanne, TJ McLemore, and Beth Ann Nyssen.

African music will probably be played.

Above image by Michael Baccam and Stephen Knezovich.

As part of a series about art scenes in different cities, we spoke with Swiss photographer Thomas Kneubühler (whose work is featured on the cover of our current issue) about his experience of his adopted home of Montreal.

* * *

You’ve been in Montreal’s art scene now for about a decade. How is it different than Switzerland’s?

What is definitely different here is there’s a lot of funding for the arts on the emerging and mid-career level. It’s also kind of interesting—these terms, emerging, mid-career, established: I’ve never heard them in Switzerland, they don’t exist. It comes from this whole grant culture. You have to put yourself into these categories.

Compared to Switzerland there is more government funding here, so you have a lot of opportunities and possibilities. To give an example, Montreal has more than 20 artist-run centers, and from what I know, they all have budgets somewhere between $100,000 and $200,000. There’s usually two or three people working there, and they can pay themselves a salary. This money comes to a high degree from government funding, like the province of Quebec or Canada Council for the Arts.

Kneubühler in the Digital Imaging Lab at Hexagram-Concordia

In Switzerland there are more small artist initiatives, more temporary projects and off-spaces which exist for one or two years. Like there’s an empty building somewhere and they negotiate with the owner to have the space for free for a year or two, and then they get maybe $20,000 for basic infrastructure from the city. Then people usually work for free, and maybe after two years they think, ok, we’ve had it, and move on.

These small initiatives are very lively. They always change, there are always other people, other locations. They’re less established. But of course, it’s hard because you work for free. Whereas here, because the artist-run centers all started in the 1980s, a lot of them are quite settled. And some of them, because they’re dependent on government funding, there’s some bureaucracy they have to deal with.

But on the other hand, they really provide opportunities. You can have a decent solo show in a good location under good conditions. I myself had a couple of solo shows in artist-run centers, which really helped me to get my career going.

Concordia University district

So these are the differences. I have a hard time saying what is better. I wish Montreal had more money for small, independent initiatives. A lot of people, when they start a project, the first question is always, how can we get a grant? It’s really a grant-driven culture. On the other hand, I just got asked to participate in a project in Zurich. Some artists got an empty space for one year at the train station—and they have zero budget, but they do it.

In Europe people are more conscious of art history. A wider part of the population is interested in art. There’s also more of an art market than in Canada, where the market is not really strong. It has maybe to do with the fact that Canadians are more into nature, because there is so much beautiful nature here. They don’t need art in their living room, they just can go out in a canoe!

Out of that situation, in Switzerland there is more of a discrepancy between artists who never really make it big and then the international stars. It’s a bit an either/or—either you make it or you don’t. There’s less of this middle ground than you have here.

Converter Station North, from a series about the impact of hydroelectric installations in northern Quebec

How do you feel about the connection between the art world and the general public in Montreal?

That’s a tough question. Of course, the people who I’m surrounded with are interested in art, so I want to believe that everyone’s interested.

The Francophone culture has a strong interest in the arts, but I still think compared to Europe there is a bit of a gap. Also, there are probably a lot of people in Montreal who are interested in the arts, but how many people are interested in contemporary art? You have to make a bit of a distinction, because art is a very vague term. Contemporary art is a very specialized field.

Kneubühler's Electric Mountain series

So it’s hard to give a precise answer, I don’t have the numbers and I never did a survey. But to give an example, in Switzerland when you go to a dentist, there is a chance that you can make a deal with him to pay with one of your artworks. I went recently to an osteopath in Zurich and he said, “What are you doing in Switzerland? Oh, you’re here for the Basel art fair? My sister’s in charge of one collection…” He was just talking the whole hour about contemporary art. And in his office he had a Sophie Calle. But if I go here to see a dentist here, the paintings on the wall look like they were bought at Ikea.

Can you tell me a bit about how you come up with ideas for your work?

First and foremost, my work is project-based. I’m working less like a painter who goes to his studio and makes one painting after the next . . . I mean, not all painters work that way, but some do. My working method is closer to what a filmmaker does. I’m interested in a topic, I research it, I do post-production, and then at one point it’s going to be exhibited. That’s at least how all the projects in the last ten years have worked. Of course, sometimes I do smaller projects in between, but most of the work are long-term projects.

Untitled #10, from the Office 2000 series

I’m interested in social issues. Most of the time a starting point for a project is that I see something which I find visually interesting, or I read about something which I think would be worth having a look at. That’s how I came up with my office building project. I was new in Montreal, I bicycled around the city, and when I saw the light that comes out of the office buildings at night I thought it was just visually stunning. I started to think about it, started to do some research and how I could transform it into a piece.

That’s really how most of the projects start. It has mostly to do with the environment where I am, and right now I’m here. In a way I’m interested in technology, the built environment, and how that affects the way we live. I think that’s maybe one of the reasons why I’m still here. I find it’s much more interesting to work with these themes or subjects here in North America than it would be in Europe. I think a lot of things which happen in western society right now have a visual appearance here—you see it—whereas in Europe, you wouldn’t see it as much.

Europe is still so much about history. The cities are kind of stable, so changes or issues don’t become that apparent, whereas here they do, broadly speaking.

Guard #4 (Martin), from the Private Property series

New York-based photographer Jen Kinney has spent the past two summers documenting the small town of Whittier, Alaska, population 180, which can be accessed from the mainland only via tunnel. She was recently awarded a grant from the Alaska Humanities Forum to continue the project during a two-year period in which she will set up and run the town’s first newspaper.

We spoke to her about Whittier and her work.

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How did you decide to start this project?

I was a waitress in Whittier in 2011. I had no connection to the place before I went; I had a family friend who knew the owner of a restaurant there. I needed to complete a senior thesis for my photography program, and I thought there must be something worth photographing in Alaska.

So, sight unseen, knowing nobody in the town, I applied to this restaurant and I got the job. I went up and stayed for three months, and kind of hated it for a little while at first—not Alaska, but Whittier, for how small it was and how isolated. But it appealed so much to my sensibility, and I suppose to my sense of absurdity.

What was the application process for the restaurant like?

It mostly just involved calling and talking to them on the phone. They had me fill out an application that had basic information, but I don’t know if they even asked me my work history. It was very casual.

Probably not a lot of competition for that job?

Actually, you know, I would be curious to know how many applicants they get every year. Because my coworkers were two girls from Lithuania—it was their first time in America, a Thai woman who had been working for them for seven years, and someone who’s now one of my very good friends there, Young, who was born in Korea but grew up in Oakland and has been in Alaska on and off for like eight years. He and Ieva, one of the Lithuanian girls, fell madly in love, and they’re still together two years later. She returned to Whittier the next summer to be with him again. It was a really unusual group of people and a really unusual place to work.

Gina behind the Anchor Bar

So there’s enough business from 180 people to support a restaurant with a staff of like 10?

It’s only open in the summer, because in the summer Whittier actually gets a huge population influx. I heard it’s as high as 700 living there. It feels more like 500, I would think. But I couldn’t speak to the real numbers.

Whittier gets thousands of visitors every year because it’s between Anchorage and the Prince William Sound. If you want to get out to the water the easiest way from Anchorage is to go through Whittier. The reason that the U.S. Army even bothered to go to the trouble of building the tunnel to Whittier is that otherwise it’s miles and miles and miles to the water.

Ieva at the Anchor Restaurant

And what are the people doing that are going to the water? Do they work there?

One of the biggest sources of income in Alaska is fishing. I actually got the chance this past summer to spend three nights on a commercial salmon fishing boat. People really do come from all over the country and the world to do that. So that’s probably number one. And then after that, the cruise ships come through Whittier, so most of the big Alaska cruise ships—Princess, Carnival, Norwegian Cruise Line—they dock up in Whittier and then take buses to Anchorage. So that’s the second. And then glacier cruises are really popular—they’ll take you out on a boat for anywhere between three and seven hours, so you go out and take pictures of glaciers and hope that you see some otters.

So the restaurant closes down in the winter. Are there year-round restaurants there?

Two restaurants stay open year-round, and three bars. There are three bars in town, and they stay open all winter. That’s about all there is to do, from what I hear. Actually in the past 15 years the Whittier Inn opened, which is the classy, high-end hotel in town. Locals don’t really go there at all. But it stays open all winter, which I always thought was sort of strange. I haven’t seen it in the winter.

Brenda walking Jolie

So you might have an influx of people passing through. But do people stay in the town in the summer as well?

Only to do basically what I did, to work at one of the seasonal jobs. You have all the other restaurants that open up in the summer—probably six or seven restaurants like that. There’s a Chinese restaurant that’s run by a Korean family, and there’s the fish and chips restaurant I worked at, and a couple other cafes and gift shops. Then there’s a bunch of fishers who will stay in Whittier when they’re not on the boat. And there’s a cannery. The cannery probably employs the most people in the summer.

You had mentioned when we first spoke that a lot of people there were kind of escaping their past?

Yeah, that’s definitely a crucial myth, and somewhat a reality, not only about Whittier but about Alaska in general. There’s a joke that Alaska is where people go to flee things, and if that’s true then Whittier is where Alaskans go to flee things.

In 2000 they converted the tunnel to be used by both cars and trains; before 2000 only trains could pass through. Certain times of year, the train would run only once a week. So in that time especially people went there as a last resort, in some ways, an escape. Or because they liked the solitude.

Girl and mother in the tunnel

One very well-known story around Whittier is about one of the longest-term residents moving there as a way to ensure that an abusive ex-husband would have no easy job of finding her.

Another persion that I got to know this past summer was a guy named Jim who’s been there for 20 years. He wound up there once for work and liked it and just kept returning until he stayed. He’s a carver, of tusks and bones. He has a little studio that overlooks the bay. And his favorite time is winter, which everyone else hates, because he likes the solitude of it. He told me one of my favorite things about Whittier. “If you can deal with yourself,” he said, “you can love Whittier.”

Jim on the Anchor balcony on a cruise ship night

What are you focusing on in your photography?

I’m really interested in the use of space in Whittier and the way that the striking architectural elements create an extremely unique sense of place, with an odd mixture of isolation and community. For me, one of the launching points is definitely the sociological exploration of spaces—the way that the tunnel separates Whittier from the rest of Alaska; that separation in contrast to the claustrophobia of living with most of the town in the same building, in such close proximity to each other; and also the fact that it has this long history of military occupation, of natural disaster, and of bureaucratic mismanagement and neglect. There is a sense of living in a town that is literally its own ruins. History is so grafted into the bricks and soil. So for me the starting point is really that idea. And then the people whose lives are circumscribed by these structures, and who either fight that or who love it there. Like I do. It’s so unappealing in so many ways, and yet it’s really enchanting.

Can you tell me a bit about the military occupation?

So the old military base in Alaska was in Seward, over a hundred miles from Anchorage. It was deemed too vulnerable to attack because there were so many miles of rail connecting it. The supply chain could be cut off very easily.

Vulnerable to attack by Russia?

By the Japanese. The Japanese actually occupied about five islands in Alaska during World War II. Alaska was bombed and occupied. So it was deemed that a more secure military base was needed. Whittier was chosen because it was so close to Anchorage, because it has the water access—and a port that is ice-free year round—and also, funnily enough, because it has fog almost 80% of the time. It was thought the cloud cover would keep Whittier from being attacked from above.

This idea was also partially the motivation to build the two largest buildings in Alaska in the town and connect them by tunnel. It was a town built to look abandoned from above. The idea was that you would never actually have to go outside, also a great protection from the long snowy winters.

So it was designed to look like a ghost town?

Yeah, it kind of was. The first building that they built was the Buckner Building. It was the biggest building in Alaska at the time. It was called “the city under one roof” because it just had everything in it. It had a theater, a bowling alley, a darkroom. They grew plants inside of it, and it was to house all the soldiers, thousands of them. The entire town was built to house 30,000 people.

The Buckner Building with BTI in window

Theater of the Buckner Building

They actually built these things after World War II ended, I should say. It was just bunkers, for the most part, during World War II, and then the Cold War also presented a threat and made Alaska again vulnerable to attack, this time from Russia.

So in 1956 the Buckner building opened its doors. Within 10 years it was abandoned. Three years after the Buckner, the BTI opened, containing family-style apartments for officers. It was the next biggest building in Alaska and, at 15 stories, remains tied as the tallest. Today 80% of the town’s 180 residents live in that building.

BTI from Anchor Balcony

It just kind of looks like a Holiday Inn.

Yes! People have actually called it “the Holiday Inn in the wilderness.” That’s exactly what it is.

Are there a lot of other structures there?

Yes, there are all these other smaller structures. The whole town, besides the two monoliths, is rather low-lying and industrial-looking. There’s the cannery. The Anchor Inn is an important structure. There’s a tradition in Alaska of building everything in one building, I guess so you never have to leave. The bottom floor is a laundromat, and above it is a restaurant, and above that is a hotel, and the top floor is the bar. There are some people who live in the hotel and work at the restaurant.

View of Whittier from the roof of the Buckner Building

Is there a grocery store?

Yes, it’s very small and very overpriced. It’s not a convenient way to live. A lot of people end up driving to Anchorage once a month and going to Costco.

Does everyone have a car?

A lot of people have cars. There is a rental car station—I assume it closes in the winter, I’m not sure. Of course, if you have a car, you have to dig it out of the snow every time.

Do most people own or rent their homes?

That’s a good question. I assume most people own. I’m assuming the cost of living is relatively low. It’s actually really expensive. Housing is not that expensive, but food is really expensive. You won’t even get a beer cheaper than $5 anywhere in Alaska. Unless it’s a Rainier, then you might get lucky for $4.50.

Chase at his birthday party behind the BTI

And how far is from Anchorage?

It’s only about an hour. Whittier isn’t truly remote at all, just cut off. There’s another town within about 10 minutes on the other side of the tunnel. That town, Portage, was mostly destroyed in the 1964 earthquake, so there’s not much there besides a wildlife reservation, but nonetheless.

I think that’s another thing that intrigues me about Whittier: people have a sense of Alaska of being a wilderness, and it disrupts their assumptions to see a microcosm of a city within the midst of this wild, barren landscape.

Do people go out much? Is there skiing, or—?

People go snowmobiling, kayaking, hiking, fishing. Any kind of water sports are really popular. I have yet to stay there for a winter, and so I’m very curious about that, because the biggest ski resort in all of Alaska is only 30 minutes away in Girdwood. That town is known for being really athletic and young and active. My sense is that Whittier is not really like that in the winter.

Gary at the Kozy Korner

How old is the population?

There’s 32 kids in the school. Which nearly doubled from my first year there, because some of the younger kids got out of preschool, and there was an unexpected influx of people. The school itself is actually award-winning, which was also surprising to me. It’s kind of run like a Montessori school in which the kids have to make five-year plans.

So there’s not many kids, and the majority are probably over 50, if I had to hazard a guess. The smallest demographic has to be high-school age up to, like, 25. There’s almost no one in that age bracket. I’ve spoken to a good deal of people who have lived there 13 years or more, and they’re all for the most part in their 50s.

And do you get a sense of sort of a general proportion of natives to transplants?

I’ve only met one person who was born in Whittier and still lives in Whittier at the age of 40. I know one girl I met my first summer, but I don’t know if she’s still there, was about 18 and a third-generation Whittier resident. She was born and raised there. Her grandfather was stationed in Whittier in World War II and he liked it so much he came back, and he had his kids there and they had their kids there.

But that doesn’t seem very common at all. The next longest resident has been there for 34 years, but she came over from New Hampshire. There’s a lot of people who are from Alaska and have come to live in Whittier, but it’s probably mostly from the lower 48 or somewhere else in the world.

So I guess you’ve taken a lot of photos of the residents?

Yes, my goal is to talk to as many residents as possible. Every resident would be amazing. I have a lot of pictures of the infrastructure and sort of an overview of the town, so now what I’m interested in getting are these stories. The grant I’ve been awarded is to continue photographing, but more importantly to start an oral history. So far I’ve done only three interviews, but I want to interview almost everyone if that’s possible. The work will exist finally as a book that combines my photographs, historical images of Whittier, and the text of these interviews.

It’s been a really interesting experience speaking to people about Whittier. People are kind of accustomed to Whittier as being portrayed with a bit of ridicule, and are a little suspicious at times. There’s a book about Whittier’s history, it’s the only one I’ve found so far, it’s called The Strangest Town in Alaska. And ten years ago this documentary crew went up there to make a documentary that didn’t end up working out, but its working title was Prisoners of Whittier.

So the discourse around it is very negative, for the most part. And it’s something that I struggle with, too. I read a book jacket recently—it was a biography of Martha Gellhorn. She was a journalist, a war correspondent, but she also happened to be married to Hemingway for a while. It was this very in-depth biography of her, and yet this book jacket says, “Martha Gellhorn was one of the greatest war correspondents of her time. And yet she’s generally known as being just one of Hemingway’s wives. This book disproves that.” And of course, that’s paradoxical and absurd, to have to cite the false impression in order to talk about it. It reinforces the very cliché it’s trying to dispel.

So sometimes I’ve experienced that with Whittier. It’s problematic, and something I still struggle with. It’s hard to discuss without prefacing that discussion by calling it “the strangest town” or “the armpit of Alaska” or any of the other prejudices that paint Whittier as nothing but really strange.

Summer cannery employees

Well, it is really strange!

It is really strange, yeah—that’s absolutely true, but that’s not the whole story. That’s the hard thing to balance.

I guess maybe the thing is that it is really strange, but it’s still these people’s lives.

Yes, and playing to any one cliché about Whittier shuts down all of the conversations that those lives and those stories could open up. The path that leads from Anywhere, America to Whittier, Alaska is very different from the path that leads to New York City.

I’ve found Whittier to be a really interesting lens on America. You get to see realities that we face across this country—environmental change, urban decay, addiction, community togetherness and disruption—play out on this really tiny, tiny scale. And all of the architectural oddities are in the end only a frame to get to this place where we can talk about space and the impact it has on this really diverse mixture of lives that come through. The strangeness is this great surrounding principle, but in the end it’s just a framework, an excuse to listen to really interesting things that have resonance outside of the context.

The mother was braiding daisies into a crown for her little girl while the father cast his fishing line into the river. Behind them, on a point of land jutting out into the Outaouais river, a barbeque was already beginning to smoke in anticipation of the catch.

On a clear July morning, on the tip of Pointe-aux-Anglais, we were the anomaly: five city-dwellers with a passion for urbanism, we shouldered our packs and took the first steps in a three-day, 100 kilometer expedition on foot across Montreal’s metropolitan region.

As the eighty-two cities and towns that compose the region began drafting their first metropolitan development plan, which would address the protection of agricultural lands and natural habitats, as well as planning transportation networks, urban density and economic development, we were compelled to discover firsthand what it might mean to be citizens of a metropolitan region.

We were convinced that neither the dull visions of suburbia glimpsed from the highway’s edge nor the lofty views afforded by Google Earth truly revealed the places that made up our region. So we set out to experience the terrain with our bodies and our senses. As our journey wound through countryside, towns, suburbs, city and back again, we became acquainted with a landscape that was at once intimate, incongruous, and surprisingly continuous.

Intimacy

Starting with the family of Russian immigrants on Pointe-aux-Anglais, our path wove through people’s daily living spaces, giving us a window into the lives of those who dwell in exurbia and suburbia.

In Kanesatake, we walked beneath proud purple Mohawk nation flags and shared a picnic table with a family at a chip-stand in someone’s front yard. At Oka Beach, we were swept up in a rippling sea of bikinis and tattoos, as ugly and beautiful people swelled around volleyballs and beer coolers or hookahs or, once, a roasting pig. Through a tangle of underbrush, we glimpsed wrinkled nudists, a blue heron, a painted turtle.

We followed railroad-tracks-turned-bike-paths through cottage-country-turned-suburbia, and heardkids splashing in above-ground swimming pools; we cut across dépanneur parking lots where teenagers lounged timelessly on concrete blocks. At the Canada Day festivities in Deux-Montagnes, an aging singer in a red cowboy hat crooned country tunes while kids flung their arms across each other’s shoulders and improvised a line dance in the grass.

In these suburbs and exurbs—on a long summer long weekend, at least—we found a vibrancy that cannot be inferred from a glance at the map.

Incongruity

No Montrealer would be particularly shocked to encounter a strip club on a major commercial artery— upstairs from a shish taouk joint, next door to a bank, across the street from a church and a university. But while we may have become immune to such contrasts comingling in the city center, we tend to imagine the suburbs to be row after row of tidy bungalows with nary a blade of grass out of line.

Not so: tents and Winnebagos neighbored bungalows in Sainte-Marthe-sur-le-Lac, where suburban sprawl had swallowed a campsite whole. In Laval, it was just as surreal to see a self-proclaimed “Urban Spa” across the street from a strawberry field and to witness concrete 1970s apartment buildings towering over tiny clapboard cottages from the generation before.

We were surprised to find that the cohabitation of incongruous forms that is so characteristic of Montreal permeates far beyond the city’s core.

Continuity and discontinuity

As blisters bloomed on our feet, we often sought the path of least resistance. Sometimes we followed old railway lines, tracing the historical vanguard of suburban development. Along these axes, one neighborhood blended into the next with surprisingly little heed for municipal lines or even waterways. After all, Laval-des-Rapides is not such a far cry from Cartierville, where The Main is lined with mature trees and single-family homes.

Other times, the sidewalk came to a sudden end and we took to the shoulder of the highway. Where the railways provided continuity, autoroutes traced sharp edges in our experience. In Laval, the 13 cut a no-man’s-land between the strip malls and McMansions of Sainte-Dorothée and the old villages of Chomedey while, on the South Shore, the 30 traced an abrupt divide between the Promenades Saint-Bruno shopping mall, with its sea of parking lots, and the farmland and fieldstone houses beyond. We found that the greatest barriers within Montreal’s built form were neither natural rivers nor historical city-lines but highways. Ironically, there was usually continuity across natural breaks in the landscape, but discontinuity when encountering manmade frontiers.

And beyond . . .

Last December, the Montreal metropolitan community adopted the regional plan and, for better or for worse, the far-flung region of Montreal must begin to recognize a common vision. We are the citizens of this region, although so much of it remains unknown to us. That is why Walk the Region will become an annual pilgrimage, tracing a new transect through the city and surrounding areas each summer and, we hope, amassing participants from across the territory.

Bergart with painted cement truck

We like art, but we don’t really like talking about art. We do, however, like talking about cities. So we’re starting a new web series about art and cities, asking artists, curators, and others involved with contemporary art about how the place where they live and work impacts what they do.

For the first piece in the series, we visited artist Andrea Bergart in her Ridgewood, Queens studio to ask about her experience of the New York art scene.

Can you say a bit about how your experience as an artist in New York has compared to other places you’ve been?

I grew up outside of Boston in a small suburb called Acton, and then I went to undergraduate school at Skidmore College in upstate New York. From there I went straight to Boston University for my MFA.

When I was at Skidmore I studied in Ghana for a semester, and I think that kind of changed my direction. I’ve always been interested in textiles and beading, and I really responded to that aspect of life in Ghana immediately.

Part of Bergart's African textile collection

After grad school I did a Fulbright and lived in Accra for a year. There I was researching the textile and bead industries and traveling ancient bead trading routes with bead traders throughout West Africa.

So the first six months I lived in this really rural village that was the center for beadmaking in Ghana, interviewing bead traders and makers and vendors, seeing how the industry has changed and the effects of globalization on trade routes, how they’re getting new beads and exporting, all of that. Then I designed textiles with a company in the city, in Accra. And meanwhile I was making murals and art and having these patterns kind of come into my paintings.

It was kind of a shock to go from grad school, having all these artists be with you all the time, to this rural context in Africa. Trying to psychologically define what art is there, and where it is found—to me it was incorporated into daily life, with the beads and textiles they wore and the way they displayed their produce . . . to, like, anything. It was hard for me to figure out how I fit in and how I could make art there. But at the same time it was super exciting to have so much influence around you.

One of Bergart's Ghana murals

And from there I moved straight to New York, which was a huge shift again. But I always knew I wanted to be in New York, being an artist. It just took me until after school to get there. And—yeah, I’ve been here for three and a half years, and I’ve had three studios. At first I was in Long Island City; then I was in the Brooklyn Army Terminal, which was a subsidized space, which was really helpful; and now here in Ridgewood.

Ridgewood

So, yeah, I love creating in New York. It’s super fast-paced, a lot of energy, so many artists. And that’s good and bad, I think. The speed of creation is super exciting, as is seeing so many people create constantly around you. It’s awesome to do so many studio visits and go to so many openings. It’s like an endless amount of information. And there are so many ambitious artists, and I think that’s what makes you keep going too—there’s such a strong community of artists here. You’re, like, making art for them, for your friends to see, and I think that’s the most exciting part.

On the other hand, it’s overwhelming too. You have to balance how much you’re going to support the community—going to openings and studio visits and all these things—and how much you’re going to dedicate to yourself. And work to still make money to live here. But the amount of shows that are happening is just amazing, and the general public’s awareness of the art world is unrivaled; at least in the States.

Bergart in her studio

From a commercial standpoint, is it really hard to get gallery representation? Are there other things you can do to sell work? What are the options, and how hard are they, I guess?

I think the whole thing is really political, like anything. What’s being shown today is such a mixed bag. There’s really a lot of great work but there’s also plenty of mediocre work that’s being shown, and then there are gallerists who will show work that they know is more saleable.

So for emerging artists it’s difficult. But I think just increasing your network of artists can help. For instance, Joe Ballweg and I curated a few pop-up shows inviting artists to show their work. More and more artists are curating shows, and that’s at least taking some power into artists hands, curating and showing work outside of a commercial gallery context.

But yeah, I think it just takes time to develop relationships with gallerists and curators and see where you fit into it all. I think it’s mostly political, once your work’s at a certain level. I feel like there are more artists than there are opportunities.

2012 installation

Do you feel like there’s enough supportive non-commercial infrastructure here, like open studios and such?

I think there’s a lot. Yeah, like open studios, and Chashama, which is the organization I got subsidized space through, which was really helpful as a poor artist. There are residencies and grants, but everyone’s applying to them, so there just need to be more, I think. There are so many ambitious artists applying for these things, it’s just like whenever you get your turn to get it. And a lot of artists don’t want to deal with all the bureaucracy. It would be great to have a patron support you—but that’s hard to come by.

But I feel like I’m always surprised—even in a little pop-up show I’ve sold work, and through open studios. And lots of artists I know are also pretty good designers, and make money that way. Like I sell jewelry and am trying to get more into textile design.

How do you see the next ten years for you in terms of working in New York?

I see myself in New York, for sure. I plan to be represented by a gallery and hope to sell work more regularly. I also still want a connection with the international community. I’ve been fortunate to get grants to be able to travel, do shows, do a mural here or there, so I want to continue to do that.

And maybe even do some more murals or public art here in New York. I have a project coming up where I’m painting a cement truck mixer. I’m doing it Lisa Frank-style, it’s going to be a rainbow cheetah pattern. I love how art can be a tool to get you into a community; it’s a vehicle to explore. So I want to keep that going.

For the past half-century, Phyllis Lambert’s work in the architectural and planning fields has had a tremendous impact throughout Montreal and beyond.

The daughter of Seagram’s CEO Samuel Bronfman, at the age of twenty-seven Lambert chose Mies Van Der Rohe to design the now-legendary Seagram Building in Manhattan. After studying architecture in the United States, in the 1970s she returned to Montreal, where over the decades she has been deeply involved in a dizzying number of programs designed to make the city a better place for all who live there.

Her most visible legacy is the Canadian Centre for Architecture, a museum and research center she founded in 1979. It has since become one of the world’s premier institutions devoted to the study and promotion of the role of architecture in society. She has also been extremely active in the historic preservation movement, and created nonprofit conservation group Heritage Montreal in 1975. In 1997, she founded the Fonds d’investissement de Montreal, an innovative private fund designed to benefit medium- and low-income neighborhoods.

Satellite spoke to her about what these and other experiences have taught her over the course of her career.

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What do you see as the primary architecture- and planning-related challenges that have faced Montreal over the past few decades?

Montreal has three very strong things. It has Old Montreal, the seventeenth-century to nineteenth-century city. It has the mountain—we call it the mountain, it’s not very much when you look at it from the air. It’s where Olmstead worked, of course—it was his only mountain park. And we have the old port of Montreal. We’re an island, so we have the water. We have green, we have blue, we have neighborhoods, and we have engaged citizens.

There are very strong neighborhoods around the place, which is very important. These are the things that must be enhanced. There’s been very strong development of large neighborhoods. For example, in the ‘70s through the ‘80s, there was a huge not-for-profit cooperative housing project for about six hundred to seven hundred people just to the east of the McGill campus, in the downtown. Some developers had gone to McGill—sometimes a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing [laughs]—and thought they were going to do something really great by establishing a high-density area just east of the university. Cars were to pass through it underground. It was the kind of place you could be born and live and die without ever having to go out of the area; it was kind of a crazy notion, or at least for a small city.

But Montreal has had very strong citizen-based planning, starting with that project. That area was called the McGill ghetto; the people living there were middle-income, low-income. They formed a not-for-profit cooperative and finally ended up with cooperatives grouped as a condominium, in order to be able to put controls on what would happen to the area so that it wouldn’t get gentrified, so that families could live downtown.

In the ‘60s, there was something called the Quiet Revolution. That made a huge difference, because before it, the church had control over all the social services, education and hospitals. That stopped in the 1960s, and was replaced by government services. And then Expo ‘67 gave a kind of sense of can-do to people here—it was important in terms of infrastructure: the subway, roadways (although I think some of those we could’ve done without), and bridges connecting the island to the mainland all round. Up until the ‘70s, when the citizens really started taking action, it was really a city for cars, not for people. All these highways were made; buildings were torn down to make roundabouts and a big butt was made dividing the old city from the downtown—the east-west autoroute, which originally was to be put through a seventeenth-century street near the port. Just pure craziness. It’s hard to imagine that people could have thought that way.

Old Montreal is wonderful. I live there and it’s like living in a village. The building are essentially European: they’re built absolutely in a row, all are about three or four stories—sometimes a little higher—and they’re grey stone, basically, with commerce on the ground floor. It’s a wonderful system. When I first moved back to Montreal—I bought my house in about ‘74—Old Montreal was red-lined. People couldn’t get a loan to buy property there. It was just considered old stuff, no good. Who wants an old house? It was just wildly stupid. So the change has been enormous. The change in the world has been enormous, but I think it’s just very, very clear here.

What current design-related initiatives in the city do you find particularly exciting?

Now there’s an area called the Quartier des Spectacles, the neighborhood of theaters. It surrounds Place des Arts, which is kind of the Lincoln Center of Montreal. There are many, many theatre seats in the area, and it is identified by wonderful graphics—a light system of double rows of red lights shining down on the sidewalks. You know where you are, and it has real character.

This was designed by the same team that created the Quartier international de Montréal, led by architect Renée Daoust, a young woman—I think she’s not even fifty yet. It’s just amazing the impact that she’s had on the city. It was her idea to reinvent this area, at the edge of the old city and rather run-down in many ways, and yet it had some very fine buildings. So this whole area, about three-quarters of a mile long, was made into a superb place. The highway was covered by a very handsome nine-story, floor-to-ceiling-glass building wrapped around the older ones; its great nine-story high agora connects two squares, one old, one new. The new square, also built over the highway, creates a marvelous new green space in the city—but very urban, absolutely urban.

And then there’s the area where the CCA is, now called the Quartier des Grands Jardins; it’s probably the most wonderful neighborhood outside of the old city. The first stone fort built by the French in 1683 in Montreal is here. Its large garden has a seventeenth-century long pond and wonderful trees. But the center of the area was badly neglected. We formed a table de consultation, a round table where everybody—developers, students, large commerce, small commerce, the institutions in the area—studied its strength and weaknesses, and brought this to the city, which then created a public/private unit to plan and revive and renew the area. This is what happens in Montreal, and it’s really, really impressive—a very strong process of democratic action. From a city that had turned its back on its history, it’s really turning around.

In distinguished places like the Quartier international de Montréal, new buildings are being constructed, and they’re good buildings. There are now a number of very good architects and developers in Montreal.

There’s a great deal of building now here. In fact, I think there’s more housing being built than there was in ’67, which was a high point. There are two new hospitals under construction, one in the city’s east end and one in the west end. They’re not going to be great architecture, but they are going to be nodes for concentrating development.

That’s a very important issue, as the dispersal of the city continues. There are an awful lot of people who are going out to the suburbs. The usual thing—raising their children until they’re fifteen, then coming back to the city. There is a very strong division between urbs and suburbs: people must understand the real needs of the metropolitan city. To do this we have formed a group called IPAM, the Institute for Policy Alternatives in Montreal, a citizens’ initiative seeking to contribute to viable urban planning in Montreal, to economic and sustainable development, and local democracy. Among other activities, we hold public hearings with people from all areas so they can debate and have a voice in how the metropolitan area and its neighborhoods develop.

Also, a city cannot be for the rich and poor and nothing in the middle. That’s certainly a problem in New York City. In Montreal, citizens have created a program through which corporations invest in affordable housing. That’s hugely important. It’s very discouraging when there are run-down neighborhoods—and where the children don’t have the space to study or to go to school safely. In this program an organization called le Fonds de développement de Montréal, or Montreal Development Fund, takes a second mortgage, helping local nonprofit groups to fund improvements such as new windows, new kitchens and bathrooms, and paint the places. We try to establish coherent groups of dwellings that are close to social services, city schools, and parks.

And are there are certain neighborhoods around the city that are particularly benefiting from that kind of work?

Well, we certainly hope so [laughs]. In one neighborhood, for example, some of the biker gangs sort of took over, and that’s being eliminated now. There are still difficult areas of the city, and there always will be, but the thing is to really work with them. The city has to exist on many levels.

All this is being done, at the same time as legislation—citizens have initiated public hearings in Montreal and then made sure that they became part of the city charter. Citizens lobbied for the creation of the Conseil du patrimoine de Montréal, an advisory body to local and city officials on heritage matters. The Montreal Charter of Rights and Responsibilities, which promotes citizens’ shared values and priorities: human dignity, equality, justice, tolerance, and inclusion, was recently created by citizens through public hearings. It is the first of its kind in North America.

What do you think needs to happen in the city that isn’t happening?

Decision-making needs to improve. For example, a major event is being planned for 2017, the fiftieth anniversary of Expo ‘67. It’s a major landmark, so everybody’s talking about doing this, that, and the other thing. There are those who think we ought to celebrate, as Expo ‘67 did, on one of the islands off the main island. Of course, that’s not what’s needed—what’s needed is densification in the center city.

There’s so much that can happen, and that needs to happen, in the center city. The major gestures are there. The Quartier international de Montréal made a huge difference, huge difference. The whole center of the city was just desolate. It wasn’t desolate because it was poor, it was desolate because it had been neglected and there was no quality of building there. But that’s changed. And the Quartier des Spectacles is not far from it, further north—it’s almost aligned with it. So one starts to find these kinds of areas in the city. A city is never one hundred percent wonderful, but if you start to have these wonderful areas, that’s what’s important.

We need a better vision of what the city could be. I think that that’s the major problem we have right now. You need to connect conservation, old and new building, green parks and transportation, and plan these together so that they enhance each other. And that`s not well enough understood.

Comparing Montreal with other cities in Canada and the US, what do you think is the most distinctive about it?

The relationship between the mountain and the water and the island. And the city has one of the richest areas of arable land anywhere, which is very important in the planning of greater Montreal. That has to be understood too—you don’t just plan for the island or the incorporated city, you have to plan for the metropolitan area. That’s one of the things we’re working on at IPAM.

The bones are good. Montreal was laid out in a fascinating way in the seventeenth century by the seigneurial system. Strips of land were given to seigneurs to manage, and they went from about two hundred feet wide at the river and then north. And then as the city developed there would be another strip of that nature north again, so it was two hundred feet by fifteen hundred feet or something like that. It was a way of giving people a waterfront, because it was easier to move around the water than it was on land. That has affected the city very much; streets of the centre city follow those landholdings. And then the gray stone—seams of limestone underlie the island and it was the major building material of Montreal before the 1920s, and they are architecturally coherent and good. Since the mid-1970s, a very strong citizens’ movement has developed, a very strong sense of working together with the city. It’s been a very positive change from, let’s say, the 1960s. Since then there’s been a pulling together of all these elements—the very old sections of the city, and the sections that are new, and the infrastructure that was created.

For example, right in front of where the CCA is, the boulevard had been widened and lots of buildings knocked down, creating huge holes in the city. Some of those holes are being filled in, such as in the Quartier international de Montréal—this gash, made by the sunken highway is gradually being covered over. I believe in this very strongly. I believe in the process of having tables de consultation, or neighborhood planning organizations, where all the interests in an area come together. And I think people are doing this because it’s the only way that they’re going to protect their backyards. But they also have to understand that it depends on a lot more than just their backyard. People see that here—or they’re beginning to, anyway.

And do the Francophone and Anglophone communities tend to collaborate well?

Montreal had a history of being completely French, obviously, and as the English came in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries neighborhoods became completely English or completely French, but that’s all disappearing now. There are always going to be people who say ‘we want to have our French city’, but I think there’s real interest in the city by both sides. Montreal is actually one-third French, one-third English and one-third people from other ethnic groups.

Over the course of your career you’ve been involved in so many different kinds of things. I’m wondering what has been the most surprising to you about what you’ve learned?

When I first came back to Montreal, I had just finished my architectural training in Chicago. I was a white-cap architect, so of course I knew just what do to [laughs]. I had been coming back because I was the architect of a building here in the ‘60s. By the time I decided to live here in the ‘70s, I became involved in stopping the demolition—and we really did stop that. And also I was very much involved in learning the history of the city through its gray stone buildings and the archival documents, which are just fascinating.

But when I went to meetings with community groups, there were all sorts of ideas. There were people who were very well-informed, and there were people who had other opinions, not based on a reasonable approach. So like Ishmael in Moby Dick, this was my Yale and my Harvard—I would just sit on my hands and learn not to say anything, not to react. I think the world has been going in that direction, but I’ve been going with it—understanding the very everyday issues that have to be very much part of what one does. You don’t wipe everything out and start again on a pure idea of a built form. You have to look at all the aspects of the issue rather than what you think you’d like to have. Or, as Mies would say, start from the facts. That’s very important.

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Russia’s traditional wooden churches, constructed across the country for almost 1000 years prior to the 20th century, have fared badly in the modern era. Photographer Richard Davies traveled to northwestern Russia, the harsh, sparsely populated region where the majority of the surviving structures are found, to document their present condition.

More at Richard Davies’ site.

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The Kentucky-born, New Orleans-based artist will be showing at Brooklyn’s Robert Henry Contemporary from October 19 through November 18.

Once a major hub for shipping and manufacturing, Buffalo has changed dramatically over the past half-century as globalization and technological advances have decimated its economy and shrunk its population by half. Like many postindustrial cities, it is now faced with a rising stock of vacant, decaying buildings and empty lots. Traditionally working-class East Buffalo has been hit particularly hard.

Convinced of the need for fresh ideas to help neighborhoods like East Buffalo thrive in spite of depopulation, architects David Lagé and Andrea Salvini teamed to form Terrains Vagues, which they describe as “a think tank escorting vacant urban landscapes during their repositioning.” For the past year, they have been developing an initiative that aims to build community around the area’s nascent urban agriculture movement by inviting local artists to build site-specific work on the farms.

We spoke to Lagé and Salvini in September about Artfarms.

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David: My wife’s from Buffalo, so I’ve spent a lot of time there. I would drive around and see how the east side of Buffalo is extremely vacant—it’s really striking. But in looking at the redevelopment projects that are going on in the city, especially the large-scale official ones, it became clear that they have no ideas for vacant areas such as the east side. And they have no ideas because it’s a blighted area, with all of the normal socioeconomic issues that go with that. It’s just an area that’s been overlooked.

When I started to look at the issue more, it turned out that 20% of Buffalo is like that, empty. So to me it seems like the biggest issue in the room, yet the one attracting the least amount of interest or attention.

East Buffalo

When I lived in Germany, I learned about a place called Lusatia. It was just the southeast portion of Germany during the GDR times. It was a huge strip mining district—Germany wanted to be energy independent, so they did surface coal mining for decades and completely destroyed an entire region in the process. When the wall came down and the country reunified, the new government realized that they had to shut the area down completely because it was a disaster. So the economy collapsed right after that and no one would invest in the region. Why would you invest in an area that was an environmental wasteland with no economy?

Eventually new stakeholders emerged—creative people, local business owners, local politicians—and they had to try to look at the situation a little differently. They thought about how could they turn their biggest liability—these big open coalmines, which was a moonscape—into some kind of asset. They came up with the idea to fill them with water and create a lake district. This changed people’s perception of the area from a wasteland to kind of an idyllic vacation spot, but also created a backdrop where redevelopment could take place. Because suddenly if there was an official program to change the landscape into a destination then I could do my hotel project, you could do your restaurant project, and we could do a whole bunch of museums and other tourism things that fed off the historical legacy of the area. And this turned out to be a real destination within Germany.

We’re not talking about creating a lake district in Buffalo, but that kind of backdrop that enables other redevelopment to happen—that’s essentially what we’re trying to do with Artfarms. We went around in East Buffalo and saw that the only people doing anything with the landscape were the urban farmers. They’re basically changing what the use of the land is—from a residential past to something else it will be in the future.

East Buffalo, via Google Maps

Farming’s not super interesting. It’s not going to revitalize the whole area. And on top of this, it’s not so easy to farm in an urban area because the soil’s of an extremely poor quality. There’s been no organic activity for a century. So they have to jump through a lot of hoops to try to get the output from the crops that they want. They also have trouble assembling larger plots of land because of ownership issues. And the city’s not so keen to give up because they somehow feel that in the future it’s going to be worth a million dollars—they have no idea.

So the farmers were really interested when we were talking about vertical farming, all these things you see emerging in places like Brooklyn. But again, who cares, though? I mean, urban farming, vertical farming, so what. But then we started thinking, well, what if well-known artists designed the agricultural structures. What if they became kind of a cultural thing, a destination . . .

Andrea: Like a sculpture garden.

David: Yeah. On a large, district-wide scale. It would be a way to attract more people in and start to change the perception of the area. And by doing so, by putting something in an area where there’s no activity, we could begin making it possible for other people to have their own redevelopment. So a café could open, and from a café maybe something else opens.

Artist's rendering of Artfarms

And one thing I have seen of the urban farming that’s really positive is that the farmers live there, and they actually start a kind of new community of their own. The downside of it is that there aren’t that many urban farms in East Buffalo, because it’s extremely difficult to start—you need resources, you need know-how, you need land. So we’re talking with a well-known agricultural school about trying to start some sort of pilot program where the school could provide kind of a support network that would enable a series of people who want to try urban farming for a season or something like that to give it a go. They’ve recommended that we connect with existing local organizations that they work with.

We’re trying to encourage more transformation of the landscape, more momentum. It’s great that we get more sites for Artfarms, but I think that the more that the vacant land is transformed, the better the image, the better the potential for other redevelopment to happen. We never had this idea before—we need more urban farms, what does that mean in terms of Artfarms—but suddenly we see that in trying to increase the activity there, there’s a lot of other benefits that will make a community happen, as opposed to just doing some art project that may attract people.

Wilson Street Urban Farms

One other thing that we were talking about: in Buffalo there’s a high-profile regional supermarket chain that does its own organic farming, so we’re going to talk to them about doing an urban farming pop-up store where they can sell local produce to the communities that are really underserved. Anywhere we turn in the project we seem to be able to find a new territory to go on beyond just the art.

Andrea: The project itself is very organic. We didn’t expect it to be this way, but it just happened. Artfarms is an unconventional approach to art that embraces socioeconomic and placemaking issues, so it adds a new layer on the practice of urban farming as a way of redeveloping this part of Buffalo. If you layer art into the existing urban farms, you also create a cultural destination that changes negative perceptions . . . it attracts interest. We think it has the potential to establish a new identity for the area.

So the urban farmers—these aren’t people who have backyard gardens, these are people who call themselves urban farmers?

David: There are three urban farms involved: Wilson Street Farm, Cold Spring Farm, Michigan Street Farm. Their plots are just former properties that are assembled into larger parcels, and they’re in different configurations. One might occupy the end of the block, one might occupy a strip through the block. They’re assemblages of places where there were houses that were demolished.

Via Cold Spring Farm Facebook page

And where are they from? Are they from Buffalo?

Andrea: They’re locals.

David: Yeah, but they’re not monolithic. When I was first meeting them I thought, oh, they’re urban farmers, they’re just into agriculture. But they’re not. The people from Wilson Street urban farm actually grew up in the countryside right outside of Buffalo, which is pretty rural. They grew up farming, so for them it was nothing new. Whereas the farmers at Michigan Street and Cold Spring—one of them used to do software encryption for government sites, and he just got tired of the rat race and the debt circle. For him it’s more a kind of self-reliance and social thing. He’s trying to build a community that barters, trades goods and services, and doesn’t have to rely on things like credit.

For me it’s not important to get into the issue of local good production or the social issues or any of that. I think it’s really interesting, though, that they all just kind of jump in and take a stake in transforming the area, for whatever their purposes are. That’s what I really admire about them. I don’t want to be a farmer, but I think wow, what they do is really amazing.

How long have they been there?

David: It varies. I’d say five years is maybe the maximum.

Via Cold Spring Farm Facebook page

I’ve been talking to people who say that in upstate New York there’s always a lot of sort of utopian stuff going on.

David: There’s a tradition of that up in western New York. The Roycroft Campus, which is in East Aurora, not far from there—in the late 1800s it was a collective of artists and farmers who really did their own thing. I heard they just smoked a lot of weed and were swingers, but their output is the Roycroft Campus, which in western New York is a huge destination.

My point is that I think there’s something inherent to the situation up there, whether it’s like the shitty climate or the fact that finance is difficult all the time, it’s a bypassed area—I think it lends itself to a different approach.

You don’t see a lot of utopian communities occurring in other economically depressed areas, like, say, Youngstown, Ohio.

David: Yeah, to me this topic strikes into what seems like the overarching theme for architects right now. Placemaking is, I think, the new movement for critical architecture. You’ve seen every building shape, every building technology done. I don’t think it’s any longer relevant. I think that making places has architectural components and uses architectural techniques in terms of project organization and conceptualization. It’s inherently architectural, but it’s so much more comprehensive.

Artist Michael Beitz' Artfarms proposal

And because postindustrial cities have such a need, you can’t use normal market-driven approaches for doing things. You have to do things differently. I think that you’re going to see in the next five to ten years a whole new kind of movement that might be loosely affiliated throughout lots of postindustrial places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, western New York.

To suddenly be in a creative area where it’s not yet fully defined is so exciting as an architect. My frustration with architecture prompted me to go search for something else, which is really where we are with this today. I know it sounds kind of grandiose, but I really believe that there could be a movement, a new medium—placemaking—coming from places where they have lots of things like land and space and empty buildings, but no money. So I think the techniques typically will use culture, like artists; farming is a thing that they’ll use. These things are kind of intensive in some ways, but completely low-cost in others. And that will end up creating a new cultural project.

I guess my question is, though—so for the example you gave in Germany, attracting tourist dollars was the solution. But there aren’t enough tourist dollars to go around to revive all the postindustrial cities of the world. For this project, do you think drawing from the catchment area, Buffalo and the surrounding region, will provide a big enough tourist market to serve as an economic engine for the area?

Andrea: We’re not focusing on tourism, actually. We’re looking more at a sense of community. Like if there’s something going on in a place, the community feels like they’re motivated to build or grow in the same area. Does that make sense?

Yeah. I guess I’m particularly interested in ways that projects like this can help a community economically.

David: Well, start with farming. It changes the land. Farming’s essentially economic—it produces things that people sell. Food’s not only something for me to go home and cook; in Brooklyn you see the whole locavore culture, with a restaurant and hospitality scene. That’s specific to the place. People want to go to a place and feel like they’re trying something specific to that place.

So that leads to the whole art thing too—going to see the artists that are specific to the agricultural situation there. I haven’t seen that anywhere else; it’s extremely specific to Buffalo. By those things being there, other shops and other things can emerge that also reflect the local environment. For me it’s totally the most authentic approach. It’s not about “let’s plant the medical corridor here,” or the harborside development—those are the two big developments in Buffalo now. It’s a much more grassroots, organic approach. I hate that word, organic, but it is the most applicable word. It’s a much broader approach than just to do the large-scale project.

If you want to see a similar philosophical approach, look at Push Buffalo—it’s on the west side of Buffalo, which is very divided between east and west. They are not cultural in any way, shape, or form. They’re doing a kind of economic-based approach that focuses on people making things, renovating houses, rehabilitating—it’s not bad, worse, or indifferent, it’s just a different approach.

Artfarms proposal by artists Millie Chen, Joan Linder, and Warren Quigley

So this area, East Buffalo, was it primarily industrial usage before?

Andrea: Residential.

David: Traditionally it was low-quality housing for workers. The quality of the housing stock varies throughout Buffalo. There are some extremely amazing areas with super high-quality buildings; this is not one of them.

How have you selected the artists to work on this project?

David: Initially it was almost a favor, because we knew one of the curators at [Buffalo contemporary gallery] Albright-Knox, Heather Pesanti.

Andrea: We wanted to have local artists. We thought it was an important aspect of the project to engage them and farming groups locally, in relation to the site and in order to facilitate interaction. This also helps the artists to envision their artwork based on an ongoing dialogue with the farmers’ input and familiarity with the site.

Artist Megan Michalak's proposal for Artfarms

David: But that said, even in getting the names of artists from the Albright-Knox, which is like the establishment art institution there, it becomes clear that there are issues. There are minority-based art groups in Buffalo that are part of the local situation creatively. We’re now bringing them in and trying to create a process for identifying and selecting artists that really represent the whole diversity of the town.

I know that sounds all sweetness and light, but it’s not. We’re not meeting a lot of minority artists through certain circles, so it tells me that we need to introduce those artists to the world. We go further into the project, situations come up, we adjust again—it’s the organic thing we were talking about.

Andrea: And the artists have total creative freedom. We think it’s important for them to work on their own visions.

David: They interact with the farmers. The artworks have to support agricultural activity, that’s the only requirement. Some things are used for growing on, some are used for water collection and retention, power generation that the farmers can be used but that can also be used for events.

Andrea: It’s not going to be a typical art installation.

So you mentioned the potential partnership with an agricultural school. Would this be something that would be completely separate from Artfarms, or would it be folded in?

David: It’s really more about trying to make more farms possible.

Andrea: This part of the organic thing; we start from one point, and it’s possible to add different layers to the project.

David: We have five artists, we have three farms. Great. We do them, they get planted, we want to do more, but there aren’t any more farms. Why aren’t there any more farms? Because it’s hard to get into farming. So how do we change that? Well, the agricultural school is a land-grant school; they’re obliged to increase economic development through agricultural means. So therefore why don’t we contact them? It’s almost like a thought process.

What’s the city’s perspective on this project?

David: The city’s reformulating its zoning code. They’re coming up with a green code. I think they’ll have their full picture together about how land will be utilized in the near future. They’re getting closer, but until that happens I don’t think we’re going to see any huge commitment. Nor have we asked for it, either. I would leave it at they’re just kind of cautiously supportive of the project. We’re in a total gray area on the zoning. We’ve got very conditional approval, but we don’t have final approval because we need the final artworks. So it’s going to be a negotiation, like any project.

Buffalo, via Google Maps

What stage are the designs in now?

Andrea: We’re going to start fundraising, then fabrication is the next step. And finally the spring is going to be the installation.

David: The installation is going to be like a barnraising. People always ask me, how’s the community involved? If I had to sit there and explain a clear path it doesn’t work, but it seems that at every point we always have help from others, whether it’s making these things, finding out how to raise money, introductions to appropriate groups and people. It’s a completely grassroots project.

We are searching for better way to more comprehensively involve people living around the Artfarm locations, immediately and down the road. We have encountered some criticism that Artfarms is just an art project—perhaps alien to its real surroundings. While it has a larger mission to change perceptions, I must agree that we should find ways to be more engaged with the people and reality of their lives in the area. Therefore, we are examining how urban agriculture has become a way to empower neighborhoods. The food security issue can address the lack of high-quality organic food in poor neighborhoods with high levels of obesity and diabetes. There is also an educational aspect to involving kids via after school programs, etc.

Andrea: We’re listening to people and it’s constantly shaping the project. The community’s extremely excited about this project, which is good, because that’s the purpose. This project is an interesting break from architecture in a way, because we’re actually dealing with other people’s creativity.

David: We meet so many people from so many backgrounds. It would take me ten years to meet that many people in an architectural setting. In Buffalo, we have the farmers and artists who are working with us, but then as time goes forward we’ve been meeting some key people in Buffalo on the grantmaking and nonprofit side that are helping us navigate this.

We also have a community group that’s our partner, the Matt Urban Center—they’re East Buffalo’s longest, most respected nonprofit group. They’re helping us with community outreach. Because one thing we’ve learned is you can’t go in there and be like “Hey, I’ve got some project I want to do.” It’s their community.

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Eric LoPresti grew up near Washington State’s Hanford nuclear production facility, a Manhattan Project creation that produced plutonium for nuclear weapons from 1943 to 1987. His recent work explores the history and landscape of the region.

New Yorkers can catch his work at an October show at Chelsea’s Field Projects gallery.

Montreal has long been recognized as one of North America’s artistic hubs. But for the last century it has also been synonymous with another cultural phenomenon: hockey, a game thoroughly suited to the city’s long, unrelenting winters.

When spring and glorious summer arrive, though, Montrealers come out of hibernation in droves, peeling off jackets and sweaters to enjoy the sunshine. As any Montrealer will tell you, being outdoors in the summer to enjoy the all-too-short respite from the cold is essential.

And for more than one hundred years, baseball has been a staple of the city’s summer days. While 
the departure of Montreal’s professional baseball 
team, the Expos, to Washington, D.C., may seem to 
indicate lack of local interest in the game, the truth 
is more complicated. During its final years in Montreal, behind-the-scenes maneuvering involving the Expos’ ownership and operation further complicated a difficult set of circumstances surrounding the 
team (one of them being the weak Canadian dollar in the nineties).

The loss of the Expos can be thought of as one of the last blows to an era often considered the city’s glory days. Today, Montreal is an amalgamation of 
thriving, culturally diverse neighborhoods—a fact of which its residents are justifiably proud. Nevertheless, it is safe to say that Montreal never quite reached the “city of the future” aspirations it set for itself during the sixties, when the eyes of the world were focused on it as a site for twentieth-century progress. Although we now look back critically on the aspirations of modernist planners and reformers, it is clear that in many ways Montreal is still slumbering in the shadow of that time. How telling it is that the city was the first in Canada to hold a World’s Fair (Expo 67), the first to host an Olympics 
Games (1976), and the first outside the United States to acquire a major league baseball franchise. The departure of the Expos is further proof that those days have passed.

And yet my own experience has amply demonstrated the city’s love for the game itself. Along with a few of my coworkers, I keep my baseball glove in my desk at work so that we can play catch at the park down the street during our lunch hour. On some Friday evenings, I take my glove home, wearing it on my hand, perennially breaking it in. As I walk through the city, time and again I am stopped by passersby who ask me if I play. It’s remarkable how many people open up, sentimentally recalling their younger days playing baseball or softball or attending Expos games with their families. In fact, upon seeing my glove, the patriarch of Cafe Union down the street from where I work proudly tells 
me of his days playing fast pitch at Jarry Park. He even brings his own glove to work so that we can indulge in a catch with one of the chefs from Depanneur Le Pick Up, a corner store/gourmet snack bar across from my office.

To flash back just a few seasons: the year after the Expos left Montreal, I began my final thesis project in architecture school. Despite the seemingly daunting task of choosing a final project, the answer was fairly obvious: I would design a downtown ballpark for Montreal. I wanted to create a park that would avoid the pitfalls associated with Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, which, although it provided fans with twenty-eight years of memories, was ill-suited
 to baseball and located a considerable distance from the city center.

But the Big O was not the only problem I wanted to address. Contemporary stadium design in general is in need of attention, its forms arguably having stagnated. In recent years, cities have gravitated toward historical, neotraditional architecture, trying to mend the blights on the urban scene caused by the sixties cookie-cutter saucer stadium phenomenon.

However, I had no interest in designing a stadium for the sake of baseball alone, despite my passion for 
the game. Postulating new directions for ballparks as urban design, the endeavor was about the welfare of the city and the future design of an integral, if long-neglected, part of its fabric.

I grew increasingly attentive to the situation facing
 Griffintown, a sparsely populated former industrial
sector south of the downtown core. An ideal match
 for Griffintown, the proposed park would be just 
that—a park, and one to which people could walk. The project sought to employ notions of gathering and urban events, including sport, as a springboard to facilitate the urban renewal of the area.

The ballpark is an ode to what the city has loved and lost, both in terms of sport and urban vitality. Its goal: to inject the Griffintown area with new life by means of a meaningful intervention at a critical node along Montreal’s Lachine Canal.

Balbahadur's thesis ballpark design

* * *

The proposed ballpark considers the role of urban events in regenerating parts of a city. The project reflects the importance of baseball to Montreal’s history and tries to rekindle the exuberance that characterized the city during its heyday.

The project examines the notion that the contemporary ballpark must be reconsidered, especially in Montreal, by getting back to the essence of the game—appropriating an interstitial space as a venue for urban activity. The park is located at an extraordinary site along Griffintown’s Peel Basin, considered the birthplace of industrialization in Canada. While acknowledging the realities and demands of contemporary professional sport, the project remains critical of the corporate generative components of modern stadium design, maintaining that the public and a connection to the city play a vital role.

Griffintown, an area poised to undergo a process of revitalization, is a remarkable setting for this re-imagining. Rather than creating an isolated object that fosters an emphasis on vehicular access, the park emerges from Griffintown’s urban connective tissue and engages the infrastructural elements that run as seams through the city. In so doing, it defies the norms of both what structured private space and pluralistic gathering spaces can be. It at once facilitates the gathering of people in observance of spectacle and restructures a site that has been long underappreciated—the Peel Basin, a logical focal point along the Lachine Canal leading west from Old Montreal, and the node that ends the Peel Street axis. While the Bonaventure Expressway and the CN rail lines act as arteries that have strangled the site from outside contact since their introduction to Griffintown, an incredible potential exists in the space between these elevated lines of transport for an urban intervention that could serve as a model for how such tight interstices—common to all cities—can be dealt with.

The location along the Lachine Canal adds to the idea of the park as an urban destination. The main procession to the ballpark takes place on the path located between the highway and train line that begins from downtown.

This artery is currently being studied by the city for high-rise development and a series of urban plazas. As envisioned in the ballpark project, parts of this path would be planted with vegetation leading up to the forecourt of the park, proceeding to the field and terminating at the basin’s piers. In this way, the green of the field extends through the city itself. Glimpses to the field are afforded to passersby, since they are equally vital to the festivities as the paying participants and players. The portion of the Bonaventure Expressway nearest the site can be closed during events of extremely high attendance, literally connecting the park to another layer of the city. Should the city follow through with plans to ground this portion of the raised highway, transforming it into an urban boulevard, the ballpark will gain additional open space and exposure to water on its east side.

* * *

It has been fifty years since Place Ville Marie, 
Montreal’s most celebrated steel and glass sky-
scraper, was built. A glittering beacon of corporate modernism in Canada, the cruciform-shaped tower (designed by I. M. Pei and Associates with the Montreal firm that later became known as
 ARCOP) marked the epicenter of Montreal’s new
 downtown core. It also served as the starting point of the underground city, which allows pedestrian commuters to cover vast distances without having to set foot outside in winter.

Although real estate booms were nothing new to the city when the tower was built, the sixties were in many ways the decade when Montreal came of age. The city was a canvas for experimentation with new forms of planning and architecture.

Designed to cover a gaping hole where trains emerged from below ground, the Place Ville Marie project explored the idea of a building complex as miniature city that would connect to the surrounding urban infrastructure. As such, it would become a model for most Montreal buildings that linked to the underground network, and, later, for New York’s World Trade Center (1973).

Place Ville Marie; Mary, Queen of the World Basilica; and the Queen Elizabeth Hotel (site of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Montreal Bed-In).

Place Bonaventure took this a step further, seeking 
to combine disparate programs (hotel, exhibition
 facilities, offices, and links to the train station, subway,
 shopping, and restaurants) into a complex that functioned as a fundamentally inward-looking cauldron of activity. Alexis-Nihon Plaza, Complexe Desjardins, 
and others followed suit, pushing the boundaries of hybrid typologies in North America.

Towers rose simultaneously throughout the sixties, providing clear evidence of the migration of the city’s financial core away from the historic old town (a move that had begun decades earlier but was slowed by the Depression and Second World War). The decade saw the construction of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) Tower and Pier Luigi Nervi and Luigi Moretti’s Stock Exchange Tower at Square Victoria, as well as the completion of Mies van der Rohe’s Westmount Square. (One of the most fascinating anecdotes to emerge from this frenzy of building activity involved the rivalry of Place Ville 
Marie and the CIBC Tower, homes to nationally competing banks, each vying to have the tallest skyscraper in Canada. Because CIBC raced to beat Place Ville Marie, the Pei team was able to pull out its ace in the hole, the addition of a penthouse-level club and restaurant that put its height over that of its competitor.)

Montreal skyline, with CIBC Tower at center

* * *

If its pioneering design epitomized a city growing 
to adulthood in the mid-twentieth century, Montreal 
appears to have become a senior citizen in the intervening years. Despite its generally progressive outlook, the city seems to be resting on its laurels,
 less interested in making the bold, avant-garde statements that caught the world’s attention decades 
ago than in facelifts and emergency reconstructive surgery. Much of the city’s infrastructure and building stock is in dire need of repair, falling apart in 
direct proportion to the alleged corruption in its construction industry. Remedial measures are no longer sufficient for many of the city’s bridges, overpasses, and interchanges; planning has begun for the complete replacement of most of Montreal’s major 
infrastructure. Last summer, the unrelenting construction in the streets seemed more intense than ever before, the objective being not only to even out 
the city’s infamous potholes, but—even more pressing—to replace plumbing that is already more than a century old.

The population has become disillusioned with the shoddy craftsmanship and poor upkeep that have become fodder for the city’s newspapers and talk radio over the last decade. Across Canada, Montreal is seen as an example of what not to do when it comes to contemporary city-building.

This is not, of course, the Montreal presented to outsiders—the romantic, “European” city that tourists love. It is, however, the town that Montrealers live with every day. In spite of its flaws, though, most Montrealers adore their city and defend it vehemently. Somehow, the artistic backbone and cultural 
diversity of the city allow its residents to see past 
its problems.

Rialto Theatre on Parc Avenue

The splendor of the city comes from its remarkable history and its great food, arts, music, culture, and people. It is a city of festivals unlike any other, one whose glorious summers are reason enough for those who left years ago to return.

The coexistence of two predominant language groups, though at times taken for granted, broadens the horizons of Montreal’s inhabitants, adding to a vibrant cultural landscape. While people living on
 different sides of the city often have different perspectives—long attributed to the historic east-west 
divide between the French and English—the intersection of the two languages and cultures is 
precisely what makes living here so stimulating on a day-to-day basis. Indeed, it has been said that a person cannot really experience one hundred per cent 
of Montreal without interacting in both main languages. And this richesse has increased as the city’s population has become more diverse. Today, people are routinely heard communicating inter
changeably in French, English, and other languages, 
blurring the traditional linguistic schism.

* * *

Having inherited the good, the bad, and the ugly of its sixties boom, Montreal is thoroughly a product 
of that era. The downtown core may be the most visible result of the building spree, but ripple effects were felt throughout the metropolitan region. The mass transit and underground Metro system that 
followed were vital to connecting the new core to many areas that are considered quintessentially Montreal: Armand Vaillancourt and Leonard Cohen’s Plateau, Mordecai Richler’s Mile End, Irving Layton’s Cote St-Luc, Denys Arcand’s Westmount, and the Wainwrights’ Outremont. The earth excavated in
creating the subway system even made possible the 
islands in the St. Lawrence River that comprised 
the Expo 67 fairgrounds.

Mile-End

However, the investment in developing the city’s
 image as an interconnected, cosmopolitan metropolis boded ill for Griffintown, a neighborhood that had been instrumental in Montreal’s rise toward twentieth-century stardom. Located southwest of the city’s current downtown 
core, the nation’s oldest working-class neighborhood
 was named after Mary Griffin, who acquired the lease for the land as part of an illegal deal with a 
business associate of Thomas McCord. McCord had initially obtained the land in 1791, hoping to capitalize on the new canal and rail lines then being proposed 
for the area. Sure enough, during the first half of the nineteenth century Griffintown became home to a thriving industrial zone around the Port of Montreal and the Lachine Canal.

Between the elevated expressway and the silos of Griffintown's Peel Basin

Over the hundred years that followed the opening of the canal in 1824–1825, Montreal blossomed into a major trading port along the St. Lawrence and its population more than quadrupled. Most of Griffintown’s inhabitants during this period were Irish immigrants who had come to Canada in search of work. Living conditions in the neighborhood were notoriously bad; the wealth of Montreal’s Golden Square Mile and Upper City did not trickle down to the laborers. Nonetheless, Griffintown residents took pride in their community, forming a close-knit group that banded together to deal with floods, fires, and poor working conditions.

Over time, with the spread of development along the canal and the growth of rail shipping, industrial activity became decentralized and workers began moving elsewhere. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Griffintown’s demographics changed dramatically as new immigrants arrived from Europe. In the postwar years, industry declined further, and by Expo 67, the Lachine Canal fell into disuse as the St. Lawrence Seaway became the primary channel for sea traffic.

As part of its modern-era boom, the city constructed the Bonaventure Expressway, an elevated gateway into the city. Running through Griffintown, which by this time had been rezoned as a light industrial sector, it reinforced the barrier already imposed by the CN rail line. The neighborhood was now even further divided from Old Montreal.

Under Bonaventure Expressway

For decades, Griffintown languished as somewhat
 of a no-man’s-land. In recent years, however, it has 
drawn attention from both historic preservation groups and developers. The city government has worked with architects, planners, and students on urban design studies and charrettes, and recently launched competitions for various sites at the Lachine 
Canal`s Peel Basin. But the area’s future remains 
unclear. The looming danger is developer-driven 
urbanism, which has threatened to bring big-box stores and streets tailored to vehicular traffic rather than pedestrians to the area. To the relief of local
residents, the 2008 recession put a dent into the plans of one major developer, who delayed and scaled back its plans due to financial considerations.

As early as 2012, though, developers appear 
poised to go ahead with the construction of large con
dominium complexes. Renderings portray a sanitized 
environment with high-rise condos, office towers and 
parks running along a ground-level boulevard pro-jected to replace the raised Bonaventure Expressway.
 Among the historic buildings threatened by demo
lition are the Cadieux Forge, the Rodier Building, and 
the Griffintown Horse Palace, the 150-year-old home 
of horses used for Old Montreal’s calèches (horse 
and carriage rides). The general consensus is that 
something must be done to revitalize the unique 
area, now home to less than a hundred people, 
many of them artists and students.

* * *

Rather than eschewing the old infrastructure, the proposed ballpark uses it as a structuring element, embedding into and making connections with the autoroute and rail line. The park thus exists in symbiosis with them, allowing programmatic elements to infiltrate and inhabit the arcades and marginal spaces underneath these floating transit structures. Seating is designed into and around these gray arteries, creating new relationships for people both toward the event unfolding in their midst and amid the seemingly hostile infrastructure. A fact that often goes unnoticed is that the site, though residual in nature and nestled between these peculiar concrete masses, is one of the most beautiful and serene places in Montreal. The piers convey a meditative sense of tranquility. When night falls here, the city lights glisten along the horizons of the elevated connections.

The park draws the public’s attention to the splendor of the site and makes full use of its inherent potential. The seating and bands of public circulation through the park create new horizons from which to observe the game, while affording views to the city, the St. Lawrence River, and the surrounding natural and industrial landscape. The spaces under the viaducts become player arrival areas, ticket windows, restaurants, and shops.

The highway and train line take on a special role, sculpting the space of the field and acting as thresholds through which spectators must pass in procession to the game. The piers at the end of Peel Street function as places onto which activity can spill before, during, and after events, furthering the goal of actualizing the interstice as a vibrant node that speaks in cohesive correlation to neighboring sites. In addition to the program relating to the game (seating, concessions, ticket booths, etc.), a commuter train station is incorporated along the CN line to allow access to the park from surrounding areas and suburbs. This hybridized typology allows for new relationships between programs, blurring the boundaries of what traditionally belongs to each. At the confluence of the canal, the autoroute, and the rail lines, the ballpark is molded by each element, but at the same time reaches out to the basin area to provide not only a field and space for gathering, but also galleries, restaurants, commerce, and places to dock alongside the canal.

* * *

With various levels of government now set to 
infuse tens of billions of dollars into new infrastructural projects, as well as controversial French- and English-language super-hospitals, the question of what to do with the Olympic Stadium remains.

Only five years ago, Montreal finally amortized the 
debt on its stadium. This arguably beautiful structure was not completed until eleven years after the 1976 Olympics, the event it was designed to host. Workers’ strikes, ballooning costs, and corruption 
brought the debt related to the Olympic facilities to almost $1.5 billion, about six times the originally estimated cost. (This despite assurances from Jean Drapeau—the mayor who spearheaded Montreal’s push for Expo 67, the Metro system, a modern downtown, major league baseball, and the Olympic Games—that the Olympiad could “no more lose money than a man can have a baby.”)

Aerial View of Montreal with the Olympic Stadium in the distance

Once completed, the spectacularly expensive facility did not work as planned. What was supposed to
 have been a revolutionary masterpiece served primarily as an example of how not to build a stadium. 
Reports have shown that pre-construction tests of the 
original roof, an umbrella-like retractable mechanism, were unsuccessful, but this was kept quiet. The latest replacement roof will soon be installed at a cost that would easily have paid for a significant portion of a new stadium. Montreal taxpayers have grown used to paying for things that didn’t work in the first place.

* * *

In his series Baseball, Ken Burns argues convincingly
 that since its inception, America’s national pastime has been a mirror into the cultural consciousness of the United States. This argument can be extended to Can
ada, as some of the most significant events in the
game’s history occurred in Montreal. By the end of 
the nineteenth century baseball was becoming a force 
in the city, even with the rise of hockey as Canada’s winter pastime. Various forms of baseball were played by adults and children throughout Montreal, from the East End to the West, on the streets of Griffintown and even in the rural regions of Quebec.

The 1890s saw the formation of the Montreal Roy
als, a professional ball club named for the mountain 
(Mount Royal) that gives the city its name. Though the
 team enjoyed popularity for twenty years, it folded in 1916. The enthusiasm that surrounded the sport did not wane, however, and in 1928 it returned to the city in the form of a Triple-A International League affiliate of the Brooklyn Dodgers. This team, also called the Royals, was the stuff of legend. On its board of directors was Charles E. Trudeau (father of former 
Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau), who played a role in building a stadium for the team at Delorimier and Ontario Streets. Over the course of its history, the team was home to some of baseball’s elite alumni: Sparky Anderson, Gene Mauch (who later became the first manager of Montreal’s major league franchise), Roberto Clemente, Duke Snider, Don Drysdale, Roy Campanella, Tommy Lasorda, and TV’s Rifleman, Chuck Conors.

What puts this team in the history books, however, 
is that Jackie Robinson made his professional debut 
with it in 1946, breaking the so-called color barrier. 
His time in Montreal was a pivotal social experiment that not only led to integration in baseball, but opened the door for changing perceptions about minorities throughout North America. Before Robinson could play, Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey asked him to solemnly promise that he would never retaliate when confronted with the hostility they both knew would come from players, spectators, and even hoteliers and restaurateurs they came across when traveling—especially through the deep South. Seeing Robinson rise above the vitriol he encountered on the public stage, Rickey reasoned, would be the only way Americans would see that African American players could play not only as well as, but in many cases better than, the players already in the majors.

With all eyes on him, Robinson let his athleticism and gentlemanly comportment do the talking. He found Montreal tolerant and became thoroughly fond of the city. In his autobiography Robinson wrote: “After the rejections, the unpleasantness and uncertainties, it was encouraging to find an atmosphere of complete acceptance and something approaching adulation . . . One of the reasons for the reception we received in Montreal was that the people were proud of the team that bore the city’s name. The people of Montreal were warm and 
wonderful to us.”

Not only did Robinson become the most valuable player that year, but he won the wholehearted support of the people of the city, more than a million
 of whom came out to watch him play—a staggering number for any minor league franchise. When the time came for Robinson to leave Montreal, his farewell, as poignantly described by reporter Sam Maltin, has become part of the lore of professional sports: “It was probably the only day in history that a black man ran from a white mob with love instead of lynching on its mind.”

After the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, the Royals fell on tough times and finally left Montreal in 1961. But at this moment the city was undergoing the transformative boom that led to the 1967 World’s Fair, a celebration of “Man and His World” with the backdrop of Montreal as the city of the future. The world’s media was focused on the city as never before, and all eyes were on Expo 67— including those of major league baseball, which with the right impetus stood ready to fill the void 
the Royals had left.

Several locations were scouted for a stadium, including Delorimier Downs and the Autostade, but when Jarry Park was selected the Montreal Expos became the first major league franchise to have a home outside the United States. Charles Bronfman, the majority shareholder in Seagram, became the majority owner of the franchise. (The extent to which the Bronfman family has contributed to Montreal arts and culture should be noted. Had Charles not stepped in as owner, the Expos may not have started
playing in 1969. The family’s commitment to education in Montreal has also been exemplary. In addition, 
Charles’ sister, Phyllis Lambert, a student of and collaborator with Mies van der Rohe, has played an 
invaluable role in the North American architectural community, advocating and raising awareness about the profession and founding the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. Even though I have had the pleasure of meeting her on various occasions at the CCA, at the symphony, and elsewhere, I have yet to fully convey to her my gratitude for all that she and her family have done for the city.)

From the outset, the Expos became the beloved boys of summer. Throughout the late seventies and early eighties, even after the team had moved into the cavernous Olympic Stadium, fans flocked to watch “Nos Amours,” as the team was adoringly called (reminiscent of “Nos Glorieux,” the endearing nickname of the Montreal Canadiens hockey club during its wonder years). Noah Richler has written that, like many Montrealers from all backgrounds, his father, novelist Mordecai, “was serious in his allegiances: hockey in the winter, and baseball in the summer.” Fans like Mordecai were privileged, 
growing up watching Jackie Robinson’s Royals and later having the opportunity to cheer on the Expos 
at Jarry and the Big O, then sharing their memories 
with the younger generations. Over the decades, 
Expos fans had the pleasure of watching players
 like Staub, Rogers, Cromartie, Carter, Spaceman 
Lee, Dawson, Raines, Dennis Martinez, Galarraga, Walker, Grissom, Alou, Wettland, Floyd, White, Pedro Martinez, Vidro, Cabrera, Vladimir Guerrero, 
and many others who left an indelible mark on the city’s culture of baseball.

After Bronfman gave up ownership in 1991, however, and as the Canadian dollar declined over the decade, it became more difficult to attract players to the city in spite of all its charms. Montreal’s system of developing young talent was the envy of most teams, but once its players became stars they would invariably leave to play elsewhere for significantly higher salaries (in American dollars), causing the Expos to be often regarded as a farm team for other clubs.

Pinpointing the beginning of the end for the Expos is difficult. There had been a series of disappointing moments, with issues ranging from broadcasting rights, sponsorship, and marketing to the value of the dollar. But one thing is certain: the strike-shortened 1994 season was a tremendous blow. Expos fans literally cringe at the mention of that season. The team had the best record and arguably the best players in baseball—many thought the Expos would win it all. It is generally agreed that the absence of a World Series run caused by the strike, coupled with the departure of key players before the following season, carved the path for rough days ahead. Baseball fans and pundits can only speculate about the outstanding team that would have existed in Montreal after 1994 had the Expos won a championship that season.

In 1999, a new owner purchased the team, pro
mising to serve its best interests and work toward a new downtown stadium. Though his admin
istration’s initial moves raised excitement, many 
of his subsequent actions were questionable, and 
the team was effectively run into the ground dur
ing his tenure. He eventually purchased another club and left with the Expos’ manager, coaches, personnel, scouting reports, and even the computers and office equipment. With its infrastructure gone, the team came under league ownership and was relocated in 2005 to Washington, D.C.

It pains many Montrealers to think of the mismanagement of the team and the unfolding of events leading to its departure. To Expos fans, the 
league was just as much at fault, for while it worked with other cities whose teams were threatened by low attendance, contraction, and relocation, Montreal seemed hardly to receive the same kind of support. (In fact, the league’s commissioner was later 
sued, along with the last owner, for racketeering 
and conspiracy to defraud the team’s minority own
ers.) The league apparently overlooked the interest 
shown by Montrealers for the sport—professional
 baseball was played in the city throughout most of
 the twentieth century, in addition to the amateur and
 youth leagues that have flourished. But Montrealers
 remain passionate and vocal about the game. The
recent death of Expos icon and hall-of-famer Gary Carter, known as “the Kid” throughout baseball, has triggered a tide of emotion and memories from Montrealers, many of whom have chimed in with ideas for what the city should do in his honor. Expo alum Warren Cromartie is himself working to keep the rich history of the game alive in the city by means of his Montreal Baseball Project. In recent years the resurgence in the popularity of the team has been evidenced by the paraphernalia worn on the streets of the city and the number of Facebook hits the team site receives.

Speculation about the possible return of a team with the right ownership group rears its head time and again—along with talk about the need for a new open-air ballpark, which Montreal hasn’t had for more than half a century. As with all sports, talk is talk until something happens. But in a city full of surprises, that something might happen sooner than we think.

* * *

The field for the proposed ballpark is the location of games for eighty-one days and nights during the year. Important to the scheme is the desire to give over the field of play to the public during times when there is no game—especially during the off season. At these times, the park remains open for visitors throughout the day. In this way, two methods become the prime means of activating the site: the gathering of people for their own pursuits (play, recreation, business lunches, studying) and the planned event. The park therefore resonates with activity all year round, unlike most of today’s private stadiums. The activities incorporated on and under the site (eateries, shops) ensure that it is active even in the winter, rather than remaining desolate as the site is at present.

Other programmed events, such as concerts and artistic shows, take place at the ballpark, and the bands of circulation through the site offer secondary and tertiary areas for performances and exhibits, so that multiple events can occur on-site as part of larger integrated shows or separate, individual spectacles.

The large electronic scoreboard and the canopy hover above the ballpark, giving the architecture a distinct presence in the city and offering Montrealers busily on their way glimpses into the world of the unfolding event. Underneath the field is the digital inverse of the event at hand, an immersive environment of virtual inhabitation for spectators with live, streaming images broadcast from games and other events. New relationships are fostered between player and fan as glimpses are given into certain player preparation areas. The digital underbelly presents a milieu in which the virtual dimension of the game can be critiqued as well as celebrated by the everyday spectator. The park creates within its confines a world whose energy bleeds out into Griffintown and right into downtown. It encapsulates a vibrant node, a destination that activates the Peel Basin. Ultimately this project is not about precisely prescribed activity, but a re-envisioning of the exquisite interstice and infrastructure of the city. The urban event, as its focus, enables this restructuring. Baseball is simply the vessel.

Connect with Vedanta Balbahadur at his website, or find him on Twitter.

Very flexible hours; work from home (although Toronto and New York residents preferred). Unfortunately our budget doesn’t allow us to offer payment at this stage, but we are more than happy to work with your school to see if academic credits can be arranged.

Write us at info@satellitemagazine.ca with information about your background and availability (and, if applicable, samples of your work) for more information.

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Artist Farideh Sakhaeifar’s series “Workers are taking photographs” explores issues of gender and class in her native Iran (she currently lives in New York). Sakhaeifar traveled to working-class areas in and around Tehran and asked workers in areas where women rarely venture to take self-portraits with her camera. We spoke to her about the project.

* * *

This project is about going to these spaces which are very masculine—it’s all men. Women can work in factories, but they work in different roles. You never see women at a construction site. If she works at a mosque she’s the wife of some guy, or she works in the kitchen. So I went to these areas and asked the workers to stand in front of my camera and take a picture of themselves. And there’s a woman behind the white background, holding it, and you can’t see anything but just her hands. So there’s this kind of triangle between me, the worker, and the person who is behind the background. It’s kind of questioning who’s the photographer and who’s the subject, who has the power.

Do you feel that gender roles are very different between the US and Iran?

I think it’s changing a lot. I grew up in a big city, Tehran, so there it’s almost like the U.S. But also it depends on your social class. Middle class, which is what my background is—that’s almost like here. But when you go to the working-class neighborhoods, it’s more like the man in still the one with power, and the woman is at home. Or if the woman is working outside, she still has a role of a woman, and the man has the role of the man.

But in Iran the gap between low-class society, middle-class, and high-class is huge, and there are not so many people in the middle class.

Do you think you would have done the same project in the US?

No, I don’t think so. Probably I would focus on nationality rather than gender.  But in Tehran it made sense to focus on the idea of women in society, of me going to areas where I’m not supposed to be. I’m not supposed to be in that environment, but I’m there. And in an environment where I’m not supposed to exist, I’m forcing them to do something that I want.

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Work from California-born, Brooklyn-based artist Clark Goolsby.

Children in Fort Liberte, Haiti

While working in health care systems around the world, San Francisco-based emergency physician Ayesha Khan watched people in country after country suffer due to the lack of two fundamental needs—emergency healthcare and jobs. In an attempt to address both, she created an innovative program to train self-sustaining teams of paid community health workers in underserved areas. Her nonprofit, Empower and Advance, is now raising funds to implement its first training session in the Haitian city of Fort Liberte.

We spoke to her about emergency care, entrepreneurialism, and Fort Liberte.

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How did the thought for this program come about?

I’ve been traveling a lot around the world, volunteering and doing educational projects. What I’ve found is there are lots of doctors that go and help in other parts of the world, but when they leave there’s not much left behind.

In other countries, emergency medicine doesn’t exist as a specialty. In countries that are low- and middle-income, either other doctors, non-emergency specialists, try to respond to emergencies, or there’s no response.

The thing about emergencies is they’re usually very simple problems that have simple solutions. What matters is how quickly you can fix them. An example would be a broken arm. It needs a splint, and it doesn’t take a great deal of talent to apply it, but it can mean the difference between somebody’s arm healing badly and them being able to continue to work and have a good life.

Another example would be something like diarrhea, which is the number one killer in children under the age of three. Children that are already malnourished, when they get diarrhea, it pushes them over the edge. And a lot of those kids do die, unfortunately. The simplest way to get through diarrhea is to keep the child well hydrated, and every once in awhile you might need antibiotics, but that’s also not something that requires the expertise of a doctor per se.

So my thought was, there are a lot of people in low- and middle-income countries that don’t have a job, and most low- and middle-income countries don’t have emergency services. Why not provide training to people in the community to take care of basic emergencies, thereby providing them jobs providing basic emergency services?

I wanted Haiti to be my pilot project because Haiti seems to unfortunately suffer most from disasters and everyday emergencies, but also dependency and lack of economic development. The spirit of the people also just touched my heart when I volunteered there with a group called Friends of Fort Liberte.

I spent almost two years doing research there, finding out what the most common emergencies are, surveying the community about their attitudes toward healthcare and doctors, their willingness to see non-doctors for medical care, and their ability to pay for those services. What I found is that the community is willing to see non-doctors, and is willing and able to pay a small fee, but can’t afford the fee that the few doctors there charge. And there aren’t enough doctors to cover many emergencies.

So my thought was to create a training program to develop five people in the community—I picked the number five because that’s approximately what’s needed to meet the health care provider-to-patient ratio in the area—to train for emergency medical services. I created a video-based curriculum, picked the top ten illnesses, and then created video modules which consists of animated pictures and narration in the local language, Haitian Creole.

Each module is a 5-10 minute video. The community health workers have to watch the module and then fill out a workbook that has details about what they see, and at the end of every section they’ll do a test before they can advance to the next session. That entire series takes about 6 months. After that, we’ll have faculty fly in to teach hands-on skills like lifting, suturing, basic transport, things like that, as a two-week workshop. After the initial workshop, we’ll train the community health workers, but also train someone to be able to do future training.

Khan commissioned Haitian artist Doudy Charles to create illustrations for her instructional videos.

The video-based module doesn’t actually require any external faculty on the ground. Once I get them started, they’ll go through modules on their own and have video meetings with me or another faculty member once a week to answer their questions and go through some key discussions.

The positive part of having the course set up this way is that it’s easily scalable, so when they’re ready to go on to train other community health workers the modules can be deployed without having external faculty there, and the external skills can be taught by the previous session’s community health workers. So it’s built in a way that it doesn’t create dependency. Once we train the initial batch, they’re kind of on their own and they can keep on going.

The day-to-day funds and community health workers’ salaries will come from community health insurance. The entire cost of the program is 6 cents per community member per month, which is a nominal amount, especially compared to the $1.25 it takes for one visit to the hospital.

When you say the funding comes from community health insurance, that’s the government’s funding—?

Actually there is no government funding. Government funding is almost nonexistent in Haiti. So community health insurance is more what the community decides they’re going to pitch into a pot to fund health care. Basically, six cents will be collected from each community member and they’ll be given a card that means they can come visit the community health worker whenever they need to.

So is this something that currently exists that you’re planning to tap into, or is it something completely new?

This would be a new program that would be implemented when the community health members are ready to go. In my research, I found that they were willing to pay 30 gourds, which is about 75 cents a month. So six cents a month is way less for them.

Is there a specific region of Haiti you have in mind?

Yes, initially I’m targeting a city called Fort Liberte and its catchment area, the rural areas surrounding it. It has about 28,000 people in the city proper, and then another several thousand in the outlying areas. I’ve been involved in that community for about three years now.

Can you describe a bit about what it’s like and why you felt this connection to it versus other places you’ve been?

One of the reasons that I felt a strong connection was that it was one of the first places I did international work. I think you tend to become more attached to where you go first.

But also the community itself—there’s very little in the way of development or economy or means for development, but there’s a lot of spirit and a lot of selflessness. The fabric of their society is woven very tightly. When a neighbor needs help they’ll give them whatever they have, even if it doesn’t leave them with enough to meet their own needs. For example, when the earthquake hit Port au Prince there were buses full of people coming to Fort Liberte that had nothing, and everybody opened their doors. The doors they opened up led to a one-room tin shack that already had 10 people living in it, but they still made room for one more person.

When food rations would be distributed they would line up, unlike a lot of places where there tends to be chaos when there’s food aid. They lined up very politely with their empty sacks and got them filled with rice and beans. When the food ran out, half of the people standing in line had nothing. The people who had gotten the rations opened up their bags and poured half into the bags of the people who had got nothing. I’ve never seen a situation like that, where the sense of community is so strong.

In addition to that, this area of Haiti is very remote from both the city—it’s actually kitty corner in the opposite end to Port au Prince—and it’s also far away from Partners in Health and other NGOs that are doing a lot of work. In this town there’s only one NGO, and they are doing great work, but there focus isn’t only health and there is quite a lot of work to do. So the need is quite great there.

Another reason I chose it was that was that it was fairly easy to do my research there. Because there’s only one point of care for a pretty large catchment area, I could figure out what illnesses were in the community, and I could go around and survey the community pretty easily.

In addition to that, there’s a large orphanage there where orphans get schooling until age 18, but they don’t get any vocational training, and there’s no real chance to go to professional school. So when they’re 18, they’re out of the orphanage, they don’t necessarily have any shelter, they don’t have a means to earn a living. It seemed that in order to keep those new young adults tied into the community it would be good to provide them with a means to make a living. Once they’re outside of the orphanage, there’s an understandable temptation to move to Port au Prince or another city where it’s very easy to fall into a means of making a living that is—well, not legal, I guess. So they seemed like the ideal population to train to become community health workers.

Are there other organizations that are doing this same sort of thing? 

In Fort Liberte there’s no community health worker program at all. In other parts of the world there are community health workers, but they’re typically not used to provide emergency services. There are some programs that pay community health workers to ensure compliance to HIV medication, or to help women that are giving birth. But the scope of this project is a little beyond that. In addition to providing emergency services, it also aims to increase access to basic health information. At the same time that a community health worker goes to visit a family to take care of their acute needs, he or she will also educate them about preventing that thing from occurring in the future.

This program will also be an arm of the healthcare system that sends people to the most appropriate place for care. For example, the town surgeon should be doing surgery.  Right now, though, because there is no one else to take care of simpler complaints, the town surgeon is often too busy taking care of diarrhea, pneumonia, etc to have time to do surgery. The hope is that this kind of triage will help the whole system work better.

The other thing that’s different about it is the way the training will be done. Because the modules are video-based and animated, they can easily be switched to any language, so as to make this easily replicable in any country without relying on external faculty to go and teach the course. It can take a lot of money and resources to fly somewhere, teach, fly back, have to fly back to ensure that the people actually are learning—this is a more replicable and scalable model.

It’s also pretty uniquely tailored to the cultural context, so the training includes local practices and local medicine that have been shown to be useful, as well as debunking local myths that can be dangerous. Most community health working programs don’t do that.

When you say that information from the local community was incorporated—how does that work with the idea of scalability? If this traveled to another country, would the tapes be tweaked according to what’s known to be problematic in those regions?

Yeah, the cultural context part of it can be altered a bit, but a lot of the cultural context applies to many tropical countries. For example, I incorporated a lot of the local plants and herbs that have been found to be useful to treat different things, but they happen to be found in a lot of tropical countries—things like coconut water for electrolyte replacement, or licorice or anise seed for gastritis.

But in terms of the myths and traditional practices, those would have to be changed for the cultural context.

I’m surprised that emergency medicine isn’t better established around the world. Why is this? 

Emergency medicine as a specialty didn’t exist anywhere until about 1978. That’s when we first started training doctors to become emergency doctors.

The scope of an emergency doctor is basically anything that comes in the door that the person thinks is an emergency or that the doctor finds to be an emergency. It’s not like a cardiologist who will only deal with the heart; an emergency doctor deals with the emergency part of everything. It’s very broad. Rather than being a set of vertical skills that build on each other, it’s more of a horizontal field that cuts across all of the other fields of medicine.

In the United States, we’ve more or less defined the scope of practice of an emergency doctor. The only thing that really defines an emergency is something that needs to be taken care of in a critical period of time in order to prevent death and disability. It’s the amount of time in which you start to help the patient that’s going to affect their long-term death or disability.

In fact, in Europe it was even more recent than in the US that emergency medicine took hold as a specialty, and in developing countries it doesn’t exist at all as a specialty. But what we’ve found through our experience in the US and Europe is that when you train people to take care of emergencies, the amount of death and disability from emergency conditions goes way down. So it is something that needs specialty care, and it benefits communities to have specially trained emergency doctors.

How much knowledge are you able to provide the community health workers with through the training modules?

Emergency medicine is often protocol based. In emergencies there’s a set of guidelines that you follow based on what’s going to kill a person first. So regardless of what the actual condition is, you can break it down to treating a problem with their airway before you treat a problem with their lungs, because in order to be able to get oxygen to the lungs they need to get it through their airway first. And then the next most likely thing to kill a person is their circulation and their neurological status. You can go through those things in an A, B, C, D fashion, and oftentimes those are the initial things that you do to anybody in an emergency. Because things can be done in almost a recipe, it’s easy to train non-doctors. It’s easy to train them to manage the patient in a protocol-based fashion enough to at least stabilize them and definitively care for whatever their emergency is.

How did you decide to take the entrepreneurial route for this project? Is this type of approach common in the medical field?

No, it’s not common. For me it was really simple: I kept going places and seeing that people need a service, people need jobs. So why not train people to provide that service?

A lot of people have asked me, doesn’t something like this exist already? Aren’t other people doing this? And the truth of the matter is, no. A lot of the time I spent looking into this was based on, hey, is someone already doing this who I can just help? But in the global field there is so much to do. Clean water, providing preventative services, child and maternal care, disaster medicine—there are so many different niches and fields that people are helping in. There just hasn’t been a lot of attention paid to emergency medicine, both because it is a young and evolving field and also because there’s this thought that we should focus more on preventative care. Like, instead of trying to take care of a person with a broken leg, we should prevent it from happening, because it costs more money to fix it later. And that’s very true, but there are a lot of things that you can’t prevent. And road traffic accidents particularly are increasing at an alarming rate in developing countries.

And in addition to that, people don’t really seek care unless they’re sick. Even in the United States very few people go for well checks. And when you get sick and you don’t have money to go to the doctor, or you don’t have access to care, you wait and you wait and you wait, until that little problem becomes an emergency.

So I don’t think that a lot of people are thinking, oh, how can we solve this particular program in a way that is entrepreneurial, let me make my own program. That wasn’t really what I sent out to do. I wasn’t really thinking, hey, what will be the coolest way for me to make a program—that will also be the hardest! It was more just that I ended up with a bunch of facts that kind of led me to have to do it this way.

I’m actually really happy with the way it ended up happening, because a lot of my desire was to avoid creating a program where there would be a lot of dependency on foreign aid or external support. I’m actually glad that I’m not a huge force like the WHO or USAID or Doctors without Borders, because by necessity I have to do things in a way that is lean and efficient and that I know can remain standing after I leave. And that pushes me to do things in a way that is ultimately going to end up providing jobs and making a stronger community for the people that are there.

All photos taken in Fort Liberte.

Credit Jeff Depner

Credit Jeff Depner

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Credit Jeff Depner

Credit Jeff Depner

Credit Jeff Depner

Credit Jeff Depner

Credit Jeff Depner

Credit Jeff Depner

Credit Jeff Depner

Credit Jeff Depner

Credit Jeff Depner

Credit Jeff Depner

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Idrissa Diop

Senegal-based record label Teranga Beat specializes in 1970s music from Senegal and the surrounding region. We spoke to its founder, Greek artist Adamantios Kafetzis, about his work.

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How did you get interested in African music, and Senegalese music in particular?

I’ve been collecting different kinds of music since I was ten years old. As the years passed I was changing styles and interests. In the beginning of the 90s, when hip-hop fashion was popular, where I lived there were some Ethiopian immigrants. I was invited to their houses, out to clubs and all this. And in their houses I started listening to Ethiopian music. This was my first exposure to African music, apart from basic and more popular things like Fela Kuti, Manu Dibango, which sounded more Western, not so African. Ethiopian music—it was something really new.

I started going to African clubs, discovering Congolese music, music from other countries. Senegal was one of the countries I was interested in. In 2003 I had a friend from school who had an apartment in Dakar with his brother, and he asked me to visit, so I did. And then I found old vinyl records there and started buying a lot of music. Not only Senegalese, but also from a lot of other West African countries.

Can you tell me a bit about Teranga Beat?

It’s not like most of the new record labels. What they do, or what they were doing in the beginning, is just releasing compilations. I was not interested in compilations; I was interested mostly in particular artists’ work. I had the chance to find old master tapes, or recording tapes, to be more specific, in a producer’s house. Then I started looking for the musicians, found the musicians, talked about my project to release these recordings, because most weren’t released—and, if we had the chance, to reform the old bands.

Le Sahel in 2011

So you’re most interested in sort of being a curator at a deeper level with the artists themselves?

Yes, we would like to produce something new . . . to bring the music of that time, the 70s, which were the best years of African music by far, for the interest of the people. In Africa there’s not a lot of money, there’s not a lot of possibilities, so we’d like to have these groups touring in Europe or the States, but at the same time create an interest in their own countries. Because young people there, they don’t listen to this kind of music.

I’m very curious about that. Your website also talks about trying to work with today’s artists and today’s music. Have you had much success with that? I agree that as a consumer most of what I hear from today I don’t like very much. Do you feel that that’s a function of not as much good stuff being made, or just not as much being distributed? Is there a lot of good stuff that just doesn’t get exposure?

No, no, no, there’s not good stuff. There’s no good music anymore. There are good musicians, but not good music.

Cheikh Tall and Sahel in the 70s

Why do you think that is?

I would say first of all a big part has to do with the influence from abroad. As always—and this is a bad thing about Africa—musicians, what they’re looking for is having success, making money. They don’t care to play good music and try to establish their work in the market.

And the most important thing is that there are not many producers. There are not producers to help big bands like there were in the ‘70s. They were all big bands, with horn players, everything. This doesn’t exist anymore. There aren’t even clubs for the musicians to go play music live. They stay in small groups, like four people, three people, one, and make music through the computer. So the result and the quality isn’t there.

And of course one of the biggest things is the influence of hip hop music. That destroyed everything.

I’ve tried to listen to the African hip hop that seems to be popular, and it seems really derivative. Do you think there is any interesting African hip hop?

I don’t think so at all. The reason is that hip hop has nothing to do with African music. There’s nothing in the culture of Africa. I will tell you one simple thing: how strange hip hop looks in Africa. I remember when I first went to Senegal in 2003, I didn’t see a lot of hip hop influence. People were dressed in traditional clothes or suits or something like that, always with a smile on their face. Everybody’s smiling, everybody’s welcoming. And then you would see somebody with a baseball cap and a t-shirt of Tupac or somebody else, trying to have this gangster look. It looked so awkward and funny, and didn’t make any sense there. I think now it’s more and more. And then hip hop, it’s so violent as a music, it has nothing to do with the music from Africa.

Yeah, I’m curious, because there are so many different strains of hip hop around the world, and some of them do more interesting things musically than others, but what I’ve heard from Africa just doesn’t seem to be all that differentiated.

Yes, because in Africa they don’t know the underground hip hop, the groups that are trying to do something else. They don’t know the groups that play with instruments. Although in Senegal there are some groups like that now. Like Didier Awadi, he was a member of the PBS, Positive Black Soul, back in the ‘90s. He has created a studio, and he’s the only person that is trying to do something good through hip hop. But it’s normal that what they listen to in hip hop is the most commercial stuff.

Gambian musician Bai Janha

You’ve chosen to locate the label in Senegal. Can you describe how you’ve had to do things differently than you would have had to in Athens?

I wouldn’t have to do things differently, I would say. It’s almost the same thing. Just paperwork. I would say a bit less than I would have to do in Athens, because in Athens bureaucracy is hell to create a company. So I would say it was a bit easier.

Can you describe how you’ve come to release the specific albums you’ve put out?

The first album I did, was Idrissa Diop and Cheikh Tidiane Tall, the two members who have created the group Sahel. It was the best band in Senegal in the 70s, but with a very short period of life, three years only. It was the group who gave identity to the Senegalese music. Before then, during the ‘60s and early ‘70s, Senegal didn’t have its own musical identity. They had the traditional music, and in the clubs the bands were playing Cuban covers. It was the first group to combine Cuban music with Senegalese traditional music to create mbalax. Many groups followed.

Is there a big African community in Athens?

Nothing compared to other countries like France, UK, Germany. We’re not a country that had colonies, so we don’t have any connection with Africa apart from Greeks who were living there.

What is the market for your records—Japan, Africa, Europe, North America? Who’s most interested in what you’re doing?

I wouldn’t say Greece. In Europe, UK and France are the biggest markets. The USA is always a big market. Japan is not bad.

What’s next for you?

I’ve released already three albums, and the day that we’re speaking the fourth one is ready. The second and third one were two groups from Gambia. The music is a bit different from Senegalese music. The fourth one is again a Senegalese band, it’s a recording from ‘79, totally unreleased, a group called Royal Band de Thies, and the album is called Kadior Demb.

With more of this sort of music either being released for the first time or rereleased, and a growing interest in African music in general, I’m wondering if you feel it’s helping Africa? You mentioned reconnecting people to their own traditions.

I think definitely when you give a job to somebody, you’re helping. And what I’m trying to do is exporting the culture. I’m not just sitting in my house in Athens and taking the music and releasing an album without any interest in the back story. I have pictures inside and text so people can understand the music better—where’s it coming from, why’s it made like this—trying to give as much information as possible. So yeah, I think it’s helping.

What I’m trying to do by reforming the bands is motivate young artists to follow this example. We have a big problem in Senegal. We cannot find musicians playing this kind of stuff. There are not people playing these horns any more.

James Gadiaga and Secka of Royal Band de Thies

We see people going to music schools, but what they do is voice and that’s it. They have schools even for traditional music, but normally if somebody goes to school he wants to play, like, kind of soul music, more western styles. But most traditional musicians, they don’t need to go to school, they get everything from their families, in their houses.

Also there are the griots. It’s like a caste, let’s say. From many years ago, what they do is play music, sing and praise, and get money for this.

Is that still in existence? Is it still common?

Yes, it is in existence.

Where does the typical Senegalese person hear music? I’m sure it varies a lot, but their exposure to music, from what you’ve seen, is it radio or live or griot?

Radio, traditional feasts where you have the traditional music, and then clubs where they play the modern music. And the last year I see again a big comeback for Cuban music. Salsa, what they used to play in Senegal, music from the 50s and 60s. Mostly they play this kind of covers, or they play Senegalese songs with a salsa rythym.

In Senegal what is happening, you have the young people listening to mbalax until a certain age. But when they reach their 30s, 40s they started listening to Cuban music again, as their parents used to do.

Jaaga event.

Can you explain how the physical space of Jaaga came to be?

Freeman: In Bangalore—but probably across India and the developing world—empty lots tend to be a sort of public nuisance. They collect trash and don’t really do anything for anyone. It’s also not great for the owners. There are problems with people encroaching and potentially squatting. But there are still lots of empty properties across the city, since it grew rapidly. Not everybody gets the memo at the same time and builds.

With Jaaga, we’ve taken a piece of undeveloped land in the middle of the city and built a large four-story temporary building out of pallet racks. Pallet racks are the warehouse shelving components that you see at Ikea or Home Depot or Costco in the States. They’re a really common material—basically every warehouse on the planet is filled with pallet racks—so you can get them easily in India as well. They’re relatively low-cost—you’re really just paying for the steel—and they’re extremely strong. They’re made for supporting pallets of dog food and other kinds of cargo at multiple levels in a warehouse, so the 50 to 80 kilos that a person brings is really not stressing them too much.

Jaaga event.

I got into putting a bunch of pallet racks together and making floors out of them—floors, rooms, offices, and auditoriums that could be used by the community. The first one that we did was maybe 3,000 square feet, and the one we have now is probably closer to 7,000 square feet. We set it up and opened it up for co-working. We do exhibitions; we have residencies where we bring artists in to do interesting things; we have lots of public events. It’s become a big, vital community center.

Courtyard.

How did the pallet rack idea come about?

Freeman: I grew up around San Francisco and there were a number of big art warehouse spaces that always seemed super cool to me. They threw parties, had galleries, did workshops. I always dreamt about doing something like that. And then in 2003 I met up with some interesting people in Los Angeles who were doing sort of a filmmakers coop, helping independent filmmakers learn the trade, get into making videos for the internet, looking at alternative distribution mechanisms.

I went in with them and we got a warehouse in Venice Beach. The goal was to be able to provide semi-private studio space for people to work on their projects, but also to be a public space where we could have screenings, exhibitions, workshops, parties. Fairly quickly we got into some conflict with the public/private spaces, and it became clear that we needed to figure out how to create a first story where people could work and a second floor where they could have their private studios. But we had a short-term lease, so we couldn’t really afford to do any structural modifications to the building. I looked around at different scaffolding things and eventually found pallet racks as a really modular, super-strong, super-common material that was able to do what we wanted.

Building Jaaga.

I built out this one warehouse in 2003 in Venice Beach, and then we gave up that space and took the whole structure out to Burning Man, set it up out there, and then came back and got a larger warehouse in L.A. We ran that for a year and then gave it up, took all the pallet racks out to Burning Man again. And then I moved to India the following year.

Fast forward a couple of years, and a friend, Archana, was trying to set up an artist’s collective. She had 20 individual artists who wanted to go in together and get a gallery space, but she was having trouble finding people who would rent to her because it was such a sort of strange assortment of people. She hit on the idea of just getting an empty lot and building a temporary structure. I told her about my experiences with pallet racks and agreed that if she found a space that I would go in and build a structure.

That’s what ended up happening. And everything since has been about what to do with all this space once we have it.

Courtyard cafe.

How long do the pallet racks last?

Freeman: They’re heavy steel, so they’ll last almost indefinitely. So long as you keep it painted and relatively well cared for it will last almost forever.

Jaaga.

Are there issues particular to the city that you’re trying to address with Jaaga and its programming?

Archana: In the last few months we’ve been working the state government, with DULT (the Directorate of Urban Land Transport), trying to find if there’s a community-centric way of dealing with vehicular traffic.

Bangalore’s a big boomtown, one of the fastest-growing cites in Asia. In the last decade the population has tripled—from 2001 to 2011 we went from 2.5 million to 8.5 million. So it’s kind of a city in crisis. It used to be a sleepy town, known as a pensioner’s paradise and a garden city—those are the kind of things I grew up with while I was a kid in Bangalore—and then in the last decade or so it’s kind of become the Silicon Valley of India.

Bangalore traffic.

So it’s good and bad. I think the bad part is the city wasn’t able to cope with the growth in population. You feel that especially on the roads. The traffic is insane; it takes an hour just to get a couple of kilometers. The city’s very noisy and dusted and polluted because of the traffic.

At Jaaga, we had experience in community-building and community engagement, and we said we’d like to pull out of Jaaga and see if we could work with the city and the neighborhood. We chose a historically significant neighborhood called Malleswaram and convinced DULT to work with us. We wanted to see how we could engage the people who live or work or study in this neighborhood to both come up with the problem and participate in finding the solution. We had a fun time really trying to crack our heads and see how to get people involved real-time—not just talk or do a Q&A session, but really be part of the process.

Malleswaram street.

We did 2,000 surveys, each more than half an hour long, in three months. All of this has been put up on the website, yourmap.in. We worked to make the process completely transparent to the public using the website. We did a series of short documentary films of the entire process leading up to the final event, the big neighborhood festival. The data was just published; I think it can be useful for a whole bunch of different researchers. We had a pretty comprehensive survey set.

The entire process was community-driven. The people who did the surveys lived or worked or studied in the area. We worked with the sociology department of one of the colleges in the neighborhood; some of the students got credit for the work they were doing for us. Researchers looked at our data to make sure it was high-quality data.

Press coverage.

So that was interesting. The other project we did in the city was something called the Avant-Garde Project. It was funded by the Goethe Institut, the German cultural embassy. It was part of a longer conversation over the last few years between me and the previous director. The municipality of the city decided to hire a set of hand-painters who lost their jobs when printing technology got really good. A whole bunch of these people were suddenly without jobs, and at the same time the government decided they needed to do something to really spruce up the city in terms of local infrastructure. The idea was to get these guys to paint all the public walls in the city, miles and miles and miles of walls. It was this three-pronged kind of thing—one goal was to give these guys a job; a second was potentially tourism; and thirdly, there was this whole thing of people peeing on the streets and on walls, so the art was perhaps one way to keep them from doing that.

Public urination.

At the time, this was a pretty hot topic among artists. A lot of the artists said things like, “Why were we not consulted as a community, how come this wasn’t raised publicly?” It’s one of those things where perhaps it was a good intention and perhaps just a bit of a disconnect. My take on it was, it’s all well and good that these guys who lost their jobs had something to do, but the content—either it was like animals and birds or it was kind of touristic. Like, if it was along the walls of the defense research facility then it would have aircraft painted on it. It was a really specific, kitschy style. My concern was that this would be the most significant interaction with art for the broader public who don’t know much about art. We don’t have a grafitti culture. Shouldn’t they be exposed to different styles? I thought there needed to be some discussion around that.

Avant-garde project artist.

Why start Jaaga in Bangalore in particular? Does it have a big art community, or are you guys breaking new ground in that sense? What’s the scene like?

Freeman: My experience of Bangalore is that it has a very strong experimental arts community. Delhi and Mumbai have sort of a stronger conventional gallery culture. There are some galleries in Bangalore, but not as many. There’s less of a commercial art scene, and what it means is that there’s more freedom of the artists here to sort of be crazy.

What sort of artists do you see coming through Jaaga?

Freeman: The stuff that we’ve gotten really engaged with bridges between technology and art. We had one artist, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, who came over from New York to do a project. She created a physical steel sculpture of a man in the style of some of the indigenous sculpture from India. Then she embedded a computer in the back that would read a bunch of different web sites and RSS news feeds and generate a sort of poetry based on the text coming in, then recite the poetry using text to speech. And the voice that she used to have it speak was a combination of all the people who are part of Jaaga.

Right now we’re doing a project using SMS and the phone system to create almost like a tour that connects with people and walks them through this ongoing experience that unfolds over the course of several days via the SMS messages and calls that they get, calls that they need to make, and places they need to go.

What has the reception been within Bangalore?

Freeman: It’s all been positive. People like it—or at least within our scene people like it. There’s definitely a large enough crowd in Bangalore that’s technically literate and appreciates the arts and is interested in what’s going on in the world.

Jaaga flea market.

Are there other institutions that are doing similar things in Bangalore?

Freeman: There’s a few right in our little neighborhood, a couple other spaces that are also sort of fringe art spaces. There’s another organization called Bar 1, just around the corner, that does a lot of experimental art exhibitions and performances. There’s another space which is a sort of residency and gallery space which also does pretty out-of-the-box kind of things. There’s a dance studio close by that’s also kind of avant-garde, and a couple other galleries. So yeah, there’s a bit of a scene.

Are a lot of those organizations also tied to the tech world?

Freeman: No, I think we’re the only one that has a strong tech connection.

Anything else that you think would be pertinent to discuss?

Freeman: Yeah, there’s one other thing that we’re trying to do. There’s a movement in education that I’m really fascinated by. It started with MIT releasing their open courseware, but lately Stanford and Harvard and Princeton have all sort of gotten on board with making a lot of their high-end classes, especially technology classes, freely available on the internet. They’re going beyond just releasing lectures, and are also conducting the online classes in conjunction with their actual physical classes, then letting people online do the homework, take the quizzes, take the tests, and get a grade and a certificate that says that they would’ve gotten an A, B, C, or D had they actually been a student at Harvard or MIT or Stanford.

This has all the appearances of being a mass movement. The first class that Stanford did was a graduate-level artificial intelligence class, and it had 140,000 students. And since then they’ve done another 20-odd classes, and I think they’ve had close to 1,000,000 people register. It’s really providing a glimpse of what the future of higher education may be.

With all this really amazing online educational content becoming available, I’m really curious about what kinds of physical structures and social structures will evolve to support online learners. We get more sort of out of going to university than just the time we spend in the lecture hall. There’s something very beneficial to being in a large social environment where you’re surrounded by a bunch of people who are trying to learn the same thing, where you have access to people who are more senior than you who can help answer questions, where you in turn may act as a TA and tutor people who are younger than you. So as we run this large community center it’s one of the things that I’m trying to play with—how we can become a community center and support center for online learners. We’re playing with this idea of what a distributed university can look like if we can get access to all the best classes from the best universities in the world. How can we support that group with a really sort of motivated social learning environment that’s grounded in a physical place, so that people actually meet each other? So that’s a project that we’re working on.

Has that sort of come up in discussions about this movement, or do you think it’s something that’s just starting to evolve?

I don’t know anyone who’s doing it at this scale, but at a smaller scale it’s definitely happening. The professors who are running all of these classes are really encouraging this at a small scale. When you sign up for these classes you can put a note on the class board to try to find study groups in Rio or New York or San Francisco or Mumbai or Bangalore. So in a very small way it’s being strongly endorsed and promoted by the professors. I don’t know of anyone else who’s trying to go a little bit bigger and say we want to become a space for all of these study groups to come together.

All images credit Jaaga / Archana Prasad.

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More at the artist’s website.

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More on the artist’s website.

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SG: Over the course of the Obama administration we’ve seen a very strong campaign to isolate Iran emerge as a major component of foreign policy. This in spite of U.S. intelligence reports, among others, that have concluded that the military applications of the nuclear program were stopped years ago. Who benefits from a war with Iran?

I don’t think the United States wants a war with Iran. They may be setting up conditions in which it will happen, but I don’t think they consciously want to have a war. In fact, U.S. military and intelligence seems to be strongly opposed to that. Not because they’re opposed to war, but because they think that the consequences could be quite damaging to the U.S. and its interests.

As for why they’re doing it, there’s an authoritative answer, and no reason not to take it seriously. The answer is given by the U.S. military, by the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence, and the clearest place is in their annual presentations to Congress. They give regular presentations to Congress on the global security situation. Of course, they have long sections on Iran. They explain very clearly what the threat of Iran is: they say that Iran is not a military threat. Iran has very low military expenditures, even by the standards of the region—trivial as compared to the United States. It has very limited capacity to deploy force. Its strategic doctrines are defensive, designed to deter an invasion long enough so that diplomacy will set in.

They say that if they’re developing nuclear weapons capability—big if; as you say, they don’t say that they are—but if they are, it would be a part of their deterrence strategy. Well, a deterrence strategy is intolerable to the United States. If you effectively own the world, at least in your own mind, you cannot accept deterrence.

Then there are other threats. Iran is attempting to expand its influence into neighboring countries, into Iraq and Afghanistan. There’s a name for that: it’s called destabilization. They’re trying to destabilize these countries. When we invade and destroy countries, that’s called stabilization. When they try to expand their political, commercial, and other relations, it’s called destabilization.

The other threat is that they support terrorism. In fact, they’re called the leading supporters of terrorism in the world. Well, “terror” means Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine. Now, whatever you think about Hamas and Hezbollah, they happen to be the political forces that essentially won the elections. There was one free election in the Arab world, exactly one: in Palestine in January 2006. The U.S. had called for the election. It was carefully monitored, recognized to be free—but it came out the wrong way. Hamas dominated. That wasn’t supposed to happen.

So the U.S., and Israel of course, instantly turned to punishing the population harshly for voting the wrong way. Europe went along timidly, the way it usually does. It revealed quite clearly the conception of elections and democracy that we have: vote our way and it’s fine; vote the wrong way and we’ll crush you.

What about Hezbollah? Well, Lebanon’s elections are—it has elections. Not the best in the world. But in the last election, which was certainly reasonably free by the standards of the region, the Hezbollah-based coalition won the majority of the votes. Well, the voting system is set up in such a fashion that they didn’t get the majority of the delegates, but they won by approximately the same majority as the year before.

So those are the major political factions. Now, their terrorism, or what we call their terrorism, is rooted in that they grew out of resistance to U.S. and Israeli aggression. Hamas took form during the first intifada as a resistance to Israeli occupation. Hezbollah was formed after the U.S.-backed Israeli invasion of 1982. After a long struggle they finally drove Israel out of Lebanon, which it had been illegally occupying—meaning, in violation of U.N. Security Council orders—for twenty-two years. They drove them out. That’s obviously intolerable—nobody can resist the aggression of the United States and its client.

They do lots of other ugly things which you can point to, but that’s not the reason for the hostility. There are others that are far worse, including us.

SG: China’s relationship with Iran has become very strong. China has exclusive rights to many Iranian oil fields until 2024, as well as state contracts with an estmated worth in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Iran has secured China’s promise to develop these vast regions as though they were China’s own sovereign land. Major General Zhang Zhou Zong’s statement in 2011 that China will not hesitate to protect Iran, even with a third world war, indicates as much. And yet certainly, China doesn’t want an Iraq-style invasion and occupation. Where would China fit into a U.S.-Israeli war with Iran?

First of all, on the last point—the U.S. invasion of Iraq intended to gain privileged access to Iraq’s resources on the part of U.S. energy corporations—in fact, that was stated explicitly—but it failed. The U.S. was defeated in Iraq. They didn’t gain that access and they didn’t gain the rights to maintain military bases, the two main goals of the war. Which were stated explicitly by the end—in the beginning there were various fabrications, but by the end it was stated explicitly in government declarations. It didn’t succeed. They’re still trying, but it didn’t succeed.

Secondly, I don’t think there’s any chance of the United States invading Iran, but if they did the Chinese wouldn’t do a thing. Contrary to statements, they don’t want to be involved in a military confrontation with the United States.

But the main point is that yes, they’re continuing their commercial and other relations with Iran—but so is most of the world. India, for example, has stated very openly that they’re going to reject U.S. and European sanctions to expand their commercial relations with Iran. That means energy, and also building a port in Iran, which for India is intended as a way of gaining access to central Asian resources (including Afghanistan, but mainly central Asia).

China, at the same time, is building a port in Pakistan which will have a straight connection to western China through pipelines. The goal of China is to access Middle East oil without having to go through the Malacca Strait, the region south of China which is the main passage for ships, and which the U.S. very much controls. There’s conflict over that. They want to get it directly, so the port in Pakistan should be the way to do that.

In fact, I should add that China has also negotiated with Israel to buid a high-speed rail line from Haifa to Eilat on the Mediterranean, where there’s also development of substantial natural gas resources. Eilat is on the Red Sea. If that works out—it’s in process—it would mean that China would gain access to the eastern Mediterranean energy resources without going through the Suez Canal.

In many other ways they’re developing an energy security system which, yes, includes Iran. India and Russia are as well. In fact, what’s called the international community—meaning Washington and whoever goes along with it—is quite isolated on this. Turkey, for example, is maintaining and maybe expanding its commercial relations with Iran. There’s almost no support for Washington’s position outside of Europe.

So yes, what you say about China is correct, but that’s most of the world. In fact, the nonaligned countries—most of the world—for years have been vigorously supporting Iran’s right to enrich uranium.

What about the Arab world, right nearby? Well, in fact just a couple of days ago the latest poll of Arab public opinion came out. There have been American-run polls before, and the results are pretty similar, but this was much more interesting because the poll was much more in-depth. I think it was based in Qatar. What they found is what’s been found before: in the Arab world Iran is not regarded as a threat. In this poll, I think five per cent regarded Iran as a threat. Other polls have found maybe ten per cent. What’s regarded as a threat in the Arab world is the United States and Israel—the percentage of people who regard the U.S and Israel as a threat is very high, three quarters or more. In fact the majority of people in the Arab world think the region would be better off if Iran had nuclear weapons to counter this threat. They don’t like Iran—Iran’s quite unpopular—and of course they don’t want nuclear weapons, but those are basically the attitudes. Right before the Arab Spring brokeout, according to U.S. polls in the Arab world, in Egypt, for example, I think about eighty per cent favored Iran developing nuclear weapons—not just enriching uranium, but developing nuclear weapons to offset the U.S.-Israeli threat.

So these are the main reasons why the U.S. and Europe are quite afraid of the Arab Spring and very much opposed to democracy in the region. Because to the extent that democracy functions public opinion has some influence on policy, and obviously they don’t want these to be the policies of the Arab world.

Now, the way that’s reported here is strikingly different. The way it’s reported is, “the Arabs support the United States on Iran.” Which is true of the Arab dictators. But the intensity of the contempt for democracy in the West is so profound that if the dictators support us and the population strongly opposes us, we say the country supports us. When the WikiLeaks exposures came out, one of the ones that got the most publicity said that Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and others support the U.S. on Iran. That meant the dictators support us. But at the very same time, U.S.-run polls were revealing exactly what I said. That barely got any mention in the press. And this latest poll, I haven’t seen a word about it yet, except on Al Jazeera.

So, who supports the West on Iran? Well, its allies. And it’s the same with other issues. Take Libya. The way it’s presented here, the world supported us on the U.S.-British-French intervention in Libya. In reality, almost nobody did. The African Union—it’s an African country—strongly opposed and came out with repeated declarations (never published here, of course) calling for negotiations, diplomacy, peacekeeping missions. The BRICS countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa—took the same position: negotiations, diplomacy. The International Crisis Group, which is the main NGO that monitors these affairs—same position. Turkey’s the same—major regional power, although it’s a NATO power, that at the beginning didn’t want to participate at all, but finally kind of slightly came along. They were all trying to head off a likely humanitarian crisis which they assumed would be the result of intervention and, in fact, took place. Many more people were killed in Libya than in any of the other countries of the region. It ended up pretty brutal and bloody. The final attack on Sirte and Bani Walid happened to be at the base of the largest tribe in Libya, the Warfalla tribe, who were quite bitter about it, and who have since reconquered it and virtually declared autonomy. It’s part of what looks like a possible break-up.

It’s claimed that the U.S., Britain, and France were responding to the plea of the Arab League. Well, there are two things wrong with that. First of all, the Arab League did take a position, but it wasn’t really the full Arab League. The gulf countries, a minority of the Arab League, did call for a no-fly zone. They also called for a no-fly zone over Gaza, so you have to ask what happened to that. And then after the bombing started they kind of drew back from it. Egypt, which is right next door, could’ve participated if they wanted to.

So yes, the West is quite isolated, for pretty good reasons. Now remember, most of the world regards the West as just the old imperial countries. Here our carefully cultivated self-image is that we’re liberators and humanitarians and so on, but that’s not the way the people at the other end of the gun see it.

SG: There are reports that Israel has received a new generation of “bunker buster” bombs from the U.S. in exchange for holding off a unilateral military strike on Iran. These seem specifically designed for attacking Iranian laboratories that are deep underground. As well, Israeli secret forces are widely blamed for the targeted assassination of Iranian scientists inside Iran over the last year. Why is Israel so eager for a military confrontation with Iran? What does Israel specifically gain from this?

What Israel wants is for the United States to attack Iran. In fact, they’re pulling out all the stops to try to convince the United States to do the dirty work for them, for a number of reasons. For one, they don’t have the military resources to do it themselves, and for another there would be a number of repercussions. They don’t want to be isolated and face the repercussions. They might try it anyway; I don’t think anyone knows, or they don’t know themselves. But they’d certainly prefer for the U.S. to do it.

Why do they want it? Well, same reasons as the U.S. They don’t want a deterrent. Iran does support forces that have resisted Israeli aggression and occupation, and of course Israel doesn’t like that. The 2006 invasion of Lebanon, which was actually their fifth, was pretty much beaten back by Iranian-armed Hezbollah forces.

And they want to have a monopoly of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. They have several hundred nuclear weapons, which is regarded not only by the Arab world as a severe danger—the Arab population, I’m talking about, I don’t care about the dictators—but others too. Like General Lee Butler, the former head of the U.S. Strategic Command, which is in charge of nuclear weapons and strategy, a couple of years ago said something like, “In the cauldron of animosity that is the Middle East it is dangerous in the extreme for one country, namely Israel, to have hundreds of nuclear weapons.” And sure, it’s dangerous and extreme, but Israel wants to be able to dominate the region. They don’t want a deterrent. They want to be able to proceed with their policies without interference.

So sure, they want to get rid of it. I mean there is concocted threat of holocaust, Auschwitz, and so on, which they may come to believe, but objectively it’s beyond outlandish. There’s no sane analyst in the world who thinks that if Iran had nuclear weapons it would try to use them. It’s exactly as U.S. military intelligence says—if they had them it would be part of their deterrence strategy. If Iran was to so much as load a nuclear weapon the country would probably be obliterated. Israeli strategists understand this as well as anybody else.

SG: So then you don’t agree that having Iran as a nuclear power would create any instability in the region?

It would create stability, not instability. The populations of the Arab world—the populations, not the dictators—regard it as a move toward stability, because it would offset the real threat that they perceive, which is the United States and Israel.
Remember, the term stability in the United States has kind of a technical meaning—it means, do what we say. But that’s not the way it’s understood elsewhere. They don’t want nuclear weapons.

In fact there is an answer to this, and a very clear answer, supported by almost the entire world, which is to establish a nuclear weapons–free zone in the region. Virtually everyone supports that. In fact, support is so strong that Clinton and Obama have been compelled to express formal support for it, but with conditions that prevent it from happening. The conditions are: not now, at some future time after everyone’s converted their swords into ploughshares down there, then we’ll talk about it. So: never, in other words. And it has to exclude Israel. That’s saying no, we can’t do it. But if there were moves toward that—it wouldn’t solve every problem, obviously, but it could significantly mitigate and maybe overcome tensions. But it’s not discussed, except in arms control circles.

And there’s another fact that’s not discussed which is kind of relevant. The U.S. and Britain have a special commitment, a unique commitment, to moving towards a Middle East nuclear weapons–free zone. There’s a simple reason for that. When the U.S. and Britain invaded Iraq, they tried to construct a thin legal cover, and the legal cover, as you remember, had to do with the alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction program. That was the excuse. The U.S. and Britain appealed to U.N. Security Council resolution 687 from 1991, which called on Iraq to eliminate these programs. And the Bush-Blair pretext was, well, they’re violating the Security Council order, so we have the right to invade them. Ridiculous argument, but that was the argument.

Well, if you read that resolution, it calls on the signers to move to establish a nuclear weapons-free zone in the region. So above all others, the U.S. and Britain have a commitment to this, but I can’t imagine anybody mentioning this.

NN: In regards to Syria, do you think that the West is going to intervene along the same lines as they did in Libya?

Not in the same way. Libya was kind of a pushover. It had no army, no defense system, and therefore you could become the bombing. Remember, in Libya there was a U.N. resolution. It called for a no-fly zone, ceasefire, and steps to protect civilians. The imperial triumvirate—U.S., Britain, and France—violated that instantly, and just became the air force of the rebel forces. That was kind of easy—just bomb from a distance.

But Syria’s not like that. In fact, if we can believe what the U.S. military’s saying, it would be extremely difficult. There was an article in the Times which reported the U.S. military judgments. How literally to take that you can decide. But what’s reported, at least, is their statement that it would be very hard, that Syria has advanced anti-aircraft systems, air defense systems, and also a big army, unlike Libya, which has no army. Obama asked the military for contingency plans, and according to the report, at least, they say we can do it, but it won’t be easy.

So I think the West regards it first of all as dangerous and costly. Secondly, fundamentally, I think the Western powers may conclude that they’re better off with Assad than his replacement. In fact, my strong guess is that Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and the rest of them were quite pleased when Russia and China vetoed the Security Council resolution, because that first of all allows them to pontificate about how wonderful we are and how terrible they are, but also offers a pretext not to do anything. They are claiming, well, our hands are tied because of the Security Council resolution. Well, that’s not even a bad joke. They don’t care one way or another about Security Council resolutions. It’s been shown over and over again. But they can claim it and the press will loyally report it without laughing, and it means now there’s a pretext not to do anything. So chances of intervention, I think, are pretty slight, for reasons like this. There are countries that could intervene—Turkey, for example, but they don’t want to do it.

NN: Do you think that the uprising is going to be successful?

It looks pretty ugly. There is a big massacre going on, undoubtedly. But any form of intervention would very likely just exacerbate the civil war and be more brutal and violent. So one possibility, a likely one, is that the civil war will just continue and get more brutal and destructive.

The only alternative I’ve ever heard anyone talk about—except for John McCain, who’s kind of off in outer space—but someone serious, is what Kofi Annan’s trying to do: see if he can make some basis for negotiation and diplomacy, which would presumably ease Assad out of office, but without requiring suicide. If you set up conditions which say either commit suicide or keep attacking, they’ll want to keep attacking—that’s what happened in Libya. No way out. So it’s pretty ugly, but I don’t see any other alternative.

The setup:

Teams consisting of one or more visually oriented people (e.g., painter, filmmaker, architect) and one or more writers will create a sequence of 12 still images (no animation or sound).

Content is entirely up to the creators: the finished pieces can be narrative or non-narrative, contain any ratio of text to image, etc.

Teams are welcome to work in whatever manner suits them best and devote as much or little time to the project as they wish. Collaborators can be located anywhere in the world.

Satellite will pair people from each category to create a mix of different styles and interests (although collaborators are welcome to suggest people they’d like to work with). At the moment we unfortunately can’t offer payment.

All teams’ work will be shown during an event night on January 9 at an event at Brooklyn’s Bedford Hill Coffee Bar. Assuming the project is fun, we’ll repeat it several times a year.

Selected image sequences will be run on Satellite’s website and/or in the print edition following the event.

The final files should be sent to info@satellitemagazine.ca in JPG form, 10” wide x 7.5” high at 300 dpi, numbered from 1 to 12 in the file name to reflect the sequence in which they should be presented. For publication purposes, all text should be legible when images are shrunk to 4″ wide. All final artwork must be submitted no later than 1 week prior to the event.

If interested in participating, send a brief note outlining your background and interests to info@satellitemagazine.ca. We will consider applications according to fit with the magazine’s aesthetic and compatibility with others in the series.

As the city’s non-native population continues to grow both in size and proportion—by 2030, immigrants and their descendants are projected to account for 50 percent of all residents—it remains to be seen how Oslo will evolve. In spatial terms, it has fared better than a number of its European counterparts, avoiding the poor conditions and isolation that blight many of the continent’s immigrant neighborhoods. As government officials and designers such as Haaversen try to build a healthy foundation for the future, however, the pressing need for more housing, and the increasing tendency for ethnic divisions to echo traditional tensions between the city’s east and west sides, pose significant challenges.

Constitution Day celebration, Oslo

The rise of immigration

Immigration is a major issue throughout Europe, but 
it is playing out very differently across the continent.
 In Oslo, the larger-than-life events of last summer,
 when seventy-seven people were massacred by a right-wing Norwegian angry about his nation’s immigration policies, contrast starkly with the day-to-day
 reality of a city that is generally tolerant of newcomers.

Norway, which has been an independent nation only since 1905, was once a land of net emigration. For decades, it lost a significant portion of its population
to better economic opportunities in North America and elsewhere. Because very few people moved from other parts of the world to replace them, as recently as 1950 only a tiny fraction of the population was non-native Norwegian (with the exception of 
the Sami, an indigenous reindeer-herding population in the north).

Today, the situation looks dramatically different. With its healthy economy (the 1969 discovery of North Sea oil made the country one of the world’s richest), generous welfare state, and reputation for progressiveness and tolerance, Norway has attracted a steady stream of newcomers since the 1970s. By early 2011, immigrants and second-generation Norwegians accounted for 12.2 percent of the country’s total population. By 2060, the government estimates that immigrants and first-generation Norwegians will number between 1 and 2 million, or approximately a quarter of all residents.

Reasons for immigration vary. Approximately 40 percent of those admitted between 1990 and 2009 came for purposes of family reunification; many in this category are foreigners who have married ethnic Norwegians. A quarter consisted of refugees or
asylum-seekers—Norway has one of the highest levels of asylum-seekers per capita among high-income 
countries—with approximately the same number coming for work. (The relative resilience of the nation’s economy throughout the global economic downturn has made it particularly attractive.) Just over 10 percent were admitted for education and other purposes.

Those who come tend to stay. Approximately three-fourths of immigrants who have arrived in
 Norway since 1990 still live there today. Generally speaking, they adapt well to their new home, 
although income, employment, and educational attainment vary greatly according to country of
 origin. In 2009, the employment rate for immigrants was 61.7 percent, compared to 69.7 percent for the general population. First-generation Norwegians tend to be more successful than their parents, with a university enrollment rate higher than the national average.

Native Norwegians’ reactions to immigration have been mixed. A 2009 government survey showed that a clear majority believes that newcomers make
 positive contributions to the country’s cultural life 
and labor market, and that they should have the
 same job opportunities as everyone else. However, 
approximately half also believe that the country should not admit more people, and that integration has worked poorly.

Other signs also point to a conflicted outlook. Stories about migrants and migration appear in the 
national media with disproportionate frequency. Policies have become stricter over the past few years; for example, the passage of new legislation in 2008 led to a dramatic rise in the number of would-be 
immigrants forcibly ejected from the country. The conservative Progress Party has become a powerful force in the country over the past few decades partially because of its strong anti-immigration rhetoric. (The party fared poorly in the fall 2011 elections,
 however, after Anders Behring Breivik’s attacks on 
liberal government workers and on a progressive 
youth camp soured the nation on politics smacking of
 right-wing extremism.)

As in the rest of Europe, much of the debate surrounding immigration centers on issues of race and religion. The increasing numbers of immigrants from countries such as Sweden, Germany, and Poland receive far less attention than those from farther afield. “This is not something that’s spoken much about 
in the Norwegian public sphere,” said Thomas Hylland Eriksen, a professor of anthropology at the
University of Oslo, “but there is a latent racism here which raises its head now and then.” In 2001, the
 murder of a fifteen-year-old Norwegian-Ghanaian 
boy by neo-Nazis shocked the country and led to 
anti-racism policy initiatives. Progress Party officials have made headlines with statements about the dangers of Islam. And the 1,500-page manifesto which Breivik sent to over one thousand e-mail addresses just before carrying out his long-planned attacks is filled with rants against Islam and multiculturalism. In it, he wrote: “I explained to God that unless he wanted the Marxist-Islamic alliance and the certain Islamic takeover of Europe to completely annihilate European Christendom within the next hundred years, he must ensure that the warriors fighting for the preservation of European Christendom prevail.”

Ethnicity, class, and place

With a third of the country’s non-native population, Oslo is the epicenter of immigration in Norway.
 According to government agency Statistics Norway, 64 percent of the immigrants and first-generation Norwegians in Oslo are from Asia, Africa, South and Central America, and Turkey. Almost 20 percent have origins in Western Europe, North America, and Oceania, while 17 percent are from Eastern Europe.

Immigrants from Europe and North America tend to settle in western Oslo, the traditional home of the city’s upper classes, or in recently gentrified areas in the inner east. Other groups have gravitated toward cheaper rents farther out on the eastern fringes of the city. “In the west side of the city,” said Eriksen, “which is middle class—everybody has a little garden with an apple tree and so on—there are very few dark faces, whereas in the more recent eastern suburbs, where you have high-rise apartment blocks and few public facilities, in some areas the proportion of non-whites can be up to 70 percent.” Immigrants and their children from the east side who do well economically rarely move to higher-status neighborhoods on the west side, as would their native Norwegian counterparts.

Popular neighborhood in gentrifying inner east Oslo

Despite this clear division, however, the city has not experienced the kinds of extreme separation and ethnic segregation that have plagued other
 European immigrant districts, most famously the Parisian suburbs where rioting broke out in 2005 and 2007. One reason for this is that immigrant groups themselves tend to mix rather than moving into separate ethnic or national enclaves. “They’re not that concentrated,” said Siri Sandbu of Husbanken, a 
government agency that deals with housing. “In 
Furuset [a neighborhood on the east side], they have 
the highest number of immigrant populations—almost 50 percent. But you have 160 different nationalities. So even though there’s a high number of 
Pakistani people in Furuset, there are also a lot of 
other nationalities. It’s not like you probably will find in most European cities. For example, in Sweden you can find suburbs full of only Somali people.”

Furuset. Credit a-lab

Studies indicate that Norway’s unique residential market may be partly responsible. Home ownership rates are very high, and the rental market is difficult to break into. What little public housing is available
 (almost exclusively on the east side of the city) tends to be given only to the very poor. This structure can make it difficult for immigrants in Norway to find
adequate housing. As Eriksen puts it, “In the rental 
market it’s very hard for Mohammed Mustafa to rent a room in a house owned by a little old lady.”

As a result, many immigrants buy property as soon as they are financially able. While this leads to overcrowding—Oslo is one of the world’s most expensive 
cities, and immigrants often can’t afford a space big enough to meet their needs—it tends to result in immigrant neighborhoods that are healthier and better-maintained than those in many other European countries. “For those who can match the housing
 market, I think this ownership structure is good,” said Susanne Soholt, a senior researcher at the
Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research who studies immigration and housing, “but for the others it’s not, because there’s not really a
 good alternative.”

Despite the relative health of immigrant areas, however, white flight has become a reality. In recent years, a great deal of media attention has been focused on schools on the east side populated
 almost entirely by non-Nordic children. Although
 some of the exodus can be explained by parents seeking native Norwegian friends for their 
children, Soholt believes that the out-migration in
 these areas is partly natural, as parents of grown
children move closer to the city center. More problematic, however, is the fact that few white Norwegians are moving in to replace them, raising the threat of a segregated city.

“Because I often appear on TV and in newspapers talking about migration,” said Eriksen, “I sometimes get the reaction, why don’t you move to the east side yourself?” In his view, the solution to preventing ethnic division lies in making the east side more 
attractive to all Norwegians, newcomers and natives alike. “We’re going to need a lot of new housing in the city because it’s growing so fast. My view
is, build some sort of nice little bungalows and semi-detached houses on the east side in order to
 attract more affluent people to move there. Get better infrastructure. There are very few attractive
 facilities nearby unless you’re into ice hockey or soccer; if you have other interests you have to take 
the subway to the city center. They don’t have a single movie theater in this valley in the eastern suburbs 
of Oslo where there’s a population of 150,000. Move
 part of the university; build a new campus on the east side. More museums, more prestige—give them a sense of local pride.”

Typical street on the traditionally upper-class inner west side

Designing for change

One current municipal planning initiative provides a glimpse into how these issues are playing out as the city prepares for the coming decades. The Grorud Valley Action Plan, a joint effort between a number of national and local government organizations, is an ambitious, multifaceted effort to transform Eriksen’s large valley in the east, which is home to
approximately one-fifth of the capital’s population. (If separated from Oslo, it would be the fourth-largest city in Norway.) Here, property values, educational attainment, and income levels are among the lowest in the city, and the major transportation corridors running through have led to problems with pollution and noise. In recent years, low housing prices have lured large numbers of immigrants.

Furuset. Credit a-lab

The government sees the valley as a natural target for absorbing some of the massive population growth expected for Oslo in the coming decades, due to both immigration and an increasing flow of Norwegians moving from other parts of the nation. Because of its high percentage of open space and low-density industrial construction relative to the rest of the city, the government has targeted Grorud
 Valley to help absorb new growth. However, its environmental issues and negative reputation (albeit one that many valley residents claim is exaggerated) need to be addressed first.

As part of the Action Plan, in 2011 a design competition was held to develop a planning program for Furuset, a ’70s-era development in Grorud Valley where the city hopes to add between 1,000 and 2,000 new homes and create thousands of new jobs in the coming years. The goal of the project was to develop a big-picture framework to focus future planning and design efforts. “We’re working with the
 winners to develop different alternatives: for example, if a school should be here or there; different traffic schemes; if there should be so-and-so many houses,” said Erling Ekerholt Saveraas of the Agency for Planning and Building Services, the project
manager for the Furuset area planning effort. Sustainability and public participation have also been major areas of focus.

Although Furuset’s population of 9,000 is 53 percent non-western (among residents under twenty, the figure is 90 percent), Saveraas said that ethnicity was not a significant project driver. I asked him 
if attracting a mix of ethnic Norwegians and immigrants to the area had been an aim of 
the effort. “It may be a goal for the politicians, I don’t know,” he said. “But in the planning project, it’s not a goal we’re working for. I think it’s quite drastic
 to have it as a city planning target. Our goal is building houses and workplaces and making good 
public spaces. It is very important that the new houses and workplaces are attractive and create good local communities, and this may attract different kinds of people. We can’t choose which people will go there.”

From Saveraas’ on-the-ground perspective, the challenges and opportunities facing the valley are more nuanced than media reports and statistics suggest. He sees a great deal of variation among immigrants 
in Grorud Valley—Swedish students, Polish construction workers, war refugees from farther afield, and
 more—and a wide variety of existing conditions within 
the area. “Different parts of the valley have different 
challenges, socially, economically, and environmentally. 
In some areas there are few challenges; in others there are more. So it’s very complex.”

Maximizing interaction

For the design team that won the Furuset competition, careful consideration of demographics, culture,
and history were central to the project. A-lab, the
 Oslo-based architectural practice that led the team 
(in collaboration with firms COWI AS and Architectopia), consciously staffed the project with a number of immigrants. “We are one of the most international offices in Norway,” said Geir Haaversen, a partner at a-lab. “So we said ok, to try to solve this [design challenge], we’ll take a mix of people from all over the world to make a competition team.”

a-lab proposal

According to Haaversen, having team members from Bosnia, Portugal, Brazil, Sweden, and other countries proved valuable on a number of fronts. The foreign-born designers had fewer prejudices about Furuset than lifelong Oslo residents, and were able to provide a broader spectrum of ideas about creating much-needed community nodes around institutions such as the local mosque. Finally, it was easier to discuss the project with area residents when the team wasn’t perceived as just “these white Norwegian architects.”

These factors were particularly important due to the team’s determination to base its designs firmly in 
local realities. They spent the early stages of the project
 exploring Furuset and speaking with inhabitants to 
understand the community. “We figured out it’s a lot 
of young new immigrants. They are quite positive. They
 have the biggest mosque in Oslo, and they are very 
open-minded about change,” said Haaversen. “They
 actually want to live at Furuset and be part of the development, and for this to be a nice place to live.”

From the outset, it was clear that public space needed to be a central focus of the design. The existing town, Haaversen said, was characterized by a “lack of good meeting places, no good place to be—like suburbia from the 60s.” His team saw this as
 particularly problematic in an immigrant-dominated 
area. “We see that all the new people that have come, immigrants, they are quite active in building a society. Like the Somalis: they find their cafés and they define places. Norwegians just move to a place and don’t want the same interaction; they just go downtown or elsewhere. But [immigrants] are more, like, stuck up there. It’s a lot of energy that can end up in rootless youth that don’t know where to go. But if we talk to them and try to make good places—that’s what we’re trying to do now.”

a-lab proposal

The team’s final proposal is currently undergoing a standard review and consultation process, and will be presented to politicians at the end of the year.
 The plan calls for a large public plaza surrounded by a highly varied, fine-grained mix of residential, commercial, and civic uses. By sprinkling a variety of 
spaces together around a central public area, it aims
 to bring different kinds of people together organically throughout the day as they go about their normal business. Instead of following a conventional planning approach with ground-level retail beneath multistory dwellings, the team followed a “spaghetti”
model, mixing schools, libraries, and other civic functions closely together to maximize interaction.

a-lab proposal

Toward an intercultural city

For Andreas vaa Bermann, head of the public architecture and design foundation Norsk Form, the government’s current approach to immigration doesn’t go far enough. He believes that the notion
 of interculturalism could be a helpful starting point for assessing Oslo’s strategies for immigration. “We’re not a multicultural society yet—or rather we’re not an intercultural society. And there is a difference between the two. The multicultural is where we acknowledge the different social and cultural groups, and these different social and cultural groups live by themselves. The intercultural society is where these groups interact to establish a new kind of society. What we have today in Oslo is a kind of multicultural society, but there are borders between different groups.”

Vaa Bermann believes that Oslo needs to develop more creative ways to integrate newcomers from around the world, rather than simply coping with their presence. “I think we have to face the fact of the multicultural city and explore it and handle it in a much more professional way than we do today. Today in a way we ignore it. We see that it happens, but we close our eyes. We don’t plan for it enough as a positive factor for urban development. It’s more of just a handling of immigration.”

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Satellite’s second issue is now in stores throughout the US and Canada.

The issue offers a broad overview of Montreal’s evolution over the last few decades and a window into its arts and design communities. Features include an interview with Canadian Centre of Architecture founder and design activist Phyllis Lambert, short profiles of local visual artists and a discussion of how gentrification is impacting the art scene, and a look at innovative music venue Casa del Popolo.

The remainder of the issue touches on a broad range of topics related to politics, place, and art. Noam Chomsky discusses the United States’ relationship with Iran, while Riddhi Shah reflects on violence in her native Mumbai. Several pieces deal with migration: Ivory Coast native Ali Baba describes his first week as an illegal immigrant in New York, Ashley Rawlings writes about moving between languages and continents since early childhood, and Sarah Wesseler looks at the spatial implications of Oslo’s dramatically increasing immigrant population. Art features include Austrian painter Jörg Herold’s 2011 Iceland-inspired series Islands and darkly comical Wite-Out portraits from Iranian-American physics professor/artist Fereydoon Family.

Details about issue release events will be posted soon.

Toby’s Estate

New York’s coffee scene has exploded over the past few years, with new specialty shops opening on a regular basis. Many of the new storefronts are owned by Australians or New Zealanders, and those countries’ signature drink, the flat white, is becoming a relatively common sight on menus around the city.

To get a better sense of why the other side of the world is having such an impact on New Yorkers’ coffee options, I met with New Zealand native Aaron Davis, an actor who worked in the coffee industry in Australia and his home country prior to moving to New York. While discussing the ins and outs of coffee in Oceania and the US, we visited three Aussie/New Zealand-owned outposts: Toby’s Estate, the recently opened Williamsburg outpost of an Australian chain; Laughing Man, actor Hugh Jackman’s new nonprofit storefront in Tribeca; and Windsor Terrace’s Dub Pies, a New Zealand meat pie shop that takes its coffee very seriously (Davis trained baristas there several years ago).

* * *

How would you describe New York’s coffee culture?

When I got to New York six years ago there was literally nowhere that I could find an espresso that was drinkable. Anywhere I tried an espresso, I wouldn’t even have one mouthful, I would just look at it and know it was going to be bad.

Nowadays things have really started to change. There are so many places around New York. Well, I don’t want to say so many—when you compare it to a populace of eight million, there really aren’t that many—but it’s certainly more than there were six years ago. It’s a lot easier now to find good espresso.

I think some of it’s the influence from the west coast. I’ve never been to Portland or Seattle, but I’ve heard they’ve got good café cultures.

And so many of them here are from Australia and New Zealand as well.

That is really interesting. I think during the Iraq war Australia really helped the Americans, sent a lot of troops and stuff like that, so as a thank you they put out some kind of new visa that made it really easy for Australians to come to America to work. So I think with that there’s been a lot more Australians in general coming over, and with the entrepreneurial types seeing that there’s a huge gap in the market I think they’ve just naturally picked up the ball.

Toby’s Estate

 

How would you describe the coffee culture in New Zealand and Australia?

Australia and New Zealand have pretty advanced café cultures. I’m not really sure where it came from, because culturally most of our outside influences, television and fashion or whatever, would be the US and Britain, and neither of those countries have huge café cultures historically. So I don’t where we really got it from, but it’s definitely a big part of the culture there. Both Aussies and Kiwis are big world travelers, so perhaps it’s from many people visiting Europe over the years and bringing it back to our shores.

We don’t drink regular coffee when we go out, we drink espresso. Drip coffee and plunger coffee, like French press, is what we have at home, and when we go out it’s all cappuccinos, flat whites, lattes, that kind of thing. Ironically—I’m embarrassed to admit it—a lot of people still drink instant coffee when at home, so I guess having an espresso when they go out is a real treat.

At restaurants as well as specialty coffee places?

Yeah, exactly. It’s kind of everywhere. And flat white—I don’t know where it started, whether it was New Zealand or Australia, but it’s unique to those countries. The funny thing about the flat white at home versus here is that here it’s more standardized—back in New Zealand and Australia everyone’s got their own take on the flat white, which is kind of funny. But for the most part, across the board, it’s a cross between a latte and a cappuccino. It’s the foam of a latte with the strength of a cappuccino, basically.

Toby’s Estate

Where are you from in New Zealand?

From Nelson, which is at the top of South Island. It’s about 40,000 people. When I left New Zealand—I moved to Australia in ’96—there wasn’t much of a café culture yet. I’m not sure about the bigger cities, Auckland and Wellington, but certainly the coffee in Nelson was pretty shitty.

Laughing Man

Then I moved to Australia and started working in the coffee industry: trained as a barista, started working for some coffee companies, learned about the whole thing. The café industry in Australia was just really starting to take off in in about 1999 or 2000, but from what I heard things were starting to evolve in New Zealand earlier than that. So when I moved back to New Zealand eight years later, things were really advanced there. It’s really hard to get a bad cup of coffee in New Zealand now, even in the small towns.

Do they have chains, or is it mostly smaller shops?

A little bit of both. There are more chains in Australia than there are in New Zealand. There are a couple of chains in New Zealand, but they’re not quite as successful. New Zealand really loves its little independent business owners. Australia does too, but not quite to the same degree—Australia’s a little more commercial and corporate.

My first exposure to the industry was working for a café franchise called Gloria Jean’s in Australia. I worked in the operations department, so my job was to train baristas at the franchises around the country. It was my first exposure to coffee. The brand now is huge, so I imagine quality control is difficult, but when I was with the business it was a lot smaller. There were only a handful of stores around the country, so at that point the quality was still pretty good. And I also worked for a couple of different companies, smaller companies, so I got a pretty good understanding of the whole science and art of espresso.

Are there Starbucks in Australia and New Zealand?

Yeah, there are. In Australia, Gloria Jean’s was actually fairly well established before Starbucks ever arrived, so Starbucks really had a hard job getting a foot in the market. I don’t know how they’re doing now, but I know in the beginning they really struggled because Gloria Jean’s had such a good following.

And then Starbucks came to New Zealand sometime after that. At least when I was still there it was very unsuccessful, because everybody was all about their small business owner.

And plus, not only that, they saw the difference between Starbucks and quality coffee, because the New Zealand palette for coffee is really refined and they know what good quality espresso is. They might go to a Starbucks just for the novelty; because it’s a world-famous company and a world-famous logo they might check it out. But they take one sip of the coffee and say oh, this is crap, because they know the difference.

Davis sampling the wares at Laughing Man

Whereas here, Starbucks is an improvement from what you get at most places.

Well, the interesting thing is, Starbucks really introduced America to espresso. This is what I attribute the whole quality of espresso in America to. Before Starbucks came out it was all filter coffee and percolated coffee. So Starbucks sort of picked up the ball and went hey, let’s do espresso. And they came and did it with their own style, which is really bad. They overroast the beans—they’re way too carbonized before they ever get to the espresso machine—and then they just do these extremely weak coffees with this extremely weak, frothy, bubbly, crappy milk. And because they grew fast and expanded right across the country, they set the benchmark for espresso. Anybody else that started to offer espresso in their business just did it the Starbucks way, because that’s all they knew.

How would you rate the places we’ve been?

Dub was my favorite. On a skill and craft level they’re all good, very good. But on a palette level, Toby’s and Laughing Man were a little mild for my personal taste. Back home most places would definitely be more full-bodied than that, but I think they’ve adjusted a bit to the American palette. I’ve been to very few places here that do a nice, full body, even places with good coffee. Dub’s is nice and full, though.

Meat pies and latte art at Dub Pies

 

Do you think the Australian places here tone down their roast in general?

In Australia and New Zealand you’d get a mixture of some fuller-bodied and more mellow, but for the most part it’s more of a full-bodied blend. I feel like the ones that come here sort of tone it down.

It all depends on how you blend your beans, the proportions you get from different parts of the world. Southern American and Hawaiian beans are really well-balanced. They’re sort of medium-bodied, mild-flavored. They don’t really have any outstanding characteristics, so there’ll be some sort of South American or Hawaiian bean in almost every coffee blend because they sort of balance everything out. Middle Eastern and African coffees are sort of more known for their acidity—there’s more of an sharpness to them. Then coffees from Southeast Asia, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, they’ll more full-bodied. Often they’re really big beans with a lot more fullness. So how you mix up your ratios in the blend will determine what kind of flavor and body you’ll get in the end cup.

Resting after a long, caffeine-filled day

 

And the roasting plays a big part in it as well. Starbucks and a lot of places roast it really dark. I feel like if you look at coffee beans and they’re shiny and oily, they’re over-roasted. If your coffee tastes burnt it’s generally not because of the way they made the coffee, but because of the way the bean was roasted. If the oil comes to the surface, that means that it’s not on the inside, and much of it has been burned up during the roasting process, which is why you get that burnt taste. That’s a personal thing, but that’s what I believe. I like a dark roast, but not dark to the point when it gets oily on the outside. When it gets there it’s gone too far.

Some will disagree with me on that, but that’s one of the things I love about this industry: all the very strong opinions of experts across the world. It keeps things interesting, and it means there’s always something new to learn.

But I’m not a roaster—I think roasting and being a barista are two very separate arts, and most people specialize in one or the other. I think if you’re a barista who decides you want to roast your own beans as well—it’s not impossible, but I think a lot of people who try to do that are spreading themselves too thin, and so they’ll compromise both. But again, that’s just me.

 

Meat pie case at Dub Pies

 

What do you think are the most important qualities for a barista?

You’ve got to know some basic machine maintenance. The pump pressure and the water levels and boiler pressure have to be right, so if you don’t know how to gauge those things that can lead to problems. You’ve got to know how to set the grind right. The grind can change throughout the day depending on temperature changes, humidity changes—so that will change the density of the grind, the coarseness of the grind. And the grind has got to be right in order for the right extraction. This is one of the key points that most people get wrong.

The extraction will vary from roast to roast, and from bean to bean as well. For the most part an extraction will be about thirty seconds. If you’re pulling a double shot, you’ll want about two to three ounces of liquid to come out in twenty-five or thirty seconds, and it’s got to be the right caramel color. If it starts coming out really pale and it only takes ten seconds, then you’re under-extracting. So there are some technicalities to it. You’ve got to see and taste what’s coming out and be able to adjust accordingly. I always trained people to look for QQT: quality, quantity and time. All these three need to align, and that is adjusted by having the grind right. Which, of course, may change a dozen times a day.

Dub Pies

 

And the other big thing is steaming the milk properly. A lot of places follow the Starbucks model and have this foamy, frothy, bubbly milk. The texture of the milk is important, because that’s what carries the flavor of the coffee, and it sweetens the coffee a little bit as well. So if you’ve got this foamy, bubbly milk it won’t carry the flavor of the coffee as well, and it won’t sweeten it as well. If you go too far, it starts to break down the proteins in the milk and leads to a bitter taste instead of a sweetness.

And another thing—you shouldn’t be reheating milk. If you heat milk to make one cup of coffee then pour fresh milk in with the leftovers to make the next drink, the protein chains in the original milk are still broken down to a point. When they’re reheated they’re being broken down more, so you’re going to get a bitter flavor. You really just want to dump out the leftover milk after you make a drink. Many café owners see this as wasteful, which it is. That’s why you should steam your milk in small pitchers, not the enormous ones I see everywhere.

So it’s all that kind of thing. I often judge a café by latte art—the rosettas, flowers, that sort of stuff. Just because somebody can do a design doesn’t necessarily mean the coffee’s going to be good, but for the most part it means it’s going to be good, because your milk has to be perfect to do it. If they’re going to make latte art you know that their milk texturizing is perfect, so chances are they know how to get their grind and extraction right too. You don’t generally learn advanced barista skills before learning the fundamentals. If I go to a café that does latte art, eight times out of ten it’s going to be good coffee.

 

Davis’ reviews:

Toby’s Estate

“Great atmosphere, fast service and friendly staff. Coffee was a 10 out of 10, although for my particular taste it was a little light-bodied.”

Laughing Man

“Cool vibe, but a bummer there’s nowhere to sit. Coffee was well-prepared and fast, but also quite light-bodied.”

Dub Pies

“Finally, a full-bodied cup! This is closer to they way we have it at home. Very well-prepared (on a much cheaper machine than the other two places). Cute vibe in the little store too.”

Nicolas Kenny, an assistant professor of history at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, studies how people in urban centers are affected by their environment. We spoke to him about his research into life in Montreal during the Industrial Revolution.

* * *

When I was a student I organized walking tours for Heritage Montreal, and I was really interested specifically in the mix of visual styles in the city, this eclecticism that it has. Traces of history are so present when you’re walking through the streets of the city, and yet up against this you get all these very modern buildings. It’s interesting—when you come to Vancouver it’s very much a contrast, you’re sort of overwhelmed by the modernity of it. But in Montreal, you have this really interesting and intense mix of deeply rooted historical buildings that have all these stories to tell in this very contemporary, fashionable, edgy kind of city.

I was asked to do a walking tour in an old industrial neighborhood along the Lachine Canal that’s often referred to as Griffintown, because it’s where a lot of Irish settlers came. There’s really a very fascinating history of Irish settlement along the Lachine Canal. Fleeing the famine in Ireland, the Irish came over and built this canal, worked in industry, and were crucial in building up Montreal as the main industrial and economic powerhouse of Canada from the mid-nineteenth century up until the late nineteenth century.

This neighborhood has been kind of taken over by the multimedia industry. The provincial government actually created a plan to subsidize multimedia industries to revive this neighborhood. It had been at one point the most industrial area in all of Canada. Then, in the postwar period, it sort of gradually dwindled and died away, so there were all these empty buildings and very few people living there anymore. New life was breathed into it with the arrival of these multimedia companies.

This was an excellent example of this perpetual tension in Montreal between the kind of built environment that speaks about history and the ways in which people in the city today continue to live in that space. I gave this tour several times, and each time I would go back, something had changed in Griffintown—a building had been completely renovated, or something minor, like a sidewalk, had been resigned—it showed a sense of life.

As I was doing research on the industrial history of Montreal, I would be walking through the streets, looking at the buildings and getting struck by the fact that they were built as factories and warehouses. When we think of factories and warehouses, we think of very functional buildings that aren’t much to look at, and yet in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when they were building factories and warehouses they were using all kinds of ornate architectural detail and decoration and aesthetics. These very functional buildings that were just polluting industries had this whole visual language, and I was interested in what they were trying to say. Why were these boring, functional industrial buildings actually quite beautiful?

On my tour we would walk past a power plant, and I would say to people, what do you think this building was? And they said maybe it was a church, or a market, or some kind of public hall—but no, it was just a power plant. It was because of the enthusiasm that industry generated—the arrival of electricity, new forms of power. It symbolized the city’s wealth and progress. At the time we had all these working-class Irish and French Canadians who were struggling to get by, but then you had this industrial elite who wanted to steep the visual landscape in this way to show the world how well they were doing—how prestigious their industries were and how affluent they were becoming. So that whole visual sense of the past that you get in Montreal was constructed in this very pronounced way.

That led me to start doing research on other kind of sensorial experiences that people had with the city. You can read what people were writing about these industries and what it was like to work in them, what kind of affect they had on the city. They talked about the really loud noises that they were making, and the smells that people were experiencing and that were sometimes making them sick—or at least they thought it was the smell that was making them sick, although that’s not necessarily what caused it. And then there was just the hustle and bustle, the feel of the crowd and people brushing up to one another. Working in these hot and intense factories, the physical exertion of manual industrial labor, meant that living in Montreal was a particularly intense sensorial experience, from what people saw with their eyes to what they smelled and heard to the sense of touch.

When you think about it, the city was growing at a tremendous pace—within about fifty years, it basically went from being a small town to the biggest city in Canada and one of the biggest cities in North America. So this was all happening very fast. You had people coming from all over the world and mixing cultures, but you also had a lot of French Canadians coming in from the countryside. They had been used to living on farms and in country houses and being out in the field all the time, and then they were suddenly transported into this city where they were up against all these intense physical sensations.

You can think of industrialization as this big global movement, but in the period we’re talking about—late nineteenth, early twentieth century—this huge transnational flow of people and ideas actually affected people very personally, very subjectively, in their personal, day-to-day selves. In the physical sensations, their bodily experiences as they walked through the streets, there was a connection. And in this period cities like Montreal in particular were places where this kind of concentration of feeling really happened to an unprecedented degree. Within the very intimate scale of their bodies, these people had a connection to these processes that were on an inconceivable scale to them, happening all around the world.

I think Montreal has kept something of that intensity. It has changed a lot in the meantime, but the city keeps that kind of sensorial diversity, the mix of sights and sounds and flavors and this confrontation between all kinds of people.

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See more of Galli’s work at stefanogalli.com.

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Most people who visit Iceland for the first time are surprised to find that it’s not the snowy land they imagined. According to the locals, it doesn’t snow all that much there and Icelandic winters are milder than the eastern coast of the US. This year, however, Iceland was buffeted with the largest amount of snowfall in fifteen years. Whereas the first snow usually falls in February, this winter it came as early as November. Driving through the countryside, it was sometimes impossible to make any distinction between land and sky—the whole world had been turned into a flat, white expanse.

Hallgrímskirkja church is one of the most architecturally striking buildings in Reykjavik. Though construction began shortly after World War II, it was only completed a few years ago. Designed by state architect Guðjón Samúuelsson, the 73-meter-tall church has a facade of concrete columns that break up the otherwise imposing structure, giving it an brutalist appeal.

The roofs of central Reykjavik.

Many buildings in Reykjavik have corrugated steel facades and roofs.

Thin layers of snow on the corrugated roofs made delicate, geometric forms.

This poor cat was shivering cold.

Street art in central Reykjavik.

Christmas lights adorned almost every window in the city.

I don’t know if this large, fenced-off area was a garden, a car park, a sports yard, or land marked off for redevelopment, but the way the flood light illuminated this undisturbed blanket of snow in the darkness was eerily captivating.

A view across Reykjavik Harbor.

Kerið is an implosion crater outside of Reykjavik. When it isn’t snowing you can see the lake at the bottom, surrounded by a steep, mossy caldera of red volcanic rock.

At the Blue Lagoon, the heat of the water kept the black volcanic rock exposed.

Strokkur fires off a thirty-meter-tall column of water every five minutes or so. While you wait, the geyser makes numerous false starts, with its water appearing to swell, but it’s not until you see this huge blue bubble surge up that you know it’s about to blow.

Not far from Strokkur, the two-kilometer canyon Gullfoss—the Golden Falls—is an epic sight. Seeing it in the depth of winter, you might as well be in the Arctic. The massive flow of water slows down considerably as large parts of its two waterfalls turn to ice.

In late December, there were only about five hours of daylight, with the sun rising at around 10:30 am and setting around 3 pm and some twilight either side. As the sky darkened, these little outposts of human habitation seemed all the more isolated.

Iceland imports many of its vegetables, but the outskirts of Reykjavik are dotted with large greenhouses, where they make up some of the supply through domestic production. As the sun fell, these glowing structures were a mysterious sight in the near-darkness.

The winter of 2011/2012 was a particularly good time to see the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, as there was a great increase in solar activity. The sky was so overcast for most of my trip, that there was only one forty-minute period in which the Lights became visible on the coast outside of Reykjavik. For about half an hour there was little more than two milky green-white bands stretching across the sky, and we were about to give up. Then, suddenly, they came alive and turned into cascading, shimmering arcs of emerald green light that gradually swirled out to sea.

As part of a desigNYC initiative to connect New York designers with nonprofit and community groups in need of their services, Brooklyn architectural firm 590BC was selected in 2011 to design a recreational boating facility for Red Hook, a neighborhood with deep maritime roots. Working with client PortSide, an educational and advocacy group focused on New York’s waterfronts, architects Bronwyn Breitner and Luigi Ciaccia created a plan for transforming an existing shipping container used to store kayaks into a destination boating hub.

We asked Breitner about how the project has affected her experience of her home borough.

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How long have you been in Brooklyn? How would you describe your relationship to the borough?

590BC was founded in Brooklyn two years ago, but Luigi (my partner) and I have a long relationship with Brooklyn prior to that. I have been living in the borough for seven years, and Luigi has been in Williamsburg and Greenpoint for twelve years. We have come to believe that Brooklyn is where we can find the kind of design and lifestyle that we want to experience. We’re drawn to the experimental restaurants, the boutiques, and the types of residents and neighborhoods.

People often say that they are able to feel a part of a neighborhood in Manhattan, but in my experience that was difficult to establish. I don’t know if it’s because it’s more crowded, more transient, more diverse, or what. But the areas of Brooklyn that we’ve lived in have an inviting neighborhood vibe that feels very genuine.

When we first lived together, we lived in the very Italian part of Williamsburg, where we would find fantastic specialty stores with old roots in the neighborhood. These are not the kinds of places you find in the NFT guide–they’re family-run for decades and are extraordinary only in how ordinary they believe themselves to be. Then some great restaurants and boutiques began to open on the commercial streets, and it added a new layer to the neighborhood that we loved. But soon after, central Williamsburg started to attract more of a crowd, and we decided to move to Greenpoint, where we now live and work. We are only five blocks away from our previous location, but it’s a completely different culture. We are now deep in little Poland, where we find that same very genuine character and neighborhood community, but surrounded by a different culture. Now we buy kielbasa instead of Italian spicy sausage!

We were really happy to be paired with PortSide through our involvement with DesigNYC, partially because of their Red Hook location. We hadn’t explored that neighborhood much previously. When we begin a project in our office—especially a project this public—we like to understand and respond to the culture of the site. It has been fascinating to learn about Red Hook as it is now, but also to learn about and respond to the maritime history of the site.

I think what’s exciting about living and working in Brooklyn is that many of the neighborhoods are only now beginning to gentrify, so the underlay of the history of each neighborhood is still vibrant and vivid.

Brooklyn is amazingly diverse, with perhaps dozens of highly distinctive neighborhoods. How did your experience on this project affect your thoughts about the borough as a whole?

Getting to know the maritime culture of Brooklyn through the BoatBox project introduced us to this wacky water-centric subculture that we had known about but never had a chance to experience. Brooklyn is on the waterfront, but it’s only relatively recently in the history of New York that people have begun to exploit the city’s relationship to the water for all of its perks. Water taxis were only just recently introduced, and formerly industrial neighborhoods along the waterfront are now being rezoned to permit residential use. Fantastic waterfront parks have developed along the Hudson and East Rivers, and no doubt there is much more to come.

But PortSide, and other people and organizations that we were introduced to through our relationship with PortSide, have been waterfront advocates for years, and are pioneering these changes through their collective vision. Because of our collaboration with the client, we were able to design a project that told stories of the maritime past and facilitated new programming for the future waterfront development. There are hundreds of subcultures like this in our borough, and one of the treats (particularly for me, with my first degree in anthropology) of working so closely with a client like this is getting deep inside the organization to understand how they operate and why.

What were the main challenges you faced on this project?

One of the primary challenges was working within unknown constraints. We decided as a team to proceed with a design solution before we knew what the budget would be and whether or not the New York City parks department would even support the project. We used our pro bono commitment as a way to produce a conceptual design solution that could be taken to financial supporters, used to apply for grant money and presented to the relevant local agencies in order to seek the required funding and permits.

Another main challenge on the project was establishing the voice or the identity of this public facility. The population of Red Hook is incredibly diverse, and the client wanted the project to have its own identity while still feeling accessible to all of the subcultures of the local community.

BoatBox project collaborators included graphic design firm Studio L’Image and advisor Paul S. Alter, AIA.

Anjali Mishra is a Montreal-based urban planner with a particular interest in the city’s cultural sector. We spoke to her about the city’s unique arts landscape and the challenges facing it.

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If I think about the specificities of Montreal and how it really came to be what it is today, I think that it’s benefited from DIY culture that emerged awhile ago. There seems to be a carry-over from one generation to the next, where artists that manage to succeed a little bit seem to pave the way for other artists to emerge. People sort of figure things out, not entirely on their own, but relatively independently. Although this isn’t exactly specific to Montreal, the way it’s done here seems to have its own style. Montreal really brings all sorts of different cultures and different ideologies together in a way that probably doesn’t happen in a lot of other cities. There’s not just an acceptance of strange things, but an expectation of the eccentric, almost.

Do you think that that’s something that’s been around for awhile, or is it a fairly recent development?

I think it’s been around for awhile. If you look back to even the Automatistes—once again, that was a community of people who were creating their own spaces and their own little groups, often in contradiction to the powers that be. They had their own place called the Place des Arts, quite close to where the Place des Arts is now. The owner of the Place des Arts got called a communist, and they had incredible amounts of trouble with the police. But at the same time, this collection of people did manage to stimulate the Quiet Revolution in Quebec through their art. And I think Montreal was central to that.

Somehow, that spirit of rebellion, that idea that Montreal is a place where you can question things just because of the sheer diversity of people who are there, is something that gets carried through, even if there’s not necessarily a direct link from one set of artistic activity to the next. It’s been around for a long time—well, a long time for a North American city. I guess for as long as Montreal’s been a large metropolis, probably.

What we’re seeing right now—DIY spaces complementing themselves and there being some kind of a scene that’s carrying through different generations of artists—I don’t know that that’s necessarily new, but it’s another wave that probably started up in the late ’80s, early ’90s.

I’m not familiar with the Automatistes. Can you tell me a bit about them?

It’s a group of Quebecois artists who came together with the idea of questioning a largely religiously dominated state and established hierarchies that were mainly dominated by Anglophones. So it sort of brought a whole set of views to Quebec that had started in many other parts around the world—a sort of social awareness coupled with artistic ideas, the idea that painting didn’t have to be of the rural countryside, that it could be abstract, and things like that. So it was a modern Quebecois cultural movement in the ’30s, but one that worked toward the emancipation of the average Francophone Quebecer, who at the time was in the lower class.

So this was a ’30s movement?

It started in the ’30s, but then it carried through all the way to the ’60s. So you’re looking at sort of a midcentury upheaval. There’s nothing directly related to what ends up happening largely in the Anglophone music scene later on, but still, once again, Montreal ends up being this incubator for all sorts of ideas, where people who never would have dared to say things are empowered to do so.

You also get a lot of people who stay here and don’t necessarily have to immediately conform to a traditional nine-to-five jobs, and that’s socially acceptable. In my opinion, cheap rent is probably the largest stimulus for that. If you get public health care and cheap rent, you don’t necessarily have to work all week long to survive, which gives you time to actually do your art or whatever it is you want to do.

Unlike many other cities, that’s actually something that’s really common and totally acceptable. I know a lot of people that aren’t even necessarily artists, who maybe just like to travel and do other things, who maybe will just work a little and then do whatever they want to do on the side. That’s probably much more acceptable in Montreal than in other cities—it doesn’t make you marginal at all.

And do you think that that’s changing? Everyone I talk to is talking about gentrification and saying that the city’s becoming increasingly expensive. Do you feel like that way of life is endangered?

I think it is. There’s a very delicate balance between your ability to work three days to pay rent and rents being cheap. I think that there are probably fewer people doing that then there were. Montreal is still much more amenable to that kind of lifestyle than other cities, but not so much as it used to be. And that’s unfortunate.

The threat of being evicted is real for a lot of people, and the city’s aware of this. They are putting together programs to help artists, but I think they’re still trying to figure out what to do, and to make sure that we don’t just get the corporate innovation and big-box innovation but also the sort of grass-roots, effervescent, much more fragile kinds.

So that’s something that’s on the city’s agenda, but still a work in progress?

Yeah. They’re aware that it’s one of their strengths and it’s something they’d like to preserve, but unfortunately they haven’t found the most efficient way of doing that yet. They’re trying, but there’s still work to be done. So who knows, maybe in a couple of years they will have found it, but unfortunately now rents are increasing faster than our ability, as a society, to make sure that we can keep all of these people and allow these otherwise more marginal qualities of life, where people aren’t working as much and are able to do other things, like art.

Is there a split in the city between people who are into the arts and people who aren’t? Are there any tensions there?

There are different tensions than I think there are in a lot of places. They have more to do with aesthetics than culture per se. I think that Montreal overall is a city that’s very welcoming to culture. The problem arises when people start defining what culture is. If you stop anyone on the street, they’ll probably be more willing to recognize that culture is integral to their city than in a lot of other places. But you get the traditional sort of dilemmas where people will say, for example, that burlesque isn’t a cultural form, or that certain types of music are too noisy, or certain types of graffiti aren’t something that people will want. That’s where it becomes tricky, because inevitably people with the money and the power are the ones that get to define what acceptable culture or an acceptable aesthetic is.

So depending on your neighborhood and the people in power you get more or less happening. In Cote des Neiges really recently, this big mural that’s reminiscent of 1930s art deco art was drawn up on a wall. It’s a really beautiful mural, but depending on who you talked to, the initial reaction was, oh, this is graffiti. Now that everyone’s seen the end result people are really happy with it. There’s a certain reticence when people associate different kinds of cultural expression with different groups.

That’s probably as prevalent as it is in any other city, but at least people here know that culture’s important. So there’s probably a little bit more of an opening in that sense.

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Sketches of Turkey from Matt Shane, whose work will be featured in our upcoming Montreal issue.

***

My goal was always to make it to Tibet before the completion of the Qinghai-Lhasa railroad, because its clear aim was to further cement Beijing’s control over the region by flooding it with a renewed surge of Chinese immigrants. But, as it turned out, when I arrived in Lhasa in the summer of 2006, the railroad had just been opened. In any case, it was already evident how strong the Chinese presence is there; I was told that Tibet as a whole is now only two-thirds Tibetan, and Lhasa is already 50% Chinese. However, there was still hope. The astonishing beauty of the land, the warmth of the Tibetan people and the profound strength of their culture shone right through the political machinations that have dogged their history.

The Tibetan Yoghurt Festival was in full swing, and Chinese soldiers were keeping watch over Tibetans as they performed dances in front of the Potala Palace. With the Dalai Lama in exile, the palace has little spiritual gravity to it; inside, it feels like the empty husk of a museum, with tourists ushered briskly along a designated route. But its structure looms large on the Lhasa skyline, and it remains a potent symbol of Tibetan culture.

Looking up at the stark geometry of the Potala’s facade during the walk up to the entrance.

In the street markets of central Lhasa, all kinds of Tibetan Buddhist iconography was on sale. Portraits of Choekyi Gyaltsen, the tenth Panchen Lama, were widely available. The second-highest religious figure of Tibetan Buddhism after the Dalai Lama, the tenth Panchen Lama died in 1989. Though the Chinese authorities permit Tibetans to own images of the Panchen Lama, portraits of the Dalai Lama are forbidden.

The spiritual heart of Tibet is now the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa’s central Barkhor Square. Pilgrims prostrate themselves in front of it, and circumambulate it all year round. As dusk fell, the view from the temple roof was unearthly.

Pilgrims at the Sera Monastery on the northern outskirts of the city. A giant thangka tapestry was being unfurled on the side of a building behind me.

 

Bowls for sale along the route up into the hills around the Sera Monastery.

The sun is very strong on the Tibetan plateau, and locals harness its rays to boil water.

Wandering up to me in a textile shop, this little boy was eager to perform for the camera.

At the Drepung Monastery, on the western edge of Lhasa, I was struck by this particular setting, where the intense contrast between the colors of the sky, the clouds, and the mountains, together with the angles of the walls below, seemed to compress and foreshorten my sense of perspective. Such an open space suddenly appeared strangely flat.

As I turned a corner, I encountered one of the monastery’s residents as she plastered a wall.

A whitewashed wall cascading into a sheltered walkway.

As I reached the heart of the monastery, I followed the deep bellowing of Tibetan horns into a prayer hall. In the corner at the back, I found a glass display case containing this sand mandala.

Moments later, a monk informed me that now was the time for the senior monk to wipe the mandala away. His movements were methodical, removing elements of the mandala in a deliberate order that began at the outer edges and converged on the center.

When the monks had finished sweeping and scooping up the sand into a jar, which they wrapped in silk, the underlying template of the mandala was all that was left to see.

Ganden Monastery is about twenty-two miles outside of Lhasa, at an altitude of 4,300 meters. Once home to some 6,000 monks, it was ransacked and bombed during the 1959 Tibetan uprising. The current buildings date from the 1980s.

Inside one of the prayer halls.

One of the kitchens, where steam gushed out of a giant vat of yak butter tea.

One of the monks was enveloped in steam as he stirred the yak butter.

Though most Tibetans were friendly toward outsiders, sometimes there were flashes of bitterness, especially among the young. At a roadside stop on the way to Nam Tso Lake, this boy was posing with his goat for photographs. The custom is to pay a few yuan in return. I mistakenly gave him only a few jiao, which is worth less than ten cents. He snarled at me like a dog until I gave him a bit more, and then he stormed off.

Nam Tso Lake is the second largest freshwater lake in the world. Coupled with the wide-open skies above it and the mountain ranges in the distance, the all-encompassing panoramic vastness of this place is impossible to convey in a single image.

These carved stones lay all along the shores of the lake. This one reads Om Mani Padme Hum, a mantra for Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion.

As I walked along the shore, the weather began to turn.

Soon the wind was billowing through the thick layers of prayer flags that had been strung up all over the nearby hill.

As the sky clouded over and rain began to fall on the horizon, the surface of the lake turned into a dark mirror, eerily flat and calm. That night, a howling storm came crashing down on our encampment.

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Photographer Frederike Wetzels documented the empty streets of Immerath, a German town which has been vacated to prepare for its eventual destruction to make way for mining in the area.

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Under Currents, the most recent photo series from Thomas Kneubuhler (who we’re excited to include in our upcoming Montreal issue), focuses on uncomfortable relations between aboriginal peoples and hydroelectric developments in northern Quebec. From the artist’s statement: ”Northern Quebec is traditionally a nomad’s land, home to the native Inuit and Cree. Ironically, in the course of the development, it is the workers from the south that become nomadic: they are flown in for their work shifts and housed in temporary work camps, whereas the native population, displaced by the installation’s progress, are settled in subdivisions.”

***

Following my trip to Beijing, I got on the overnight train to Shanghai. In mid-August, the city was swelteringly hot and the air conditioning icy cold. The alternation between these extremes was at times grueling. While life in Beijing was frenetic and grimy, its generally low-rise profile made for a less dramatic cityscape. By contrast, in Shanghai the architectural statements were more demanding, more aggressive. Shanghai is a couple of decades ahead of Beijing. Here, a bold vision of the future had already taken root.

The Bund, looking across the Huangpu River to the Oriental Pearl Tower in the Pudong financial district.

At the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center, located right in the center of the city on People’s Square, you can see a pristine model rendering of the city.

In reality, looking down on Shanghai from the observation deck at the top of the Oriental Pearl Tower, the fabric of the city is in a much rawer state.

The juxtaposition of narrow traditional streets with looming skyscrapers is a cliché in the visual representation of Asian countries, but somehow it is too compelling to ignore.

The looping telephone wires follow you down almost every street.

Longhua Temple, the oldest in the city.

At the time, I was experimenting with photographs in which key elements of the composition were pushed to the outer limits of the image.

Behind 50 Moganshan Road is the M50 Arts District, which has dozens of contemporary art galleries. With massive real-estate projects surrounding it on all sides, this street has faced the threat of demolition since the early 2000s, though campaigns by architects and college professors have somehow kept it there.

The Fou Fong Flour Mill stands alone in this overgrown grassy area at the back of M50, where it once housed the nonprofit Island6 art center. It wasn’t intentional, but the flat depth of field in this image accentuates the ominous encroachment of the surrounding high-rises. The building was demolished in 2008.

I find the bamboo scaffolding that Chinese construction workers use to be charming. It became completely otherworldly when sparks from their welding guns cascaded down on it from above.

A nicely wrapped building site in the city center.

The descent into the subway.

Walking along the Bund at night, I was struck by how this shiny wall bisected the postcard view of the Pudong district and reflected the neon lights of Nanjing street.

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More at Ari Burling‘s website.

(Image via Google)

Satellite is asking designers to discuss issues affecting the places where they live and work. We asked Christian Sottile, principal of architecture and urban design firm Sottile & Sottile and professor at the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD), what he finds most interesting about Savannah, Georgia.
 

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Savannah’s an incredibly unique city on the merits of its urban plan, which goes back to the 1730s. It was laid out in pre-revolutionary America by a British general, James Oglethorpe. It was arranged around a system of squares that could be replicated, so as the city grew it kept adding new wards, and each ward had at its center a public square. The city is internationally renowned for this very unique urban plan, which has survived the test of history. Over the course of three centuries now it has remained very much intact.
 

1818 Savannah map (from the University of Georgia libraries)
 

How much of the city does it cover?
 

It covers the center city. There are 23 wards in the center city, each arranged around a public square. It’s a very rational plan. Because of its design it’s one of the most walkable cities in America. We actually have the smallest city blocks of any city in America, so it’s an intensely humane experience to be in Savannah.
 

Is the downtown area highly populated?
 

That’s where the intersection starts to form between SCAD as an institution and the revitalization of the national landmarked historic district, or the original Oglethorpe plan—that highly unique ward plan that was repeated to its finest expression in the 23 wards. Outside of that there’s a lot of additional city that continued to grow, but that core city is one of the largest national landmarked historic districts in the country. Just like all American cities, it experienced decline in the 20th century. The preservation movement began in Savannah in the 1960s, and when SCAD was founded in the 1970s, it became integral to the revitalization of the historic center city.

So we’ve watched this story unfold over the last 3 decades. The city and the university have become inextricably linked, because the campus actually exists throughout the city. Imagine an insular college quad on a university campus, but then imagine turning that inside out and having an entire city of quads. And SCAD—if you look at a campus map, you’ll see that the buildings that they’ve adaptively reused—many of them original school buildings that have been vacated by the school system—brought an entire city back to life. It’s an unbelievable story.
 

Does it extend past the historic center?
 

SCAD began right in the heart of the historic core, and today it exists throughout that core and has extended beyond. It’s a decentralized campus, but all within a relatively compact radius. It exists in many of the other surrounding historic neighborhoods as well.
 

Is there a lot of activity in the downtown core outside of the school?
 

The center city is still very much alive, because it supports our commercial life. Savannah is actually the fourth-largest port on the eastern seaboard, and the port has been an economic engine for the city throughout its existence. It’s located on a river strategically inland from the Atlantic.

So the city grew as a city where everything was together. In the American context, it’s in a very select group of cities that developed prior to the Industrial Revolution, so it was built on a platform of humanity. And through a series of events and good fortune it survived into the 21st century, through historical periods when many other American cities lost their building stock or their finer-grained street pattern. Savannah, through the 20th century, emerged as a shining example of what cities of the future might look like. We have it all pulled together. We have a vibrant residential core in the center city and a surrounding historic neighborhood. I think there are approximately 10 other historic districts around the national landmarked historic district that are all well connected and support a vibrant mixed-use pattern of development today.

But the center city is still a place where one can work, one can recreate. In contemporary planning practice, planners are trying to figure out how to make cities like this again. Savannah, I think, is unique in that it has a continuous history of providing these things.
 

What would you describe as the main challenges facing the city in terms of urban planning?
 

I think the challenges we face are no different than any city. It has to do with the inertia of the last half-century of planning and engineering and the development of codes, regulations and ordinances that actually prohibit making places as humane as Savannah. So, for example, when we work on a new street improvement project, we’re often challenged to change the rules so that we can do it like they did it hundreds of years ago, even though it works.

There’s a national inertia in the way that we do things today. Our systems are designed through the default pattern to look like modern American suburbia. It’s urban growth that’s dominated in the last half-century, and we’ve framed all our rules and regulations around it. So even in a city like Savannah, where we have such an incredible fabric to learn from, we still find ourselves challenged when we undertake new projects to rethink normal and actually look ahead by looking around us at what we have.
 

Is there anything else you’d like to add about Savannah?
 

It provides an insight into a very effective combination of public and private land in a world that’s become increasingly privatized. Savannah squarely, no pun intended, asserts the importance of the public realm. The squares become outdoor living rooms. Every 600 feet you’ll find yourself in the center of a living room, surrounded by private buildings. That dialog of the diversity of the private realm in architecture congregates around the spectacular shared spaces. And I think that’s an insight that is needed now more than ever in a world where, in typical practice, the emphasis with new developments is on the private-sector development and not in the public domain that’s created.

If you take an average ward in Savannah and look at the ratio of public to private, 40% of the land is public. That’s exceedingly high in contemporary development, but it’s proven over centuries to provide an extraordinary high quality of experience–and value for all the private land that’s created within that framework.

* * *

It seems as if there’s barely been an article or photo essay about Beijing in the past ten years that hasn’t gone on about the relentless demolition and construction taking place there. And yet, it’s impossible to ignore. When I visited in 2005, the Beijing Olympics were still three years away. The iconic “bird’s nest” stadium, aquatics center, and CCTV building were still under construction and had yet to redefine the cityscape. The process of demolition was far more noticeable than construction. I stayed in the Qianmen neighborhood of traditional hutong (courtyard houses), just south of Tiananmen Square, and half of it was already torn down. When I returned a year later, the area was barely recognizable—whole blocks were gone (and yet nearby the authorities had created a faux-traditional street for tourists).

This set of photos is the first in a three-part series on Beijing, Shanghai, and Lhasa, to be published over the next few weeks. Looking through the images I took in these cities, I see that the theme of demolition and construction runs throughout, but its significance changes in each place. Whereas Shanghai’s skyscrapers symbolize the future that Beijing aspires to, the ruined temples in Lhasa and around are a maddening reminder of the ruthless legacy of cultural colonization on which this nation-state—like so many others—has been built.

The most striking thing about the demolition of the Qianmen neighborhood was that the buildings had been only partly torn down, and then apparently just left there. It felt as if all the government wanted to do was just smash up the area so nobody could really use it, and not finish the job anytime soon.

These ruined streets had an ugly poetry to them—buildings sliced in half and piles or rubble covered with cascades of tarp.

This kid was spying on his friend (through the same fence you can see in the picture above).

Unlike those in Qianmen, the old streets in the central Houhai district are nicely maintained, as it’s already been established as a popular area for tourists.

The color palette in these streets is overwhelmingly gray.

Coming to Beijing from my home in Tokyo, the laissez-faire, let-it-all-hang-out attitude of people in this city was a breath of fresh air. Street scenes like this are almost non-existent in Japan.

One night, my friend Olly and I got a motorbike-rickshaw ride back to our guest house in Qianmen. Soon after we got on, we realized the driver was either drunk or on amphetamines, because he tore through the streets at a speed that clearly horrified everybody we passed. Here, we were racing between two massive trucks. The smart thing for us to do would have been to tell the driver to stop, but then it was just too satisfying to cut so quickly through Beijing’s otherwise impossible traffic.

Among the photos I took from the speeding rickshaw, some have a vague, gritty romanticism to them—somehow reminiscent of Daido Moriyama’s nighttime shots of Tokyo in the 1960s.

Meanwhile, these blurred colors make me think of Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express—a bit of Hong Kong escapism within the backstreets of Beijing.

Late-night TV-watching sometimes ended with this. I love the bizarre, retro compositions of TV test patterns. This one reminded me of the completely weird image of the girl and the clown that would appear on the BBC at the end every night in the 1990s.

Dashanzi is a factory area of northeastern Beijing that, since 2002, has become known as the 798 Arts District, with hundreds of artist studios, commercial art galleries, museums, and shops. The area has since become overly gentrified, and many of the city’s best galleries have moved to other art districts, such as Caochangdi and Songzhuan. But in 2005, there was still some charm to 798.

Ducts snake throughout the whole 798 area.

Many contemporary Chinese artists have played with the aesthetics of social-realist sculpture, propaganda posters, and fashion advertising—to the point where, by now, it’s a terrible cliché. But at the time, these seemingly discarded, dressed up figures standing outside an artist’s studio made for an unexpected, unusual encounter.

Because artworks sometimes permeated the 798 area beyond the galleries, sometimes it was hard to tell whether what you were looking at was an installation or not.

Occupying a former factory built in the Bauhaus style since 2002, Beijing Tokyo Art Projects was the first gallery to open in the 798 area, before it was called 798. It’s run by Tokyo Gallery + BTAP in Japan, and I have a particular fondness for it because I used to work for the Tokyo branch. The original slogan on the glass reads “Mao Zedong Is the Light in Our Hearts.” The sunshine coming through this skylight was probably one of the few respites in a grueling life for those who used to toil away in here.

Tiananmen Square is invariably talked about in terms of the 1989 massacre—as the unforgiving political center of China. But in reality, it is a lively and quite family-oriented place. In the evening, people fly these long “centipede” kites in the square, and they sway gently in the night sky. But come 11 pm, the fun’s over. The police clear the square, guards are stationed at various points around Mao’s mausoleum, and the square becomes dead quiet.

Another thing that’s less well-known about Tiananmen Square is that in heavy rain, its minimal drainage system can’t keep up…

…and you soon find yourself walking ankle-deep in water.

Not far from Tiananmen Square, you can find the official entrance to the Underground City. It’s a network of tunnels that Chairman Mao had the people build during the 1970s in anticipation of a nuclear war with the USSR (though these bunkers wouldn’t have achieved much, given that they were only a few meters below the surface). The guide who shows you around says you’re not allowed to take photos, which, of course, only tempted me to snap one when he wasn’t looking.

Inside the Gulou Drum Tower. The stairwell recalls the tunnels of the Underground City, which is uncannily ironic because it was centuries-old city towers and gates such as this one that were torn down to provide construction material for the tunnels.

A brass urn in the Forbidden City. These urns held water to fight fires.

The Yonghe Lama Temple is Beijing’s Tibetan Buddhist temple and monastery. Crouched in the car park, this guy stood out as an unusual figure. I couldn’t quite place where he was from: maybe Xinjiang province, maybe Central Asia or South Asia. He was intensely lost in his thoughts.

The more I sift through the photos I’ve taken in the past ten years, the more I see how fixated I am with the patterns created by roof tiles. I loved the graceful, sweeping rise and fall of these roofs at the Summer Palace.

A window frame at the Summer Palace.

In China and various other East Asian countries, pale skin is a traditional sign of beauty, and women protect themselves from the sun by using parasols, wearing long sleeves, and, more unusually, wearing tinted plastic visors. It makes for some weird images.

View from the Oslo fjord into to the city, with new high-end residential and commercial developments replacing industrial waterfront spaces.

Satellite is asking designers to discuss issues affecting the places where they live and work. Earlier this year, we spoke to Bjarne Ringstad, a founding partner of Norwegian architecture firm Code and curator of the 2010 Oslo Triennale, about his fears that families are being driven out of the capital.
 

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What is nice about Oslo is that we’ve always had a lot of kids, a lot of families. They’d work at the shipyard and raise their kids. But now a lot of the local schools are in big pressure to relocate or just go away. We have some new laws that say they have to change their buildings and so on, and of course a lot of the buildings are very attractive for housing.

But I think that keeping these kinds of institutions within Oslo is very important. I think you should kind of have a political and architectural awareness of this kind of transformation. What we’re seeing in the expensive new residential developments by the fjord is that there are no families there. The families are moving out of Oslo, like a 30-minute bus ride away, to the suburbs.

Oslo’s growing like hell. The growth of Oslo will be enormous for the next 20 years, because we’re actually emptying out some of the rest of Norway. People are coming here all the time, but they’re establishing themselves in the outskirts.

The outskirts are really good at positioning themselves. If we do infrastructural investments nowadays, it’s primarily to work on the connection between the suburbs and Oslo transportation-wise, by rail or car. The politics around that are very good—the outskirts are very well represented politically, so they get these things done. Norway also has this very strong political movement for anything but the cities, because we try to really have big support systems for the rural areas.

A lot of people from the west of Oslo, they might have a one-and-a-half-hour train ride, and they go in and out every day. Of course you’ll find this in every city. But my point is that what is special about Oslo is that there’s a lot of space, and a lot of green space, within the city. You can go forty minutes up to go skiing in the winter, or you can go twenty minutes down and go for a swim, catch a fish at the fjord. So there’s tremendous possibility in this kind of environment, this kind of city, to make it a better place for a very broad spectrum of different people. There’s actually not any space problem at all.

The policy connecting this is not clear. The main thing is that you should have a public discussion about it. So at the triennale, we tried to address this by making a political project where the kids from the nearby schools came in. It was also about whether it was possible, in a kind of architectural way, to change urban space, for the short or longer term; to adapt to a different use. So we had some architects and some artists come. They went out and collected materials from the waste places of Oslo. I just made one rule: you can’t buy anything. You can make whatever you want, but everything has to be found. So they did, they made something, and the kids came in and they also built something.

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I first visited Seoul in 2004, when I was living in Tokyo. It was my first foray elsewhere in Asia outside of Japan. To be honest, I didn’t like it that much. It was August, and the city was hot and oppressive. I was traveling alone, and felt lonely and alienated as I wandered the streets aimlessly. My overwhelming impression was that this was a dusty, austere place—a slightly unkempt, dirty and dated version of Tokyo. But I visited again in 2010, and enjoyed the city much, much more. I was there for the Korean International Art Fair, the Media City Seoul biennial, and the Gwangju Biennial, which gave me a greater sense of purpose. I knew many more people, and it seemed that parts of the city, such as the art gallery district in Jongno-gu, had livened up a lot since my last trip. And yet, looking back, the photos I took on my first visit remain stronger and more evocative images.



A view from the observation deck of the N Seoul Tower, located on Namsan Mountain in the city center. I have a fixation with visiting the tallest building in every city I go to.



Changgyeonggung Palace. Korean palaces contain some very forlorn spaces, set off only by the beautifully colored detailing in the rafters. In this room, I was struck by how the incline of rock outside filled the view from the window, as well as the oblong of light shining on the floor.



Traditional Hanok houses in the Bukchon historic district. In Seoul, I got by speaking to people in English, and sometimes in Japanese. Young Koreans often spend few years studying in Japan and come back more or less fluent; old people may know Japanese as they were forced to learn it during the occupation (1910–1945). An old woman stepped out of one of these house and said something to me in Korean. I asked her if she spoke English, but she shook her head. I didn’t dare address her in Japanese, for fear of what memories it might bring back.



A backyard on Namsan Mountain. You have to walk up some steep slopes to reach the cable car that takes you up to the N Seoul Tower, and they afford you some great views down into people’s gardens.



Jongno-gu historic district. Six hundred year-old courtyard-house neighborhoods such as this one are increasingly rare, as some Hanoks elsewhere in Seoul are being demolished and replaced by modern buildings.



Lee Seung-taek is an avant-garde artist who has staged outdoor performances and made works of Land Art since the late 1950s, pre-dating similar, more famous movements in the United States. Entitled Tile Works (1968–88), this piece was commissioned for the Olympic Sculpture Park when Seoul hosted the Summer Olympic Games in 1988. I was one of the first people to interview him and write about his work in English.



Sanchon restaurant, in the Insa-dong neighborhood, serves Buddhist vegetarian food. They place dozens of small bowls on your table, each filled with greens that look almost identical but taste completely different, and all of them are delicious. Every evening, dancers perform. This swinging, swaying dance was the most unearthly of them all.



A perfume stall in Myeong-dong shopping district.



A vendor in Namdaemun Market. I was still figuring out how to photograph people—whether to take direct portraits or attempt to capture them without them knowing. I often concealed the fact I was taking a photo by shooting from the hip, and this sometimes resulted in unusual close-up compositions.



The Seun Arcade, a discount electronics market. I was struck by this stretch of roofing, a kind of artificial riverbed winding its way through the buildings.




A metalworker in Euljiro san-ga manufacturing arcade. Parts of Seoul still have a kind of chaos, a rawness that is left open for all to see, that you don’t find so much in Tokyo.



A scrapyard in the Sinchon-dong neighborhood. I used to take a lot of photographs of people almost consumed by their environment.



A view from the observation deck of 63 Building, formerly the tallest skyscraper in South Korea. Built in 1985, it was the tallest building outside North America until 2003.



The Han River, seen from Yeouido Island. The colors of her umbrella lit up the unforgiving blue-gray expanse of the city in front of her.

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A less-seen side of Las Vegas. More at Michael Wells’ site.

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More at http://michellejezierski.com/.

Satellite spoke to him in September. Interview condensed and edited.

In an interview for our New Orleans issue, Dan Cameron (the curator who founded New Orleans art festival Prospect) made what I thought was a pretty amazing statement: “what’s going on in New Orleans right now I would describe without any irony at all, as an artistic renaissance really unparalleled in this country.” I wanted to get your perspective on this.

I wouldn’t be able to validate what Dan is saying on a certain level, because his international perspective gives him a worldview that I don’t have. But I do know that there is a change going on here. Many, many young artists are moving here. As wonderful as that is, my question to them, usually, is have they really invested in the culture here? Because that’s two different things. You can come from someplace and continue to do what you do, or you could come to this place like Dan has come, creating a Prospect: study the city, know what the city has to offer, and therefore bring some resemblance of what’s here. I’m not sure that that’s taking place to the level that I’d personally like to see. But we’ll just have to play that out over time.

You have a city that already has a culture. People have come from all over the world because of the music we call jazz, because of what we call second line, what we call Mardi Gras Indian. The way we dance here is different than any place in the world that I’ve ever been. There are basically two cultures that are trying to move at the same time, and hopefully at some time they’ll intersect. And then they might make something that is visually very, very unique, that transcends race and class.

But I don’t necessarily see that yet. Most of the artists who have come to New Orleans, I believe, are still doing formal stuff that you could see in any other part of America. For me, the nature of what we have here—the different ways of seeing, hearing, movement that makes New Orleans so unique, because of the African tradition—has not translated to a lot of the young people yet as a form they can use. I’m sure there’s a lot of reasons why. But I’m 68, so maybe it’s too slow, maybe I don’t have that much time to wait. I want it now! [laughs] So I may not be totally fair in terms of my comment.

The city was already in the process of change before Hurricane Katrina. I think Hurricane Katrina just pushed it a little bit further. On certain levels, the disaster had its advantages, in terms of allowing a new type of people to come in and realize that they can create something without being inhibited by what we know as standard forms. It left a wide open door.

How was the city changing before Katrina?

The city, and the arts community in particular, was beginning to take itself more seriously. You had more young people going away for school or other reasons and finding out how important visual art was in other places. And all of a sudden that was beginning to come to New Orleans. After Katrina, it just doubled or tripled. Once that energy started moving, young people began to come because this was the place that they thought they could make their personal statement.

Do you feel that the arts activity that’s going on in the city now mainly involves outsiders, or is it people from New Orleans as well?

I think it’s both. I still think there are some major problems around race and class. I think that the arts community that I see, that I’m a part of, has problems in terms of addressing the entire city.

I mean, it’s very, very complicated, but there are two art communities. Being African American, I’m able to go across both lines. I have formal training, but I grew up in a situation where I had access to African-American culture, so I’ve always been involved with both of these ways of working and seeing. I think that’s what may separate my work somewhat from most people’s. As an African-American artist, I’m somewhat isolated from not only a lot of my European colleagues, but also from my African-American colleagues.

I lived in New York for twenty-some years, so moving back here is not the same as if I had stayed here. New Orleans is a very community-based place, where everybody knows everybody. And when you’re away from here for a certain time, it makes you different.

Because people knew my mother, father and cousins and all these people, that gave me an entrée. At the same time, because I’ve lived away from here as much as I’ve lived here, it gave me a way of looking at my city more as an outsider does. That helped me to see things that maybe folks who were born here take for granted, I believe. So I’m sitting in these two worlds, trying to play my unique role of being in a culture but also outside of a culture.

With the separation between the African American community and the white community, are there totally separate venues for showing art?

The format is different. I mean, when you talk about second line or Mardi Gras Indians, those are performance arts. So they come out certain times a year—Mardi Gras day, St. Joseph’s night, whatever—and they perform, they do their thing.

That’s changing somewhat. A couple of young people I know who are Mardi Gras Indians are now doing a 4″x5″ [visual art] piece, which changes the whole dynamic of what they were doing. My response is, as long as you keep your sense of integrity and the respect for what you’re doing, it somehow will translate in the work.

But in taking a Mardi Gras Indian costume and placing it within a museum setting [a Mardi Gras Indian costume was shown in Prospect 1], you change the whole dynamics of what it represents. So I think as a lot of these young people begin to explore the idea of what they want to say and how can they say it, it creates another sense of where and how they fit. Part of how we perceive art in America is based on buying and selling. So young people like to think, where’s the money? And somebody like me, I’m saying there is no money, or the money comes later. [laughs]

It’s a real tricky situation, which I’m sure could really frustrate somebody if they don’t understand the system. In New York, making pieces that express your unique need, that’s normal. You deal with hunger because everybody you know is doing that. But that’s not necessarily how it works here. Most of these young people, they are committed to their costumes for the need of making this one particular statement twice a year, to give something back to the community. That may not involve any money. But then when you take a Prospect and you place that kind of monetary value on the work they’ve done, it changes the whole dynamic. I’m not sure too many people really want to talk about that yet. But I do, because, like I say, I got one foot over here, and one foot over there.

I find that dynamic incredibly fascinating. Most art events I go to, there are very few African-Americans. That’s the reality. My statement is always, is this normal? Those are the issues that I’m trying to confront people to think about. Obviously that is not normal, but at the same time, you can’t force people to come and be a part of wherever you are just because you invite them. So it’s very complicated.

You cannot eliminate race in this. You cannot eliminate our history. But the history is a painful history. I’m sure certain whites don’t want to be a part of it, they don’t want no responsibility for it. But at the same time, you have people who live that history. In the city here, it’s more than 50% African American, so nobody’s going anywhere. So there are these underlying aspects to this that nobody really wants to talk about, and until we do, we still walk around fooling ourselves that everything is just hunky dory.

And how do you feel about arts education in the city with regards to these issues?

That was the mission part of Prospect, I thought. As an educator, I was disappointed that there wasn’t more education. Artists are looking at new ways of seeing, you know, more conceptual. And yet, there is no literature that allows you to enter the work unless you come with a certain level of formal understanding. And that’s unfortunate.

I think it’s deeper than that, it goes back to the culture. The culture has isolated art and made certain people feel that they’re not welcome. New Orleans is part of that. Just the other day I was with a group of people, and I kept saying education, education. So one person went, educate who? He wants to educate children? And I said yeah. And the conversation stops, because that was what he, as part of the cultural elite, needs. For me, man, coming out of the civil rights movement, you start with the young. But to him, he doesn’t have no time for that. I’m saying, well, there are two problems here. One of them is, do you think that these people have no worth? Which really took him to a place he didn’t want to go. Or do you believe that nobody else will support that endeavor because they may find it absolutely ridiculous? There is something wrong with both of those concepts.

I like to get people to understand that once you give me an intro to understanding what I’m looking at, I can make my own evaluation in terms of whether I want to play there or not. But as long as you keep me isolated, you can go on to anyone about how ignorant I am and how I don’t want to be bothered, which is totally not true. We have enough literature today to show how these things have worked out in terms of African-American issues, in terms of female issues, in terms of immigrant issues, how they’re treated . . . none of this is new at this point. Where we still haven’t gotten to is a need to educate all the folks who want access to this information. Because then you’re empowering people.

Music has always been put on a plateau higher than the rest of the arts in New Orleans. I was eleven years old when I decided I wanted to be an artist, and it was through an art teacher who had studied at the Sorbonne in Paris who created an art school just for somebody like me. My mother thought it was the most ridiculous thing in the world, but she allowed me to go because of who this person was. But visual art, on a certain level, has always been seen as only for a certain group of people.

But with New Orleans having such a strong culture, in terms of the African-American debate at some point somebody will hopefully get wise and realize that this is not going to go away. It has to be in every dialogue about what we do here and how we do it, and how we need to go in terms of making all people a part of what we do, beyond race and class. I may be dead when that goes on, but I hope one day it does happen. Other than that, we gonna wallow in our ignorance.

I don’t have no answers, the only thing I know is to continue to make the work I do, and tell people that this is my story.  It’s not the only story, but it is my story. My story has as much right to exist as anything else. And that’s a real power struggle, from the point of view of a society that has attempted to deny certain people any sense of equality.

I was amazed when a year and a half ago a very wealthy collector came into my studio and after about ten minutes he said, wow, you’re really bright. I’m saying, well, I’m glad to hear that, brother; I’m thinking, what the hell? Why would you come in here thinking I was some dumb dude—and here you support my career on top of that, you know?

That’s the kind of prejudice that exists when you don’t really investigate why you think certain things are less. But the culture has created this sense of what’s more important and what has more validity. My reasons for doing paper mache [in his earlier artwork] have to do with challenging what was precious. The first time somebody paid $20,000 for a piece, it was a like a joke to me. But then you realize it has nothing to do with the material, it has to do with what you’re saying. Your calling is to make the statement and be as honest as you can.

An artist will always play on that edge of confronting and challenging society in terms of how it sees itself. You know, New Orleans is a perfect canvas right now to be an example of how this world will change, and in particular how people in the United States will see each other.

In New Orleans, the level of poverty is unbelievable. I tried to get the New Orleans Museum of Modern Art to have art classes where my studio is. They threw the idea around for a while and of course they realized, maybe we ain’t ready for it. And I’m saying, you keep wanting kids in my neighborhood to come to you, but they have no sense of you. They have no sense of you as being somebody who will be fair to them, and you don’t want to accept that. What would happen if you send an artist in here? And then when those kids reach a certain age, you can begin to export them to the museum. But those kinds of simple gestures don’t seem to work here, because we don’t seem to like to look at something that will benefit a greater good unless somebody puts up some money. Everything is couched around money, and that may be part of the problem, too.

Is there anything else that you think would be good to discuss?

One of the most beautiful things about New Orleans—I always get goose bumps when I think about it—is that on any given Sunday during second line season, some young brothers will be walking down the street, with everybody going to find where that second line is. And somebody will holler out all of a sudden, “This is the greatest show in the world!” And this person may be raggedy, some of their teeth may be falling out, but yet, they have a personal pride, and understand that what they’re experiencing is a cultural phenomenon that only can be gotten at that particular time, at 2:00 in New Orleans on any Sunday, whether there’s a football game or what. That’s incredible. That’s empowering to me. It’s incredible how many times you will hear “this is the greatest show in the world.” And then you get it. You get it, you get it, you get it.

That’s my city. It’s magical, you know. It’s like no place on earth, and that’s beautiful. And if a cultural form is able to come out of here—like Cuba; like any other place in the world where people have come together to turn their experience into a cultural manifestation that is unique to them . . .  We already have that in terms of music, we have that in jazz. Lil Wayne is turning hip-hop on his head, you know what I mean?

When I decided to stay here in ’97 rather than go back to New York, that’s what I saw. I began to say, okay, there is something totally different here. And if you can tap into that, brother, you will help to start something that may last for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. Because that is the feeling of my city, and visually, that has never happened. It’s a new day, and so the visuals now have a platform. What do you do with it? Do you do the same old stuff, or do you take what the city has to offer in terms of its marshes, its crawfish, its oysters, and all of these different things that exist here, and add a layer called gumbo that makes it so unique that everybody wants a piece of that?

People gravitate toward truth and energy. And that’s what I’m trying to make happen, every day of my life. Being an artist in an African-American community is an unusual phenomenon. Those dudes around the corner, they’re selling drugs, but they all know me. They all respect Mr. Willie, because I don’t work for the man, I work for myself. And I can speak to them in a way that gives them dignity, so you got to respect that.

I don’t have a gun, I don’t carry no weapons. I’m just this old dude who can walk my neighborhood, and at some point somebody says, you know, we know him. That’s what community’s about. I grew up with that idea, and it’s part of why I think I will continue to survive, because of the nature of the respect that the community feels about what I do in depicting them, giving them another purpose and sense of who they are. That’s very, very beautiful to me. That’s what Mardi Gras Indian does, that’s what second line does. It’s magical, and so hopefully my work has that same kind of magic. I call it truth. If I do that well enough, my ego says that I will have to be dealt with. It’s a great moment for me to be alive, and to say I’m a visual artist and I was born and raised in New Orleans. There ain’t that many of us, you know.

After building up a successful DJ career in New York and Berlin, Frank Gossner spent 2005 to 2008 in West Africa, scouring old record collections for vintage ’60s and ’70s sounds. Back in Brooklyn for the past few years (although not for much longer), he has run African dance parties and kept a running log of his record-seeking trips at http://voodoofunk.blogspot.com/. Some of his finds have made their way into compilations such as last year’s Lagos Disco Inferno.

What’s your impression of the contemporary music scene in the African countries where you’ve traveled?

I’m specifically focused on music that was recorded in the late 1960s and all through the 1970s. There are some Nigerian Disco and Boogie records from the early 1980s that I’m also into, but anything recorded after that generally is not for me.

When I’m in Africa and I’m not too tired after a long day of digging for records, I sometimes go out to catch some live music, and I’ve seen incredible performances by various veteran musicians and by a few younger artists. Guinea, especially, still has an incredibly vibrant live music scene, but I’ve also seen great performances in Ghana and in Benin.

I’m not really into any recorded contemporary music from Africa (or from elsewhere in the world) because I generally can’t stand today’s style of production. All this Autotune stuff is nauseating to me.

I’m curious about how African music is changing/has changed in recent years. In trying to check out new African music I’ve been disappointed that a lot of what I’ve come across just seems like mediocre hip hop, and that the interpretations of that genre don’t really seem to be adding anything interesting the way African funk or rock bands did.

I have the same general opinion about current African pop music. I believe that in 1970s West Africa, people wanted to come up with a new sound. They played Western artists on the radio and in the clubs, and people wanted to put out music that was accessible enough to move an audience, but at the same time they wanted to have their own sound which would separate them from the rest. There was a strong, post-colonial sense of cultural identity. This is why the stuff from the ’70s sounds so powerful and edgy.

To me, the new stuff sounds weak and boring, but at the same time, I don’t want to talk down on it. I generally have no interest in top 40s pop music no matter where it comes from. I listened to punk rock and so-called alternative when I was growing up, then I got into funk and soul, and from there I got into vintage African music. I never consumed any mainstream music—never listened to the radio, watched MTV or went to any mainstream nightclubs—so I never knew anything about contemporary music to form an opinion.

You write in your blog about the network of Africans who help you look for records in various places. Are most of them also interested in music, or is it more of just a job for them? In general, are many people in Africa interested in the music you collect?

For some this is just a business, but my friend Ken in Ghana, for example, has started his own record collection and really got into this stuff. He’s started playing DJ gigs and old Ghanaian music has become the new focus of his life. To him this is much more than just about making money by selling records.

What has the reception been in Ghana? Has he found an audience there?

He’s played a few private parties that went over very well, and he recently had a guest appearance on Nigerian radio. (http://voodoofunk.blogspot.com/2011/07/ken-on-freedom-radio-995-fm-kano.html)

In general, how do the Africans you interact with react when they find out you’re interested in their old music? 

The older guys are usually very pleased with this, and they enjoy listening to some tunes on my portable record player.

Your blog talks about how some cities are getting emptied out of old records. Are there any cities/countries that you think have flown under the radar to date?

I can only speak for coastal West Africa, and I think Ghana and Benin have pretty much dried up by now. My agents in Nigeria still send me a couple of packages every month, but generally we are scraping at the bottom of the barrel. I still spend a month or two down there every year and always come back with some great records, but at the same time I’m going there to visit friends and just have a good time, not exclusively to dig up vinyl.

If you could be magically transported to any African country in any year to see music, where/when would you pick?

Lagos for the Festac in 1977, and then spend a year going forth and back between Accra, Cotonou and Lagos.

Satellite spoke to Berry in August about New Orleans and his unusual writing career.

This is probably a stupid question, but since you’re a specialist on New Orleans music—is it still really vibrant? Is it still something that’s practiced?

Oh, absolutely. The music culture here is rich as gold, especially with the number of younger musicians who come up either through the family tradition or the brass bands in the street. Thankfully more schools are slowly starting to field the music programs. One of the real problems with the gross incompetence of the public school system here over the years is that they’ve ignored music instruction, and that’s slowly starting to change. NOCA, the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts—where the Marsalises, Harry Connick, Donald Harrison and others studied when they were in high school—has a stellar program, probably one of the best in the country, but it’s very competitive. It’s typically very well-educated youngsters who get to go to that school. It’s a real class divide. A lot of younger African Americans are going to public schools that don’t have very good music programs, if they have them at all.

But having said that, yes, musically the town is generating more and more young talent. Treme, the series on HBO, has had quite an impact as well. It’s given a long-overdue spotlight to many artists who might otherwise have not gotten that kind of national showcase. Yeah, the music is rolling and swimming at the same time.

Today you hear about bounce and hip hop from New Orleans. Is jazz still a dominant art form?

No, I wouldn’t say jazz is a dominant form. It is the most rooted form. This town has a pretty good jazz circuit. A lot of the mainstream guys complain that there’s not enough attention paid to it and people don’t support it.

The real problem for jazz, not just in New Orleans but everywhere, is what’s happened to the record industry. It’s so hard to get marketing for CDs because most of the stores are closed. So a lot of the musicians sell their CDs stage-side. When they travel, they’ll take along a suitcase filled with CDs. It’s not the easiest way to move product, but a lot of people generate a fair amount of their income that way.

Alternatively, rap and bounce and hip hop have an enormous following in the working-class black neighborhoods here—and enormous crossover popularity, as we well know. Lil Wayne sold more records in 2009 than all of jazz music combined. So that’s kind of where the industry is, sadly.

But yes, jazz is doing well in New Orleans. It could always do better. But people come to jazz in the way readers find themselves drawn to a certain writer, a certain strain of literature. I think people sort of discover jazz. It’s a music of epiphanies that keeps drawing people in. Look at the continuing popularity of Louis Armstrong 40 years after his death.

How did you end up specializing in both New Orleans and the Catholic church?

I think it really springs from where I live, frankly. I was doing a lot of investigative work in the ‘70s. I wrote a lot about the IRS and a whole pattern of audits that they perpetrated on civil rights activists and newly elected black political officials. I was just starting to write about music for alternative weeklies at the time, and then gradually the music became more of an in-depth pursuit when I did the first documentary, Up from the Cradle of Jazz. The book of the same title grew out of the film.

In 1985, I got access to the depositions of the case in Lafayette, Louisiana involving (pedophile priest) Gilbert Gauthe. I did a long series of articles on that which got a good deal of attention nationally. That sent me on a seven-year trail gathering information on similar cases around the country.

So really, since the mid-’80’s I’ve sort of gone back and forth between the cultural writing and the investigative work.

Is Louisiana a very Catholic place?

South Louisiana is. There’s been quite a movement of evangelical churches in this part of the state, as there has been all over the country and the south. But when I was growing up in New Orleans in the 1950s, it was quite a Catholic society. I think the Catholicism still has quite a hold on the popular imagination here.

A lot of your writing is very critical of the church. Are local Catholics okay with that?

Well, I think local attitudes change. In ’92 when the first book, Lead Us Not Into Temptation, came out, there are a lot of people who just . . . the strangest thing about the south, particularly New Orleans, is that people are polite. Like the old adage—you walk into a southern garden party and there’s a dead body in the living room and everybody walks to the side and says, oh, what a beautiful garden you have. They don’t talk about the cadaver. Well, people I had known really from childhood onward—friends of my parents, people I had gone to school with—would bump into me and sort of give the distant nod, as if yes, I see you, but maybe we shouldn’t stop and talk. That occasionally happened, and I think a lot of people had trouble believing that it was as serious a problem as I argued in that book.

I wasn’t really ostracized or anything like that. I did a lot of national television with that book, and many people who never read it would come up to me and say, oh, I saw you on the Today Show, or you were great on Donahue, or something like that. It was a way of acknowledging it without having to say ‘I agree with you’ or ‘this is important work’ or something like that.

And you’re working on a book about New Orleans now?

It’s really a history of the city using funeral traditions as the narrative prism. I’ve been writing about them and attending funerals—I’ve probably been to at least 150, maybe 200, by now. They are major events here, and until fairly recently very little was written about them. You’d always see photographers—it’s sort of a joke, you know, these are media feasts, because the cameras show up. Sometimes the TV stations go out, and sometimes there are documentary crews there. But rarely do funerals get covered in either the daily papers or the alternative press. But I find them such absorbing events. They’re really like urban pageants, and they’ve changed greatly over the years. A lot of what I’m doing is following the evolution. I treat funerals as a story-telling tradition.

I’m interested in where New Orleans is going and how this city is kind of reimagining itself. We’re six years now since Katrina and there are a lot of encouraging developments, but we’ve still got a long way to go in other respects.

Do you have a thesis so far about the future of the city in the next couple of decades?

I think New Orleans will continue to be a city of love for people the world over. People come here because they’re drawn to the mysteries of the place and the sort of elemental lyricism of the town. It’s there in the music, in the parades, in the way people walk, certainly in the carnival parades. It’s a city that exists outside of time, almost. I used to tell buddies before the hurricane that nothing important happens here except culture, and that happens a lot.

Since Katrina, for obvious reasons, there is a greater sense of urgency about New Orleans. And a lot of that I think today is tied to the poverty and the crime. We’ve had a large infusion of federal money to help homeowners. It has been a flawed process, to be sure.  But a lot of people have come back. And most of the people who have not returned were poor. Many of them lived in housing projects. I got into titanic arguments with friends of mine, liberal Democrats, who lined up four square behind Nagin and the city council when they decided to tear down the housing projects, which I thought was just horrific. I mean, here you have very solid, well-made structures that dated to the New Deal. Nicolai Ouroussoff, the architecture critic of the New York Times, did a really fine piece on the aesthetic quality and durability of these housing projects. Yes, there were certainly lots of drugs being dealt. There were teenage girls who were pregnant without young men to raise the children—all of the things that retarded the healthy development of the city. But to blame buildings for what is going on inside them is rather irrational.

Nagin got elected with 80% of the white vote in 2002. He was a refreshing candidate, a conservative businessman, a Democrat who was making noises about cleaning up city hall. He seemed to really get it about the music industry, which was kind of a sleeping giant at that point. And then after the hurricane he made a complete about-face and turned into a demagogue in order to get black votes. He was portraying himself as running against the man, got elected with 80% of the black vote and about 20% of the white vote, and then proceeded to double-cross everybody. He was such a disaster.

Mitch Landrieu, who’s a forward-thinking liberal, got elected this time and inherited a government more dysfunctional than most people can imagine. I think he’s working hard to rebuild the operations of city hall. So that is an encouraging development—we have an astute, intelligent mayor who really can play in any league. I’m sure Landrieu has a future in national politics.

But on the other side we have got these rooted problems of poverty and the drug trade—the drug economy, really. I don’t know anyone who’s done the big investigative piece that links the narcotics here to the cartels in Mexico, but you’d have to believe that most of the stuff is coming in on those trade routes, however they’re established. So in a sense we’ve become kind of an exterior colony of the cartels in that regard. And when you have a city with only 300,000 people and television being basically the tabula rasa for urban crime, the nightly news is a show on homicide. We have the highest per capita homicide rate in any city in the developed world.

The easy way to cover this town is to say, well you got these old-line aristocrats with their Mardi Gras groups and parades who don’t let Jews and black people into the balls. Well, it’s true, that does exist. There are a handful of those organizations. But what is also true is that there are probably 80 carnival krewes that have parades that roll down the streets for almost a month, a solid month. It’s an industry. And there’s been this upsurge of dancing groups. My daughter’s in one, it’s called the Gris-Gris Strut. These are about a dozen gals, all in their mid-20s, and they parade in three or night of the parades at night and in the afternoons in the build-up to Fat Tuesday.

So there is a sort of ascending spirit about the place that’s quite encouraging. But in the jagged divide between the haves and the have-nots, I guess it’s like Rio with the favelas, although it’s not as bad because Rio’s a much, much larger city. But the same social dynamics are here that you find in many third-world capitals. I would guess that probably 25% of the population is poverty level or under. It used to be close to 35%, but a lot of people did not come back after the hurricane. That’s a really major problem in a society that nationally is becoming more stratified, and with the NRA practically dictating the flow of guns, we do have our work cut out for us.

Frankly, what I fear is that some riot as we saw in UK or some major event like that could really turn us into Detroit, where people just start leaving and moving into suburbs. There’s been a lot of that. I would really hope that the cultural renaissance which has taken root and seems to be moving with its own momentum, will continue. In the long run I’d like to see the rising tide lift many boats.

Interview edited and condensed.

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Louisiana native Brian Guidry paints with colors sampled from the wetlands surrounding New Orleans.

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  Steven Bindernagel
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  Steven Bindernagel

From a hitherto unpublished 2006 interview.

The public’s concept of “selling out” has changed to reflect its own tastes. For example, the early 1990′s mindset was less forgiving of an artist using his celebrity to market products than today. What do you consider the most modern definition of selling out? 

I can only speak for myself but let me make one think clear: I have no problems with people making money. I don’t believe The Dandy Warhols sold out because they set out to be popular and play the “record business game.” I, on the other hand, really wanted to learn how to produce my ideas and make recordings I like. In a live context that also means remaining true to the original sonic idea of the music and execution of the same. As well as not trying to either act like a total madman or try and control my actions. Having said that I would like to go a little deeper into what “selling out” means to my work. I believe it to mean to alter my actions to conform to some idea or norm to try and be more successful. Like trying to change my sound or style to be more mainstream (whatever that means), to alter the process of how I work in anyway, to stop learning. Hell, I would consider it to be selling out to withhold my honest opinions or to lie to anyone when asked a question.

Many artists that marketed themselves as outsiders of the system/establishment in the early or prolific stages of their careers eventually come to sell their work to be used in advertisements (e.g., The Ramones, The Cure, The Who, Lou Reed, Elvis Costello, The Clash, Bob Dylan, U2). Do you consider this compromise? Is compromise a symptom of age?

I don’t, really. People have to eat, but it does cheapen the special bond that some people have with music. For instance: I love The Zombies. I think that “Time of the Season” and the album that it came from (Odyssey and Oracle) as a landmark in recording history. It kind of made me sick to listen to the song in the context of a Tampax commercial.

How does hearing these types of songs in commercials make you feel?

It makes me upset because I use music like a drug almost. I find that certain songs that I loved even at 3 years old still hold the same power to pull me into their little world. Art can be a sort of refuge for me, or sanctuary, but when placed in the context of, say, selling soda pop–well, I don’t drink pop. I may end up just looking to another source.

Product placement in film is as old as the film industry. Now, product placement seems to have made the jump to music. Was this development inevitable? Is it reversible?

No, I think it’s ridiculous. You see, the people that own or run these companies have no idea what a good idea is. Back in the day, they would hire someone to write a jingle, but they don’t know what a catchy idea is. It’s easy to just throw a pile of money at someone and use a song that’s already in the mass culture and try and hijack it.

In the music community and in the hearts of critics, you have a lot of “credibility.” What value do you think this has? Has it limited your message?

I am touched that some people understand what it is to have ideals and respect that. I do however have real financial needs, like most. I’m lucky that I am not really very materialistic and never have been. I do, however, want to work with film makers in the future. Like I said, I don’t have a problem with making money. I look at it like this: buy what you need and take care of it. But this culture of selling people a whole life is just way out of hand. I really believe our society is on a downward spiral.

But, we give it all away for free. There is a donation paypal link for people that wish to help. You can buy the albums if you like. Or just stream them. And I insisted that Teepee Records let me put our last album there as well. I did, however, post versions of the songs that we did not complete, say, the orchestration. I believe it has helped our record sales a lot. Even after 2,000,000 or so downloads. The thing is, a lot of people love music that they can not afford. Say a poor fan really gets into it and shares it with another fan with money. They may end up seeing the shows or buying records. Also, because of the film (Dig!), a fair amount of smart people went online to find out more information about me or the band, and discovered the downloads. There really isn’t a lot of our music in the movie, and when they listen to the hundreds of songs, they really freak out.

I wish journalists would listen before they interview me. Anyone with any soul can see that there is something to be said for our body of our work.

Carpenter

Planter

Digger

Mechanic

Butcher

Father (1 child living, 1 deceased)

Husband

Dog Trainer

Clerk

If you ran a forty-acre farm, if you were large-boned and sturdy like all your family, if you were balding, if you had some grade-school education under your belt, if you were Fred Fincher.

Buried seventy years now, in Meridian Cemetery.

Chewing and spitting phantom tobacco in your sleep, cracking knuckles under the sheets, muttering—Oh God I am so tired.

Hannah Chalew

Hannah Chalew

Hannah Chalew

Hannah Chalew

Hannah Chalew

Art from New Orleans’ Hannah Chalew.

You look over your shoulder at the woman again, and she smiles at you, her lipstick only minutely darker than the frames of her sunglasses. She has a small, round mouth and full, doughy cheeks that make you think of a blowfish. You imagine a lot of men would find her desirable, though at the moment you are simply confused.

You turn back to the elevator and readjust your glasses so they rest on the very center of the bridge of your nose. She opens a mailbox and you wonder if she is a new resident. If she might be your neighbor. It would be nice to have a new neighbor, you think. You consider introducing yourself.

But it’s too late. By the time you turn around, the blond woman is on her way out the door, her hair swirling behind her, the fur of her coat shaking in the wind. You walk to the mailboxes and stare for a moment, standing in the space she had just occupied. You smell her tart, overbearing perfume. Lemongrass. But no new names on the mailboxes as far as you can tell, and you shrug as you open your own.

Inside, square envelopes crowd the metal box. They’re identical except in color; some red, others white or blue or orange. No return address. Only your name written with thick marker on the front: Leonard.

You open the door to your apartment and drop the letters onto the hardwood floor. You sit and sort them into piles by color. After counting them—there are forty-three—you open one. Inside, there is a card which has a picture of seventeen yellow tulips and one red tulip at the top-center of the photo. Glistening water droplets sit atop the petals as if it has just rained, though the sky is a solid blue in the photo. The card reads: Congratulations! You were DEW for that promotion! You chuckle briefly before realizing that you haven’t heard anything about a promotion.

You open the other envelopes and find that each contains the same card. Is this a joke, you wonder? Are they picking on you? But who would bother? You never do anything extraordinary, have never strayed from your routine; your life can’t be very offensive to anyone. But then again, maybe that’s why your company is giving you a promotion. Maybe that’s all they want from their workers. Consistency. Simplicity. Or maybe it’s all a mistake.

The next day, you walk into your manager’s office to demand an explanation, but instead the blond woman, the blowfish, is sitting behind his desk.

“Congratulations!” she says.

You step back, then stop. You were prepared to be angry, to file a complaint and let your displeasure at this joke be known. Only a small, unreasonable part of you thought that the promotion could be real, and now you find yourself in a vulnerable, embarrassing state. You are completely unprepared for this encounter.

The woman stands and walks to you, the chair still swiveling by the time she is in front of you, shaking your hand with surprising vigor. You try to pull away, but she holds on tightly and then begins to walk toward the door, dragging you out of the office.

Then, suddenly, she stops and stands straight. “I’m Evelyn. I hand-picked you.” She pokes you once in the chest, hard, just below your shoulder.

“Why me?” you ask.

At this, she resumes walking you past the cubicles, through the hallways. You keep your eyes on the back of her head, but she doesn’t turn to look at you. “Mostly because you’re a good worker, naturally. That’s how one gets a promotion, after all.”

You smile to yourself. “What am I being promoted to?”

“There isn’t really a title.” She looks at her watch and you continue down the halls. These are halls you’ve never seen before. They’re becoming narrower and the light changes from the usual stale yellow to harsh white against the clean white walls and floor tiles. There are no windows.

You reach a long stairway and Evelyn hurries up, leaning forward, the heels of her shoes precisely and uniformly set just off the edge of each step. There is no light, so as you follow, you go carefully and slowly into the ever-darker darkness. By the time the stairs are so steep that you must use your hands to navigate each step, a door appears and a rectangle of sunlight flashes into your eyes. You squint and see Evelyn’s hourglass silhouette outlined in the doorway above you.

“Come on,” she says. “We’re late. He’s already passed.”

She holds the door open, puffs her chest and exhales in a quick huff. You wait for your eyes to adjust. When you blink, you see Evelyn’s shape. It is discomforting to realize you’re now standing street-level on the same pavement you’ve used every weekday to come to work.

In your blurred vision, you spot an old man. Slowly, you take in more details: the old man’s gray hair covering his eyes, his back hunched, a look of complete disinterest on his narrow face. He carries a large tweed suitcase in his left hand, drags it across the cement inch by inch, his slippers shuffling against the pavement. He is moving at a snail’s pace.

“He’s so slow now,” Evelyn frowns. It is a minute motion: the downturn of the corners of her tiny mouth. The slight tightening of her forehead and eyes. This look is serious. Her anger is reserved, but sharp. “You can see why we decided to find someone new.”

“Yes,” you say.

“You, of course.”

“But I still don’t understand.”

“He’ll show you. Just follow him.”

You go with the old man, but it takes fifteen minutes for him to walk only two blocks. He doesn’t respond to your questions or your offers to carry the suitcase; he only continues shuffling. Evelyn has disappeared, whether down the stairs or around some corner. Eventually, the old man stops and pulls a crinkled map from his pocket. He unfolds it and his shaking hand points to a spot on the map, the spot where you are standing. It is marked with a black blotch of ink and it is only one of dozens of blotches on the map.

The old man puts the map away, walks toward a small brownstone, and opens a heavy steel door. Behind the door is a dimly lit closet, just big enough to fit you both. There are polished shoes—brown and black—lining the right side of the wall in ascending order from lightest to darkest. There are complete work outfits which vary only slightly, pieced together from neutral-colored blazers, button-ups, slacks, ties, and suspenders.

“This is my closet,” you say. “How did we get in here?” When you look back, the steel door is gone. You turn and stand facing forward.

The old man clears his throat and knocks on the wooden closet door in front of you. He cups his ear and listens for a response. You refrain from asking questions. It seems that the old man will never answer and that the answers are surely beyond your comprehension. The whole job is beyond your comprehension, but that’s why you are following him, to uncover what Evelyn wants from you.

After a minute, the old man reaches for the knob and you step out of the closet into a bright, nearly empty room that is not your apartment. Maybe others have the same closet as you, the same two extra pairs of wingtips which are identical to the ones on your feet, the same midnight blue tie with a snowflake pattern. Or: Have they cleaned out your room? Has Evelyn executed an elaborate scheme to steal your things? You tell yourself to pay close attention in the event that you are asked to recount the morning’s details to the authorities.

The light in the room is abrasive. You feel the beams on your skin, as if you are being cooked. The old man is unfazed. You try to act cool, calm. You hold onto the old man’s bony shoulder and look up at the ceiling, but there is only light, no bulbs, and the ceiling seems to be a great distance from you.

You shield your eyes and scan the area. The light bounces off the walls and floor, which are both painted silver. Then you see a brown rabbit in the very center of the room. It is sitting in the air as though it is resting on an invisible platform, chewing on blades of green grass, its mouth jerking in circles. It looks bored. But where did he get the grass, you wonder? And why is he floating in the air? As the old man walks toward the rabbit, still dragging that suitcase, you see that the rabbit isn’t floating, but sitting on a folding chair. The chair is the same color as the walls and floor, making it blend in so perfectly that it seems not even to exist. Perhaps this room and the closet are a trick of the eye, created by the dark of the closet and the light of the room. Can you trust your eyes anymore when you see the old man lay the suitcase on the floor and open it? Are there really bricks in there?

The old man bends down and begins to pile the bricks upon each other in stacks of four on the tiled floor. You force yourself forward and kneel by the suitcase. You remind yourself that this is your new position. You should help the old man. It’s a miracle he can even pick up a single brick, and here you are, a young man of twenty-nine, watching him do all the work. So you do help, and the job is done in a minute, the bricks on the floor and the suitcase empty. You stand, but the old man adjusts the bricks until each stack is four-high and lined up together like a wall, their short sides flush. You’re ashamed, how could you be so thoughtless, so ignorant of proper process? Uniformity is key. You count the stacks: eleven total and one stack of only three bricks. And then the old man moves the piles so they are side-by-side. You make a mental note of this pattern.

The rabbit hasn’t responded to your actions. It sits still, continuing to chew grass, which sticks out of its mouth at the same length as before. The old man stands and picks up the rabbit, lifting it from under the front legs, its bottom half hanging down, its long, white belly exposed. The rabbit keeps chewing. And then the old man puts the rabbit in the suitcase and flips the top closed, zipping it shut. This is simple. The rabbit does not resist. And now you follow the old man again. He is shuffling out of the closet door at surprising speed.

You and the old man walk around the block. This time, the old man lets you carry the suitcase, though it is extremely heavy, even with just a rabbit inside. Since the old man has resumed his slow pace, you drag the suitcase like he had done before, taking a small step, pulling it only a few inches and setting it down, over and over.

You wonder how this job is a promotion at all. You wonder when they’ll put your brains to use, your advanced calculations and forecasts. When they’ll ask you for your most important opinions. When they’ll request that you break the news to poor Frederick Yarborough, who is no longer necessary in the larger workings of the company and who should stop wasting so much time with his paper animals, really. But maybe that will come later. After the rabbits and the bricks.

Once you’ve walked around the block, the old man looks at his map as you stand in front of the rabbit building again. He licks his lips in wide, slow swaths with his fat tongue and then walks toward the same building. Naturally, you follow, thinking the old man must have forgotten something. You try to resist thinking that the old man is senile, that he has simply failed to remember that the rabbit has already been retrieved from that particular building.

Again you enter through your closet, though the old man doesn’t knock or wait as he’d done before. Instead, he walks right in, and this time, it is your bedroom. You put the suitcase down—carefully, so as not to harm the rabbit—and your first thought is that your bedroom is messy. There are three pens lying on your desk in no order and unindexed work papers on your bed. The pillow nearest the wall isn’t tucked in. Embarrassed, you go to the pillow first, fluffing it and placing it next to your other pillow so they are in a perfect line. Then you take the papers to the file cabinet and drop them into their proper folders: “Yang-Yoon” and “Smith-Smithe.” When you turn around, you see that the old man has already toddled to your work desk.

“Those pens . . .” you say.

The old man ignores you and gets on his knees. He crawls under the desk and takes a pocketknife from his jacket. He begins to stab into the carpet, and you restrain yourself from saying something. Maybe this isn’t even your apartment, you think. Obviously not. Your apartment is on the fourth floor of the Willis Building. But that is how you left your pillow. And the pens.

You go to the doorway and look out at the living room, the kitchen a little farther on. There is a single sky-blue duck-themed placemat on the table. Two very plain, white wooden chairs. The “Various Nuts” calendar hanging on your refrigerator which you received at a company party last November.

When you turn back to the old man under the desk, you see that he is pulling up the carpet.

You politely say, “Excuse me,” as if trying to get a waiter’s attention.

The old man stands and you see a hole where the carpet has been cut away. You lower yourself to the ground and crawl to the desk. There is a well. You run your hand over the rough limestone blocks, their dusty residue. A subtle acidic scent recalling Evelyn’s perfume puffs into the air. You look into the well, though you cannot see farther down than two feet.

You push yourself to stand. “What is this?”

The old man is lying on your bed now, his hands resting on his stomach, his eyes closed.

“What is this hole?”

He sucks in his cheeks, licks his lips, and sighs. “Throw the bunny down the well.”

You sit on the floor and wait for the old man to continue, but he appears to be sleeping. You crawl to the suitcase and unzip it. The rabbit is done chewing. Its black, too-round eyes look up at you and then it licks its paws, cleans its face. You pick it up with care, making sure to support its feet. Its body is warm as you cradle it against your belly and move toward the hole on your knees. The rabbit does not resist.

Think, Leonard, is this a test? Are they gauging your blind commitment to the company? If so, throw it in. Or are they measuring your compassion for the rabbit? No. You know, indisputably, that compassion is of no concern to them. So you drop the rabbit down the well. Closing your eyes, you try very hard not to hear its soft body smack against the limestone.

You leave the apartment through the closet and walk home, hands in your pockets. You were so frightened at the thought of the falling rabbit that you left without taking the suitcase, without waking the old man.

As you near your apartment building, you see Evelyn walking toward you in her fur coat and sunglasses.

She smiles and reaches into her coat, pulling out an envelope. “I was just coming to give you a card,” she shouts. You stand still and she walks closer until you are face to face, the points of her heels nearly squared exactly across from the toes of your wingtips.

You put your hands in your pockets and she looks around you, though you aren’t sure what she’s looking for. Then she tucks the blue envelope between your wrist and the waist of your pants. “Card,” she says.

“What for?”

“It says good job on your first day.”

“Couldn’t you just tell me that?”

“I am. Where’d the old man go?”

You shrug, realizing it wouldn’t be most prudent to tell her that you left him. “He fell asleep.”

“Ah. Well, it wasn’t too hard, was it?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You did great,” she says. “Everything was perfectly executed.”

“What are these rabbits? Where do they go?”

She pulls a silver coin from her pocket. “Bunny,” she drops the coin and it plinks against the pavement. “Down the well.”

“Why?”

“I have a meeting,” her mouth clenches into a pucker of annoyance. “Keep up the good work.” She turns and walks away.

You pick up the coin, put it in your pocket, and stand confused for a moment. Then you go inside your building and up to your apartment.

You walk into your bedroom and let out a deep breath. The old man is not resting on your bed. But then you see the open suitcase. It is exactly where you had left it. And yes, the well is under your desk.

You go to your bed and lie on your back, looking at the ceiling and imagining Evelyn’s coin falling from above you, over and over, onto your forehead. The coin grows in size and soon it is all you can see.

Evelyn leaves a card in your mailbox each day. Most only say “Good Job,” but some are weekly anniversary cards. After a month, a card commending you on your endurance. Eventually, you stop checking your mail.

You continue your work, going to the marked spots on the map and always ending up in identical metal rooms. Though you feel more lethargic after each assignment, you still maintain great pride in your work and are hopeful that the completion of this task will reveal a more fulfilling project. For now, this is your job, and as always, you will do it to your greatest ability with the utmost attention to timeliness and efficiency.

But what, you wonder, are you doing exactly? The days pass and still you know nothing of the consequences of your actions. You try to figure out where the rabbits come from and where they go. How the bricks turn up in your suitcase every morning. The metal room yields no clues. The hole seems to go on forever. You stare down the well for entire evenings, listening for a rabbit’s grunt or the trickle of water, but there is only silence. You throw various objects into the well—pens, nuts, clothes, Evelyn’s coin—but they always end up returning to where they were before. Desk, kitchen table, closet, trouser pocket. The well, it seems, only takes rabbits.

After almost a month and a half, there are only three spots left on the map. You bring the third-to-last rabbit back to your apartment, but instead of throwing it down the well, you set it on the floor and it hops around your bedroom. You’ve handled so many rabbits before without having seen one do something as simple as hop. So you watch this rabbit carefully. You see the twitch of its hind legs before it jumps, the repositioning of ears when it has heard a sound so quiet that you almost feel as though you are missing out on a part of the world that only it is privy to. And as you observe, you think: these rabbits, they’re okay.

So you continue to watch, and the rabbit—which you come to regard as Number Three—stands on its hind legs and looks at you for nearly a minute. You are lying in bed, resting your back. Your navy suit is wrinkled, dirty and dusty, but it is comfortable, broken in so that it feels soft on your body. You haven’t changed in weeks, not even for bed, and you no longer consider it important to shed one suit for another. The rabbit hops. Hop. Pause. Listen. Hop. You fall asleep.

When you wake the next day, Number Three is huddled next to the well, making a chewing motion like it had done with the grass in the metal room, though there is nothing in its mouth. You pick up Number Three and place him in your closet, shutting the door so he won’t wander toward the well again. Then you look at the clock. You’re almost late. You grab your suitcase and set off to retrieve the next rabbit.

The next morning, Evelyn knocks on your door. “Leonard!” she begins to pound. “Let me in!”

You rise from your bed and check on Number Three and Number Two. They’re side-by-side in the closet, just as you had placed them last night, and you pat Number Three on the head before walking to your front door.

Immediately after the lock clicks, Evelyn turns the knob and rushes in. “What are you doing? Are you sick? Have you read my cards? Why aren’t you working?”

“Yes,” you say. “I’m sick.”

She looks down her nose at you, her chin raised slightly.

You cough.

“You’ve missed a few days.”

“I’m sorry.”

“We need to move those bunnies!”

“Okay,” you say.

She walks to the open doorway. “Read my cards.” She pivots and is gone.

You nod and shut the door, lock it.

After collecting the last rabbit, you return to your room and open your closet to see the two you are hiding. They are very well-behaved. You set the last one on the floor next to them. It hops out of the closet, toward the well. “No,” you say. “Careful.”

In the past few days, you came up with an extraordinarily elaborate plan to save the rabbits:

1. Gather them up and put them in the suitcase.

2. Go to the edge of the city and release them into the wild.

But you’ve never been outside of the city, don’t even know where the rabbits might like to live, so you simply hope for the best. They’d at least be more happy out there than in your apartment. They could hop around and eat all the grass they wanted. They could make hundreds of more rabbits. It’d be better than falling down a well. Though, and this is your greatest fear, you wonder if the well is some sort of paradise for the rabbits, if you are supposed to drop them down there for their own good. That’s what Evelyn wants. Maybe she is well-intentioned, while you are wrong. And maybe you are causing a great deal of pain. You’ve never made a misstep by following directions, so what is it that compels you to go against your orders? You are tired. The gap in your knowledge is too great. You do not know where the well leads, but your calculations have concluded that the most likely scenario is that you are killing rabbits. And, finally, you decide that you can no longer continue dropping them into the darkness unless you know what is down there yourself.

You kneel and look at Number Three lying in the closet. It is motionless, eyes closed. Dead. Maybe from starvation. You don’t know, it still looks plump, though it feels like too much liquid in your hands. They didn’t eat anything you offered—celery, green beans, lettuce—opting only to chew on nothing while in the closet. And when you let them roam about your apartment, they hopped around lazily and then stood briefly, listening, until they approached the well and resumed their empty chewing. Even when you pet them, they regarded you as nothing more than an inanimate object, a chair or a lamp. They are oblivious to your attempts to save them. They are only rabbits, after all.

So you hold the dead Number Three over the well and then release it. It’d be the last one. You think: These kidnapped rabbits, they don’t care where they are. Still, that does not absolve you from hurting them. And as Number Three tumbles, you decide that you will set the other two free tomorrow. Yes. Tomorrow will be the end.

It is now tomorrow, though you’ve slept through the day and the sky outside is black. You are barely able to get out of bed, but still you summon the strength in order to save the last two rabbits. When you open the closet door, you are relieved to see that they are alive. You tuck them into the suitcase with one of your pillows, put on a dark peacoat, and slide your feet into your slippers. You leave after midnight to minimize the chance that you might run into Evelyn, and you walk away from your building in no direction in particular. Eventually, you will be outside the city. There will be a forest or a prairie or a swamp. There will be something, so you just go. Edge of the city, let the rabbits hop away, return to bed and sleep well for the first time since the promotion.

As you move down the sidewalk, you feel someone watching you. It could be Evelyn or a new assistant. It could be nobody. Nobody caring about nothing, you tell yourself. Don’t let them bother you. You are on a mission. Let the blowfish come stop you if she wants.

After an hour or so, you run into a row of buildings—identical, tall brick buildings with no lights shining through the windows—that block your way. You walk up the sidewalk, but the row seems to stretch forever. You see no end to the buildings. After an hour, you feel tightness in your thighs, muscles stiffening in your shoes, and you decide that you will go through the buildings-wall.

You walk to one of the doors and enter. It is your closet. Again. Of course.

Before you shut the door behind you, you turn and walk out. You go to the next building, and the next, and the next, but they are the same. You recognize the dim light, your wingtips, your old outfits. It is indisputably your closet that you keep entering. Your body shakes. Your face is hot. In the back of your throat, you taste a faint saltiness. You swallow hard and open the door inside the closet. And yes, it is your apartment. You step in and cry. It is the only thing left for you to do. And then you put the suitcase on the floor and take the rabbits out. You set them on the ground. You say: “I’m sorry.”

The rabbits hop to the hole under your desk and you crawl behind them, pushing them aside, one soft body sliding into the other. You are at the edge of the well, next to your bunnies, staring into the blackness. And you keep staring, though nothing will reveal itself. Soon, the light at the corners of your eyes disappears. You are undeterred, on your knees, searching. You’re leaning your head and chest deep into the well. But there is nothing. And you fall.

Bart Lodewijks

Bart Lodewijks

Bart Lodewijks

Bart Lodewijks

Bart Lodewijks

Dutch artist Bart Lodewijks creates chalk drawings in ordinary neighborhoods around the world.

This interview was conducted in May 2011 at MIT.

The following is excerpted from the print magazine.

Much is said about the American Empire’s diminishing power and influence in the last decade, yet the U.S. is far ahead of the rest of the world in advanced weaponry and military capabilities. The entire defense budget of China is a fraction of what the U.S. spends annually in Iraq and Afghanistan alone, yet it is widely speculated that China will become the world’s next superpower. With such utter superiority in military force, how truly weakened is the U.S. in the twenty-first century compared to the period immediately after World War II?

Well, the peak of U.S. power actually was immediately after World War II. At that point, the war had devastated the industrial world, and the U.S. had gained economically. It got the country out of the Depression. Industrial production boomed—it quadrupled. At that point, the U.S. had half the world’s wealth (which is uncanny) and overwhelming military security. And planners knew it. I mean, right through the war years, ’39 to ’45, there were high-level planning sessions about how to organize a new world system in which the United States would be overwhelmingly dominant. Their assumption was that the U.S. would dominate at least the entire Western Hemisphere, the so-called backyard, and all of East Asia, and would take over the former British Empire—which includes, crucially, the Middle East energy reserves.

As the Russian army began to grind down the Nazis after Stalingrad, their plans extended. They recognized that Germany wouldn’t survive as a major power and that these plans, the “Grand Area Plans,” included at least Western Europe, the commercial and industrial heartland of Eurasia. And then beyond that, anything.

It didn’t take long for that to start to decline. By 1947, the way it’s put, interestingly, is that the United States “lost” China. The phrase is interesting. You can only lose something if you own it. And the tacit assumption is that we own the world. So, we lost a piece of it and it’s a major tragedy; we lost China.

Then it turned out there were plenty of problems with maintaining control of Southeast Asia, right on through the Indochina Wars. I won’t go through all the details, but there were similar problems in Latin America. It didn’t just automatically accept becoming a U.S. satellite. So, the overthrow of governments, installation of military dictatorships, and a long history.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the industrial powers reconstructed, and new ones began to develop. And decolonization started to take place, making the world somewhat more diverse. By 1970, the U.S. control of the world’s wealth was 25 percent, and it’s hovered right around that ever since. Well, that’s still huge, but it’s not 50 percent. By the early ‘70s, the world was becoming what’s called tripolar, with three major industrial centers: North America, which is U.S.-based; Europe, which was increasingly German-based; and East Asia, at that time Japan-based.

Well, that’s changed too. By now it’s substantially China-based. But the idea of China as a superpower is highly misleading. I mean, Chinese economic growth has been spectacular, but its gross domestic product per capita is a tiny fraction of the U.S.’s: according to the World Bank, 5 percent. Probably understated, no doubt—maybe it’s 10–15 percent. And if you take a look at, say, the Human Development Index, they’re ranked around 90th, I think. India is probably 120th. And they have enormous internal problems—ecological, labor, political, and so on—that the West doesn’t face.

Beyond that, it’s worth remembering that China is a kind of assembly plant. So if you, say, take a look at the trade deficit—there’s a lot of talk about the trade deficit with China. Well, it’s substantial, but it’s way overstated. If you estimate it accurately in terms of value added, turns out that the trade deficit with China declines by about 25 percent, and it goes up by about 25 percent with the surrounding industrial countries: Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore. They provide the high technology, the fancy software, the parts and the components—and, in fact, so does the United States—and they are assembled in China. Sooner or later China will move up the technology ladder, no doubt about that—huge education investment and so on. It is a major player in the world, but in terms of commerce, investment, and so on. It’s displaced the United States as the major trading partner with Brazil, for example—the major country in Latin America.

And meanwhile, in other ways, U.S. power has eroded. So in the past decade, Latin America, for the first time in five hundred years, has moved towards integration, which is a prerequisite for independence. And a symbol of that is the new Community of Latin American and Caribbean States. It’s an organization of Latin American and Caribbean states which includes every state in the Western Hemisphere except for the United States and Canada. That would have been unthinkable in the past. Its first meeting is going to be in July this year. We’ll see what happens then. But that’s just one of a number of integrated organizations in mostly South America that have been separating themselves from the United States.

One sign of it is that the United States has lost all its military bases in South America. They thought that they could hold the one in Columbia, but it doesn’t look as if even that is going to work. It’s a suspicion—I can’t prove it—but I would guess that part of the reason, at least, for the U.S.’s effective support of the military coup in Honduras, separating itself from most of Latin America, even Europe, is that there is a big military base there, Palmerola Air Base. It may be the last or one of the last ones on the hemisphere outside the U.S. and Canada and the Dutch Islands.

All of this is important. Latin America is drifting away—partially, has done so. And now, in the last couple of months in fact, the Middle East is beginning to drift away. That’s the meaning of the Arab Spring. It’s the reason why the U.S. and its allies are so upset about it. It’s worth bearing in mind that for the United States and its allies, democracy in the Arab world would be a disaster. It’s easy to see why. Just take a look at the polls in the studies of Arab public opinion. Now, if you have a functioning democracy, public opinion has some role in determining policy. That’s what it means. Well, what would public opinion be in, say, Egypt? About 90 percent of the population regards the United States as the worst threat they face. They’re so opposed to U.S. policy that about 80 percent think the region would be more secure if Iran had nuclear weapons. Figures vary throughout the region, but not very far from that. In fact, throughout the whole region, about 10 percent think of Iran as a threat.

Well, that’s just totally counter to U.S. policy. It’s almost diametrically opposed to it. And you can see it beginning to take shape. I mean, the regimes haven’t really changed. Take Egypt—it’s still run by the military, same as it has been for fifty years. But there are dents. The uprising has had effects. Significant ones. And you see them in policy. A couple of weeks ago Egypt and the Egyptian military allowed Iranian ships to transit the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean. It’s the first time in thirty years. It appears that they’re going to open the Rafah border to Gaza. That would break the siege of Gaza. Egypt did manage to organize a unification agreement between the two Palestinian factions, Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank. The U.S. and Israel for twenty years have been dedicated to separating Gaza from the West Bank, and bringing them together might threaten that. It’s not clear that it’s going to work, but it might threaten that.

And it also might ease the way to a diplomatic settlement. Now, the story in the United States is that the U.S. is an honest broker trying to bring together two recalcitrant partners. But that’s just completely untrue. I mean, for about thirty-five years the U.S. has been unilaterally blocking a political settlement. We vetoed it for the first time in 1976. Take a look at U.N. votes—the U.S. is almost isolated, and that continues. There’s an overwhelming international consensus on a political settlement. Everyone knows its basic outline, and the U.S. and Israel refuse. If you move towards a political settlement, those policies are going to be undermined.

And the most serious threat to U.S. power is the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. Now, the population in Egypt is pretty strongly against it. Here, the New York Times described it a couple of days ago as the “cornerstone of stability in the region.” That’s a technical sense of stability, which is commonly used: stability means subordination to U.S. goals. In reality, it’s the cornerstone of instability in the region. And that was understood right away. As soon as the treaty was signed in 1979, Israeli strategic analysts, and I’m sure U.S. ones, recognized that the treaty effectively neutralizes Egypt, removes Egypt from the conflict. Egypt is the only significant Arab deterrent—that automatically frees Israel to carry out actions that it wants to without concern for a deterrent. And it did. It very soon invaded Lebanon, killing maybe 20,000 people, trying to establish a client regime. It didn’t quite make it. It also expanded its integration of the occupied territories—all illegal, as everyone agrees.

Well, that’s instability in the real world. But it’s called stability in the United States. And it is, in the technical sense—it means “do what we want.”

Can you give a broad overview of your thoughts about the New Orleans art scene?

Well, I think probably the most startling thing is that, as a lifetime New Yorker, what the New Orleans art scene reminds me of the most is the East Village art period of the early to mid ’80s, when suddenly it was clear that there were not enough galleries to accommodate the new generation that was coming up. It’s very similar here.

The big difference, of course, is that New Orleans is not the media center of the known universe. So not only has there been a dearth of appropriate spaces to show the work, but there has also been a lack of media attention. No one nationally paid any attention to New Orleans art until after Katrina, and at that time it seemed in a way that it was largely out of a feeling of loss, or the responsibility that comes with loss—having almost witnessed the destruction of this city, people felt, well, maybe we need to redouble our efforts to find out what’s going on there artistically. And the visual arts community there does live and work very much in the shadow of the musical community and the food community—it’s sort of the red-haired stepchild.

What’s going on in New Orleans right now I would describe, without any irony at all, as an artistic renaissance really unparalleled in this country. I’ve never seen so much talent gathered in such a small place with so few of what we are used to in New York as the standard mechanisms for achieving attention. There’s no contemporary art museum, there are no major collectors of contemporary art, and until the year before last the museum of note, New Orleans Museum of Art, had no curator of contemporary art. So there was really no platform at all for these artists to get attention.

They really only came to my attention when I started doing research for Prospect 1, and then even more when a bunch of artists’ co-ops opened up in the St. Claude area. And suddenly this new generation, this post–baby boom generation, was suddenly out front and center, saying, “We’re here, don’t forget about us!”

In those two years since Prospect 1 opened, there’s been a radical restructuring of the art community, very much in the artists’ favor. But there’s still a long way to go. Most of the truly interesting younger artists here do not have gallery representation, and the city has been kind of a closed market for most of living memory, which means that there’s no real reciprocal relationship between New Orleans and the art scenes in other cities in the country.

The possible exception is Houston, which is the city that has overwhelmingly recognized and supported New Orleans—especially after Katrina, opening up its communities and its resources. Houstonians tend to come to New Orleans more regularly than people in other places—Houston is not a terribly fun city, although it is a cultured city—and there’s just been an overall feeling on the part of collectors and curators in Houston that it’s only a matter of time before the rest of the country finds out how much talent there is in New Orleans. The size and the excitement in the New Orleans art scene certainly eclipses that of Houston, which is several times bigger and a hundred times wealthier. There’s just this sense that it’s coming, that this recognition is about to happen in a very serious way.

Why do you think this has happened—why New Orleans and why now? Who are the artists working there now—transplants who are coming to the city recently, or homegrown talent?

I think artists are very sensitive to New Orleans’ charms. I experienced this a lot with Prospect 1, where we would bring in these really seasoned veteran artists who had been everywhere and shown everywhere. They got to New Orleans and could not believe their ears and their eyes and their noses. They just felt like they had never been to a place as beautiful and inviting as New Orleans.

Since the beginning of the recession artists have looked to New Orleans, which has probably the best ratio of low cost of living and high quality of life of anywhere in the country. They’ve said, that’s the place for us to be—we can be poor in a rich city and be miserable, or we can be poor in a poor city that has amazing cultural roots and be quite happy. So there have been a lot of people moving here from cities like New York and Chicago, where it’s just a real struggle to make ends meet and to find a foothold in the art community. Whereas here it’s kind of the opposite. It’s a very supportive community. Everyone is welcome and everyone goes to each other’s openings and each other’s parties, and it doesn’t take much to break in. I think that’s something that young artists in particular feel very happy about.

Could you discuss what you see as the dying or dead liberal class and what is happening now that is different from, say, 1990 or 1980?

CH: Well, there’s been a slow collapse of liberal institutions. A kind of steady decline of labor unions, the press, liberal religious institutions, the Democratic party, so that they no longer . . . well, they speak in the traditional language of liberalism, but they no longer protect liberal values.

The decline of the Democratic party is perhaps most dramatic if you look at the Clinton administration and how there was quite a conscious effort to win corporate money, to do corporate bidding. You had a democratic administration that forced through NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), which was the single greatest legislative betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft–Hartley Act. They deregulated the banking system, deregulated the SEC, destroyed welfare . . . this was all done by a Democratic administration.

We now live in an era where liberal institutions no longer function, or at least no longer have their traditional role within society. Anybody who cares about fundamental issues of wars and worker’s rights and habeas corpus and protections against corporate malfeasance at this point has to be very naive to think that the Democratic Party is going to carry out any kind of meaningful reform on any of those fronts.

A lot of the evidence you use to support your worldview comes from American examples. With America’s declining power and influence, is it still a matter of ‘as goes America, so goes the world’? Could China or another emerging power take the baton and do some of the things that the US refuses to do with regard to climate, workers’ rights, etc.?

CH: What we’re doing is replicating China’s totalitarian capitalism, where workers have no rights; all kinds of regulations, including environmental regulations, are gutted; there are no labor laws; people are treated like chattle. That’s what globalization is about, and China is at the forefront of it. When American workers are told that they need to be competitive in the global marketplace, they’re being told that they have to be competitive with prison labor, in essence.

What about Brazil? Or the new Latin American union?

CH: The United States has allowed corporate forces, in the way other countries have not, to hollow itself out, dismantle the manufacturing base, run up the largest deficits in human history, allow its infrastructure to be destroyed. I think we have probably gone further than anyone else in terms of the corporate assault, in the sense of dismantling prosperity. That wasn’t true in China, where most people were poor to begin with. But we once had a prosperous and protected working class, and we allowed corporations to reconfigure our system into form of neo-feudalism. Latin America is a little different in that they’ve tried to fight back.

SG: Why do the labor unions have less power now than they did in the 60s or 50s or 40s?

CH: Because they’ve been broken. Only 12% of the American workforce in unionized. And there’s a huge assault on public sector unions. Look at the new batch of Republican governors.

SG: Talk about the modern rebel.

CH: Camus described it better than anyone: someone who is perpetually alienated from power, someone who is different from a revolutionary in the sense that you are always alienated from centers of power. This is the Julien Benda vision of the world, where you have two sets of principles—justice and truth, and privilege and power—and the closer you get to privilege and power, the more you compromise justice and truth. I think that in order to maintain a democratic system you need large movements in society committed to issues of justice and truth. To put pressure on the power elite, to make sure that those issues are honored by institutions and by people who hold positions of power.

SG: So last December when you were arrested during an anti-war protest in Layfayette Park with Daniel Ellsberg, did that accomplish what you had hoped? Were you surprised
at the lack of media coverage?

CH: No. It’s all we have left. If we sit around and wait for the Democrats to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they’ll never be ended. Theirs has been a long history, including 2006, where the Democrats largely took over control of the Congress over the Iraq war and yet continued to fund, and even expand, the war.

SG: Why do you think more journalists in the US aren’t defending Julian Assange?

CH: Cowardice. He certainly functions the same way The New York Times functioned of the publication of Dan Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers. Assange didn’t leak the documents, he received leaked documents, which is what The New York Times did when Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to them. There is no difference.

SG: So what made journalists more afraid now than they were in the 1970s?

CH: The whole news industry is more afraid because it’s dying. It doesn’t have the economic or political power that it once had.

SG: Would you consider yourself more activist than journalist now?

CH: No, I don’t think so. I speak out on a lot of issues, but I’m no more an activist than I. F. Stone was an activist.

SG: Your style of writing has changed since you wrote for The New York Times. What prompted this change?

CH: Well, you’re not allowed to write like that. The forms of American journalism are very constrictive, and you work within those forms if you work for an institution like the New York Times.

SG: Do you write in the style that you do because you want to motivate as well as inform?

CH: I think any journalist writes because they want to effect change, even the good journalists at The New York Times. And I was very careful about what assignments I took. I didn’t go to Washington and cover the White House. I didn’t work for business. I went to the Balkan world and covered conflicts—conflicts that often my own country had a position in, or a role in. I put myself in a certain amount of physical jeopardy to give a voice to people who, without my presence, wouldn’t have one. And there was a place for this within The New York Times. Those were the only jobs that I accepted and the only jobs that I did. So I don’t think that the change in my work is as dramatic as it might appear. Volunteering to go into Sarajevo during the war when it was being hit with 2,000 shells a day was, I think, completely consistent with the kind of work I do now.

SG: The writing is a bit more lyrical now.

CH: Lyrical? (laughs) Well, that’s because I don’t have layers of editors destroying my prose. I think, once freed from the heavy constraints that are imposed on journa-
lists at the Times, it wasn’t hard to find . . . it was liberating to be able to actually write stuff bluntly and passionately and without muting either my anger or commitment to issues of justice.

Still, any writer writes for himself, too, if they’re any good. You write to be as honest as you can. There’s nothing calculated about it.

SG: Is the artist playing his role in society now?

CH: Well, I think that that role is the same as any good writer has, which is to explicate sometimes unpleasant truths and speak about those forces that make possible transformation to a better individual and a better society. I mean, that’s certainly what the good artist does, and that’s what I think a good writer or journalist does. And yes, in individual cases, yes, it’s there in the world now. In terms of where we are in the country, it’s a pretty depressing place to be.

But people don’t reward you for virtue. If you think that the world is going to reward you for a virtuous act, then you are very naive. And when you carry out something that you think is right, the world won’t reward you, and you just have to live with that. If you think that you’re going to be lauded, praised, for doing what you believe is good, then you don’t understand how the world works.

Kyle Bravo

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Kyle Bravo

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Kyle Bravo

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Kyle Bravo

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Kyle Bravo

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Prints by New Orleans artist Kyle Bravo.

A few years back, I read Knut Hamsun’s 1890 novel Hunger and the world of literature opened up wider than I believed possible. As a book addict who had been finding it harder and harder to get excited by the offerings at local bookstores, becoming so obsessed with a book was a rare and wonderful experience. And yet I was shocked that I had been ignorant about Hamsun for so long. Why hadn’t I even heard of him?  Why aren’t Hunger and his other books celebrated the world over?

Hamsun writes unlike anyone else. Many writers today incorporate dark, twisted internal monologues into their work, but Hamsun did it both earlier and better than almost any other novelist. He was also hilarious. Have you ever been on the subway and suddenly snapped your book shut because you’ve fallen completely into hysterics and can’t hide it from the bewildered travelers around you? Most authors are incapable of inspiring such maddening joy.

After I finished Mysteries and Growth of the Soil, finding other Hamsun books became a problem. I couldn’t understand why Hunger wasn’t on shelves next to Catcher in the Rye, The Stranger, The Metamorphosis and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The matter needed looking into.

The first thing I learned is that Knut Hamsun is widely acknowledged as a major forefather of modern literature. His admirers and followers are a who’s who of 20^th century novelists: Joyce, Woolf, Mann, Proust, Kafka, Hesse, Faulkner, Fitzgerald. “Hamsun taught me to write,” Ernest Hemingway once said. He received won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920.

I should have stopped there. Looking into your heroes’ private lives is never wise. I still wish I hadn’t ever read Lou Reed’s biography (although it saved me from buying any more of his abysmal solo efforts) or learned that H.P. Lovecraft was brutally racist.

And Hamsun? In 1943 he handed his Nobel Prize over to Joseph Goebbels, Germany’s minister of propaganda, in admiration for the latter’s work. Having offered political sympathies to Germany during the First World War, with the rise of Hitler Hamsun became an unofficial spokesperson for the Third Reich. He went to see Hitler, and even though in their meeting Hamsun argued for the release of Norwegian Jews from concentration camps (which reportedly enraged the Fuehrer for days), the two men maintained a deep mutual respect. Hamsun’s eulogy for Hitler called him “a warrior for mankind, and a prophet of the gospel of justice for all nations.”

After World War Two, Hamsun was charged with treason, but was spared trial due to his deteriorating mental state. (He did have to pay a fine of 325,000 kroner for his allegiance to the National Socialist Party of Norway.) His books were burned and his reputation was nearly erased. He spent the rest of his life in and out of mental institutions until dying in 1952.

The man who should have been an international icon instead ended up a sad, crazed pariah. In recent years, there has been increased interest in his books, as readers around the world—myself included—find themselves captivated by his work. As his biographer—a fellow Norwegian—wrote in 2009; “We can’t help loving him, though we have hated him all these years . . . That’s our Hamsun trauma. He’s a ghost that won’t stay in the grave.”

What aspect of African music do you focus on in your academic work?

I’m writing about benga music, which is sort of the Kenyan equivalent to what Sorry Bomba was doing in the ‘60s and ‘70s. It’s the Kenyan form of rock and roll, basically, using the same type of format, a small band with electric guitars and drums. All across Africa between the ‘50s and the ‘70s, in almost every country, this style of music featuring this kind of format developed. I work on a particular kind of benga music in Kenya performed by the Luo ethnic group, so all the music is sung in the Luo language. It has similarities with Congolese rumba music, Tanzanian rumba music. But it’s a very particular, local Kenyan style.

Is that style of guitar bands still popular? Everything contemporary that I’ve heard sounds really synthesizer-y or rap-influenced. Has that moment just passed, or is it still going on in some places?

It varies from place to place, but it’s still pretty intact. That older tradition is still going pretty strong, but things have definitely changed recently.

The younger generation in a lot of places in Africa has embraced the newer music, like rap, hip-hop or dancehall music. The availability of cheaper recording equipment in the past ten years has helped that drive. In the ‘70s the only way to record music was going into a studio, and that was all oriented towards these guitar bands. Nowadays there’s a lot more flexibility. It’s a lot cheaper sometimes to make music with this rap- and dancehall-oriented stuff. The musicians themselves don’t really need to put together a band; they can collaborate with a producer or something. It’s a really self-contained operation.

But despite that, the guitar bands are definitely still thriving, I think. In Kenya you can still easily find bands performing all over Nairobi. Out in the rural areas, especially like in western Kenya, where the music I have studied comes from, you still find electric guitar bands performing in little bars all over in small towns. And certain countries in particular that really had a thriving music scene with bands—like the Congo; Mali, where Sorry Bamba is from; Guinea also—in these countries, they’re really well-established.

What do you think of the upswing of interest in African music in the U.S. and Europe in the past couple of years? Does it seem like there is one to you?

Yeah, I’ve noticed that, for sure. I guess that’s great. African music really never caught on too well in the U.S., and a lot of times it has been presented as more of what you’d label as traditional music. Which is still vital over there, at least more rurally based styles. But the music that has really been driving music scenes over there, and that African music fans have really gotten into, is the more contemporary and popular stuff. So the fact that that’s been catching on is good, because it’s more in sync with what people are into over in Africa.

A lot of times I think things which have been getting put out here are maybe not as popular over in Africa, though. Like, for example, Fela from Nigeria. That’s become really popular, almost to the point where people see him as the number one pinnacle of African popular music. But in reality he wasn’t really that popular outside of Nigeria, whereas I think you can say more accurately that Franco and his band OK Jazz, from Congo, is an overall African superstar. Sometimes these new records that come out are driven by the tastes of Americans and Europeans. But at any rate, I think it’s all good for musicians over there to have their music promoted, and to have more interest in the history of their music.

It’s an interesting time for African music. Ten years ago it would have been hard to imagine Thrill Jockey releasing a record by Sorry Bamba, even though they have such a wide range of stuff. That wouldn’t have ever occurred to anyone. So I think the fact that people who are interested in new music are getting turned on to African music is really cool. And I’m glad that it’s becoming available through outlets that previously had no involvement with it. Before there were maybe a few different outlets that you would go to if you wanted to hear any kind of African music, and now it’s become more a part of record labels too. I just hope that it is maintained and nurtured even more.

But the music business is not in as good shape as it used to be. It’s unfortunate that this wasn’t happening when people were really spending a lot of money on CDs and stuff like that. It’s happening at a time where you can just search on the Internet and find a lot of this stuff for free. Hopefully the music business can continue to thrive in some way, with the new level of interconnectedness made possible by the Internet. All the new ways of communication really help with things like promoting African musicians.

Are there any trends or groups that you think are really exciting that are working there now?

It’s hard for me to say, because for the past couple of years I’ve been so emerged in writing the dissertation that I haven’t really been keeping abreast of new stuff. I think that it’s at a transitional point. You have younger people coming up with a different sound that uses keyboards and drum machines and that type of stuff, and then the older traditions of using guitars and bands still exist. I think in the coming years there should be a lot of interesting stuff coming together as these younger musicians mature and develop their trends, and continue to participate in these older trends as well. I think the way that the young and old will interact will be interesting.

There are already signs that new things are happening, at least within the music I’ve been studying. For about the past five years the music I’ve been studying, benga, has been really challenged by another style called ohongla, which is all based on keyboards. It references a lot of traditional elements, but at the same time it’s really contemporary. To me it doesn’t really sound traditional, but there are certain things about it that appeal to their traditional sensibility, in terms of the lyrics and maybe some of the instruments used. But at the same time they’re using synthesizers, which is a real new thing for Luo musicians.

So I think as things like that interact with older stuff like guitars we’ll find new things emerging. But the process is really always going on all over the place with music. Every few years something new is coming together.

Do you plan to keep working with Extra Golden, or do you want to go the academic route purely?

No, I want to keep going with the bands. It’s a lot of work to maintain a band, so I wasn’t really able to concentrate on finishing my degree. So we’re just having a hiatus, I guess, right now. But we worked on a new album about a year and a half ago, and we’re going to finish that up and release it and probably do some more shows.

And then one of the guys from that band [Extra Golden] lives in the U.S. now, and I usually play in a band with him and some other Kenyan guys, performing just straight-up benga music. Whereas our band is trying to do more of a hybrid with rock-and-roll, this band’s more of a faithful performance of the Kenyan style.

But yeah, as I get into the academic side I definitely want to maintain my involvement with performing, and also trying to produce recordings and promote music.

Sorry Bamba in Mali.

How did the Sorry Bamba album come together?

I first heard Sorry Bamba back in about ‘92. I was in college then; I went to college with Alex Minoff. We had both gotten interested in contemporary African music, and I had learned a had little bit about Malian music through some courses I had taken in African music there at Oberlin College. So I went to the library, looked up some stuff. Back then they didn’t even have computers, it was card catalogues. They had a collection of records that were produced by a German label. These were a series of releases of Malian music from about 1970, recordings of different regional orchestras in Mali. I was really struck by how interesting the music was, because they were performing a lot of traditional Malian songs using a really contemporary sound of the ‘60’s, the electric guitar band.

That was one of the first things that really got me into the African music—seeing how these guitar bands were coming up with new sounds based on their folk traditions as well as trying to come up with a modern sound on the guitar. Back then our band was trying to write a few songs and come up with something unique, so we were inspired by this music. Especially the record we found of Sorry Bamba’s, the Regional Orchestra of Mopti. We got really into that, and then over the years we thought about how great it would be to be able to buy this record, because we couldn’t even get a copy of it. The only place we could find it was in the library, and you couldn’t get a recording of it.

So then fast forward several years after our band Golden had produced a bunch of records—we’d always tried to incorporate some ideas from African music into the songs we wrote. And then at the same time I had been going to graduate school for ethnomusicology, and I ended up studying Kenyan music. And we started our next band, me and Alex, called Extra Golden. This band was another step even further towards incorporating African music. In fact, we were playing with Africans, or Kenyans.

One thing that came out of that was we started a label called Kanyo. The main reason we started that was the first time our band toured in 2006, one of the guys in our band, named Opiyo Bilongo, had a CD I had recorded while I was living in Kenya in 2003, and we wanted to release this when we went on tour. So that facilitated us starting our own label. We spent a lot of time trying to get this label going, but it never really became a full-time thing. We released that CD and another CD by a Kenyan band.

But as soon as we started this, one of the first things we decided was that we wanted to try to re-release this record, the Regional Orchestra of Mopti by Sorry Bamba. So Alex got in touch with Sorry through a friend of ours at Voice of America who was in touch with a lot of different musicians and producers from Africa, in Europe and Africa. Alex got the contact of Sorry Bamba’s partner, this woman named Lillian Rogel. He suggested our idea of trying to reissue some musical material, and they were both open to it. There weren’t really any solid reissues of his older songs. He had a lot of great stuff. And in the past five years there have been a lot of reissues of African music from that time period, the ‘60s and ‘70s, so it seemed like a good time to try to put it together.

Alex took a bunch of old records of Sorry’s. We definitely had enough material to put together something. We worked on that for about a year. We edited these things and tried to get them to sound clean, because when you’re using older records to master a new recording you’re going to get a lot of extra unwanted noise.

And then we finally got it mastered, and at that point we were ready to release it, but we weren’t really in a position to do this album justice with our label, because we had never really got it operating to a be full-fledged record label. To give the album the promotion we thought it needed would have taken us quite a lot of time and work. So we talked to our record label, Thrill Jockey, who had done our Extra Golden records, about doing it, and they were interested. And that’s how we got to this stage. We have a lot more music of his that’s really great and hasn’t been released, and hopefully we’ll get to put out some more.

Some other people from Mali, like Salif Keita and the Rail Band, have got a lot of promotion in the past two years. Sorry Bamba was a big star there, and he hasn’t gotten much exposure, so this is exciting for us and him. And I’m not sure of it’s out yet, but he was going to release a new record of stuff that he recorded recently. So that’ll be a good thing for him, too, as he’s trying to continue to promote himself. The whole thing worked out beautifully.

Interview edited and condensed.

Did my hours on the saxophone yesterday, and as I finished up, the roofers called to say they’d be here tomorrow (today) and then today they called to put me off till tomorrow.

Tough these days to keep track of time, no rhythm, week to week, whatsoever. I moved back into my house on October 10^th. Two weeks ago? Four? Months and months seem to have gone by since the storm and the levee failure, but in fact less than two have passed.

The roofers mentioned a murder over in the Marigny, about six blocks upstream from here. I drove by there on my way uptown to a dinner party earlier this evening— yes, right across the street from my good friends Gabour and Faun, right where we had changed that tire a few weeks before (my third popped tire since I returned). Swarms of cops, media trucks, forensic experts. I rolled down my window and asked the neighbors who were huddled together on the corner what was up. One of them, a youngish woman in a sweatsuit and flip-flops, leaned into my window and, in a curt whisper, told me. A woman stabbed to death in the kitchen, and a middle-aged gay man, the owner of the house, beaten so badly he was hospitalized in critical condition. No signs of forced entry, so the assailant was someone they knew. Same deal around the corner from Gabour and Faun in early August, a few weeks before the storm, another middle-aged gay man slain, the knife left sticking through his chest into the floor, a colossal thumbtack. In the second case, the middle-aged gay man survived but his neighbor-friend was hacked up fatally.

When I got home tonight from the dinner party, the electricity was out. This time, though, it wasn’t out just below Elysian Fields, as had been the pattern lately—rather, everything below Canal was engulfed in blackness. A heavy storm had passed through town mid-evening, and there was a bigger one predicted for later tonight. No one around.

I got in the house, felt around for lighters and candles, got those set up, and sat back on the couch to make these notes in my journal.

The silence was absolute. I sat there for a moment, reflecting on how perfect the silence was, and then, in the next instant, a noise in the kitchen. Something had moved back there, been knocked over or bumped, something small, but the sound was big enough to travel through my study and my dining room to reach me in the living room. The cat had been sitting right next to me in the living room—she too was startled by the sound and crept down from the sofa to crouch in the shadows of the coffee table and watch intently in the direction of the kitchen.

Had to be a mouse in the garbage can. But if it had been a mouse, the cat would be charging after it.

Larry. There is a guy named Larry, short, wiry, intense, pedals around on a bike with a bucket full of stuff for washing and waxing cars. He used to bang on my door every few weeks and badger me into letting him wash my car for ten bucks, which meant unlocking the gate at the side of the house so he could turn on the hose. I agreed a few times. Then he started asking to borrow my car. Once, I thoughtlessly let him come into the house to take a leak, even though there is a vacant lot behind my house. As he strolled back to the bathroom, he was unmistakably casing the place. Would he try to get in here to kill me for my car keys? Yes, I think he would. I assume he ended up in the Superdome or the Convention Center, after some rough days on a roof. But where was he now? My kitchen?

I noticed on the news this morning that the last murder in New Orleans before Katrina hit occurred two blocks from here, corner of Montegut and Saint Claude. Tracy Bridges, aged 34, shot to death right there in her home on August 27^th, the day of the mass evacuation and my drive to Louisville. And now the first post-Katrina killing happens across the street from Gabour and Faun. And now there’s a furtive sound of something moving in my kitchen.

An essential rule of life in New Orleans, the entire time I’ve lived here: be very careful who you let in your house.

Mike-from-down-the-street seems to be the only other person on the block these days. He’s a carpenter, and he agreed to gut my kitchen and laundry room, where the roof was torn off and a lot of water came in and made a mess of things. I like the guy. I really do. But there are problems. Two days ago, he was working in the back of the house, making steady progress, but then he slipped away without saying a word, left the back door unlocked and the gate unlocked. When I got home from wherever I had been and walked back to the kitchen to say hello and see how he was coming along, I saw that he had left everything wide-open, and my first thought was that something horrible had happened to him.

All of this—Larry, Mike, those murders over by Gabour and Faun, the roofers, Tracy Bridges—rushed into my head as that sound from the kitchen reached my ears.

I put down the notebook and walked back there. Nothing. After double-checking the locks, I moved all the candles up to my bedroom. Then the winds began.

*   *   *

Two days ago, the police gave me a panic attack. I had stretched out on my couch at exactly 4:20, and soon thereafter heard black voices in the street, then a few more, and finally got up to look—and there were some NOPD, and then I realized there were at least three cop cars in front of my house—two parked across the street where the old drunk used to park, one behind my car. There might have been others. And, then, yes, there were more, and then a few more cars carrying still more. I didn’t want to stare. But there were at least thirty officers of the NOPD gathered right outside my front door. They did not knock on my door or shout anything in my direction, nor, as far as I could tell by peering through the slats of the old wooden shutters, did they have any interest in any of my neighbors.

They were talking in a jovial mood, but there was an undercurrent of menace rolling from them, because they were a large group of cops. And soon there were still more.

I had no idea what was happening, and I still don’t. Feeling wildly paranoid, I just fixed my attention on the clock. Nothing important, really, but if they were about to mistake me for some kind of major-league troublemaker, kick in my door, and kill me, I guess I needed to observe my final moments on earth as a distinct set of moments, like the condemned man who who sincerely wants to know what time it is, how much closer to the big moment he is than the last time he asked. And so, I can tell you that it was exactly 4:54 when I heard their car doors slamming, engines turning over, and the sound of them all zooming off. What was that all about? I heard the word “roadblock,” but used jokingly as in “Ha-Ha-Ha-We look like a roadblock.” What were they doing? I didn’t consider opening the door to step out and start asking questions. Ten minutes later, my heart was still pounding.

Obviously, they had wanted to have a discussion that could not happen at headquarters nor go via radio over the airwaves.

Normally, there are zero police in this end of town, and if I called them I doubt they’d come.

I was flipping out, in part because a few days earlier I had heard some horror stories about the NOPD. I had bumped into a former graduate student from a few years ago at the video store around the corner. He told me that he had been arrested the previous week. He had been leaving the Sugar Park Tavern on his bicycle, decided to turn on a little headlight on his bike to keep from weaving into a pile of debris, but the light had alerted some cops down the block who stopped him, cuffed him, and threw him their car. They charged him with 1) being out after curfew, 2) being drunk, and 3) something else I can’t remember. The cops, he told me, were out of their minds and had said to him, “There’s no one out here—we can do whatever we want to you—we can kill you.” And then when he got to jail, he saw people being stripped naked and beaten up, saw a woman forced to piss herself. Weird, sadistic behavior. Granted, this guy is not exactly full of common sense or keen wit, and he should have known better than to be out at 2:30 am, drunk, with a light on his bicycle, but what he experienced with the cops confirmed my biggest concerns about being here. The  NOPD had been spiraling downward for a long time, at least since Chief Pennington left, arguably much longer, and Katrina had blown them way past their personal and institutional vanishing point. Thus, the name of the game: do not go out late and do not go out alone. And again: be very careful who you let in your house.

*   *   *

When I first came back to town, I had gone over to Markey’s Bar late one afternoon. The place was about half-full, but there was no one I recognized, which was odd, because normally I know at least a dozen people in there. Even the bartender was a stranger. I spotted Roy, the owner, down at the far end of the bar. I approached him without thinking and said, “Roy.” He looked past my shoulder into the distance, then gave a slight nod as he turned his gaze to the floor, and then he turned his back on me. His way of saying welcome home, which was also his way of saying get lost.

Hung out there for maybe forty-five minutes, went down to Washington Square Park, where they had free food. Passed by DBA (not open), spoke briefly on the sidewalk
with a friend who makes her living crooning old-time jazz, and who, mid-sentence, lifted a tampon from her purse, eyes ablaze with the lucky discovery, and excused herself as she spun on her heel to stride triumphantly across the street to squat between two parked cars.

Ran into Tom Saunders in the food line in the park—he was like Roy, only less rude. Just sullen, dumbstruck, not up for small talk. Like everyone else I ran into, myself included, he was essentially swallowed up by the silence.

Came back here and had a long chat with Mike-from-down-the-street. This was when he agreed to be my carpenter, but he was slippery about the matter of schedule, and it seemed wrong at the time to press him on this point. He told me that he had not evacuated before the storm—had just checked into a tall hotel in the Central Business District, then drove back to his house the next morning. He stayed here for about five days, when A. J.’s Produce in the warehouse on the next block along the river exploded, he said, like the sudden eruption of a volcano. He had spent most of the previous three days rescuing fat people and small children  from the neighborhood across Saint Claude in his canoe, paddling with them over toward the interstate, where he turned them loose at the foot of the on-ramp. But, after a few days, the people who were still around seemed increasingly desperate and dangerous, and also increasingly organized for ambitious looting.

What utterly flummoxed him, he said, was the absence of outside leadership, the absence of anyone not from the immediate neighborhood. “No Feds and no figureheads of any kind—no Rush Limbaugh, no Bill Cosby, no Schwarzenegger, no Muhammad Ali, no Jay Leno, no Oprah.” All of these fixtures of the culture simply absent, their people left behind.

Most of them didn’t know Royal Street, where Mike and I have our houses, was dry; instead, they moved by one means or another toward I-10, where they would use one of the on- or off-ramps, whichever was nearest, to access the dry, sunwashed height of concrete above, and then, eventually, a ride to wherever.

But some did come walking up Royal, right past my house, where I sit with this notebook right now, not looking back at all, knowing full well that what lay behind they would never see again.

Photographer Stephen Hilger has spent the past three years documenting the destruction of Lower Mid-City, a New Orleans neighborhood chosen to serve as the site of two new hospitals. The controversial project touches on many of the key issues which the city has grappled with while struggling to rebuild after Katrina: history vs. progress; cultural distinctiveness vs. economic growth; poor vs. rich; black vs. white.

When Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, Charity Hospital, a massive art deco buildng which had provided health care to the majority of the city’s uninsured for decades, made national headlines as several hundred patients and healthcare workers were trapped inside for days without food, water, or electricity, with dead bodies stashed in stairwells. After the storm the facility was shuttered, leaving many city residents unsure where to turn for medical attention.

Meanwhile, Louisiana State University and the Department of Veterans Affairs had been discussing plans to build new hospitals. The groups sought support and funding for their plans on the grounds that Charity was no longer usable, arguing that two new state-of-the-art facilities would attract medical talent to the area and create jobs for city residents. Their proposals were approved, and a 70-acre section of Lower Mid-City, a residential neighborhood near the central business district, was chosen as the site for the new buildings.

A number of community activists and historic preservationists strongly disagreed with the plan. Rather than destroy a neighborhood, they claimed, the city should modernize and reuse Charity. They hired the architectural firm RMJM Hillier to conduct a full independent assessment of the existing hopsital, which was declared fit for renovation into a state-of-the-art  facility. The architects also said that restoring the existing structure would be significantly cheaper and faster than building from scratch, and made the case that a functioning, centrally located Charity could play a pivotal role in revitalizing the city’s struggling downtown.

Many also found the choice of Lower Mid-City as the site for the new hospitals problematic. With a colorful history stretching back over a century, the area  was in many ways classic New Orleans—a vital working-class neighborhood where New Orleans culture had been created and lived for decades, with a rich architectural, musical and artistic legacy. Hit hard by Katrina, it had seen many of its residents return to painstakingly rebuild their homes, businesses and communities.

In addition, the demographic makeup of the population slated for removal made the new hospital plan politically suspect. In recent years, approximately 90% of neighborhood residents have been minorities, with around half living below the poverty line. The socioeconomic dynamics led the National Trust for Historic Preservation (which in 2008 named Charity and Lower Mid-City among the 11 most endangered historic sites in the country) to criticize the hospitals project for following “a classic Urban Renewal clear-the-land model, demolishing vast numbers of homes in a city desperately in need of more housing.”

That moment came for me on a recent Tuesday. I was playing human slalom in the tunnel that connects the F line to the 1/2/3. I paused from studying the gum-speckled floor and looked up. From the wall, a man with a prominent brow peered at me while  a red liquid ran down his forehead and soaked into his white dress shirt. He was clean-shaven and wore a malevolent smile that looked like something a speed-addled thirteen-year-old would carve into a pumpkin with a bent spoon. An infant who looked like an extra from Children of the Corn was perched on his shoulders. Two lines of text floated near the child’s head, informing passersby that the man’s name was Dexter and that he was the “World’s Most Killer Dad.” We were all invited to learn more about him on Showtime, Sundays at 9 pm.

I shook my head and wondered how I could have walked by such a bizarre image so many times without noticing it. I kept moving. I shuffled through the remainder of the tunnel, traversed a small landing, and descended a single flight of stairs. Advertisements were never out of sight. Inside an uptown train, they pleaded to me from the ceiling and walls.

Since that morning I have tried to keep track of all the advertisements I see in a given day. I pay particular attention to outdoor advertisements because there is no practical way to avoid them. Starting with the presumption that nothing existing in such abundance can have a null effect, I decided to investigate how outdoor advertising changes the city and the people who live in it.

* * *

I used to think of advertisements as requests for transaction (Please, buy my product), but I have come to think of them as transactions in and of themselves, little bits of attention sold for a price negotiated and collected by a third party. Which raises the question: what does it cost each of us to lose what the city sells on our behalf when it leases public space to advertisers?

Trying to answer that question, I called Sharon Zukin, a sociologist and author of the recent book Naked City: The Life and Death of Authentic Urban Spaces.

Outdoor advertising on public property “may really have the serious impact of furthering people’s acceptance of market transactions as being the basic form of human behavior,” Zukin said. “That, I think, is really dangerous.”

Dangerous maybe, but not controversial. Most people, she pointed out, don’t think there is any cost associated with absorbing the message that market transactions are an essential part of life. Most don’t even notice, and those that do don’t question the fact that the city is leasing public space to private parties and facilitating free-market evangelism. The practice is so long-standing and common that to most people it seems “there is nothing to question,” Zukin said.

If she is right, then every advertisement broadcasts twin messages. Dexter is saying that we should watch his show and that turning on the television is part of a normal day. The steaming cup on the Starbucks billboard is selling coffee and promoting the idea that lethargy is best dealt with by making a purchase. The three entwined, underfed models on the Calvin Klein billboard are selling jeans and saying that sexual desirability is related to buying clothes.

Each is saying that market transactions are as natural and inevitable as relaxing at home, waking in the morning, having sex. And outdoor advertising conveys that message with remarkable efficiency because it can “adjust to, and tap into, the linear rhythms of commuting to work that are linked to the cyclical, bodily rhythms of sleep, waking, and work.” I found that passage in an academic paper entitled “Advertising and the Metabolism of the City,” written by British sociologist Anne Cronin.¹ I struck up an e-mail exchange with Cronin, who is one of only a few people to have specifically studied outdoor advertising.

Cronin reinforced the idea that advertisements influence our experience of daily life. “There is evidence,” she wrote, “that people understand their cities, and even wider issues such as politics, through their everyday urban environment—so an ‘urban vernacular’ that is composed in part by ads may influence how they see the world.”

Catered to our travels, outdoor advertising reinforces the idea that purchasing is an essential part of life and suggests what purchase would best accompany the next phase of the day. Leaving work is about visiting a restaurant, maybe eating a frozen, precooked meal, turning on the television. The end of a long day is about drinking liquor, cavorting with the mostly nude women that accompany it on billboards. Hating your job is about registering for classes at a for-profit vocational school. And those miserable, groggy mornings when the trains crawl and shudder and you want nothing from life more than you want a break from your commute—those are about visiting whatever vacation destination is being hawked on MTA property (Aruba, most recently).

Consuming these messages in public spaces also distracts us from the fact that we are in public space. Purchasing is an individual activity. Even as we become part of a crowd, travel through subway tunnels, and share bench seats, we consider the advertisements around us and feel they are speaking to us as individuals. We forget that we are a crowd. We are millions of credit cards bumping and jostling against each other.

It is reasonable that private property, itself concerned with the market economy, should spread an atomizing, free market message. I expect small businesses and chain stores and office buildings to lease their outer surfaces. But I expect more from public property. I expect it to spread messages produced by or beneficial to the public. Not long ago, that was very nearly the case.

From the 1970s until the early 1990s, New York City’s trains were canvases. Graffiti artists rode the subways armed with fat caps and etching fluid. If all they had were the keys to their apartment, they gouged their mark into a vinyl seat. Train walls, ceilings, floors, and benches were a haphazard orgy of noms de guerre, cartoonish landscapes, bubble letters, and colorful tableaus. Some designs were breathtaking, intricate, sublime. Others were nothing more than scribbling, a few jagged lines scratched onto a window pane. The discourse was profane and lovestruck, boastful and obscene, utopian and angry. But it wasn’t trying to sell you a thing.

Most claim New York’s graffiti movement began in 1970, when a young Greek from Washington Heights started scrawling TAKI 183 throughout the city and on subway cars. Others emulated him, and by summer of 1971, he was, in his own way, famous. The New York Times caught up with TAKI (real name Demetrius) who explained himself by saying, “You don’t do it for the girls, they don’t seem to care. You do it for yourself. You don’t go after it to be elected President.”

The Times put him on page thirty-seven, and thus was born a contentious movement that divided the public, defended by artists and academics and alternately ignored and obsessed over by politicians.

In 1973 Norman Mailer penned the introduction to a book about NYC graffiti and claimed that the art form “provokes and demands that an indifferent world recognize the individuality, talent and existence of its creators.” That same year, New York Magazine asked pop sculptor Claes Oldenburg for his thoughts, and he provided them a spirited narrative. “You’re standing in the subway station, everything is gray and gloomy and all of a sudden one of these graffiti trains slides in and brightens the place like a big bouquet from Latin America.”

Graffiti gained ground steadily for years, partly because the recession of the early 1970s left the city without the means or the will to combat it. The initial police response to the movement was anemic, and by the time Ed Koch became mayor virtually every train in service had been covered by graffiti writers, inch for loving inch.

When Koch took office in 1978 the city was in financial straits, and so was the country. The new mayor feared that the output of New York’s indigenous artists would destroy the city’s chances of luring tax-paying corporations to the city, so he declared a “war on graffiti.” In a pamphlet advertising the campaign, Koch wrote: “In this period of intense competition between cities and regions for corporate investment, we simply cannot allow this type of vandalism to continue to label New York City as a blighted town.”

Thinking back on that time, Koch recently told the Wall Street Journal, “Graffiti is graffiti, and it’s disgusting and destroys the neighborhood.”

In that “disgusting” period, the city did not just receive messages and prompts, it sent them by the millions. The walls did not only belong to people who could afford to lease them. The frames holding billboards and posters were not recognized borders. Public space wasn’t something you just passed through, it was something you interacted with. The trains carried messages to the world, and none of them were preceded by a dollar sign. The city conversed. Graffiti was the heterogeneous expression of thousands of individuals, not the slick salesmanship of a handful of corporations, and combating it required an impressive coterie of institutions and political and cultural figures.

To fight his “war,” Koch created the Mayor’s Anti-Graffiti Task Force and filled its ranks with representatives of the city’s business class, McDonald’s, Macy’s, and Con Edison among them. The task force launched a public relations campaign featuring major cultural figures. On one typical poster, Joe and Marvis Frazier glared menacingly beside the caption: “We got where we are by messing up other fighters, not by messing up our city’s walls.” The campaign’s materials were produced by advertising firms that joined the task force and provided their services pro bono.

Koch bolstered the public onslaught with thirty police officers, assigned to the Transit Police’s Vandal Squad. They made about 1,000 arrests a year throughout the 1980s. And the mayor had double lines of fencing installed around the train yard in Corona, Queens. German shepherds ran the circuit between the fences, snapping and snarling at any graffiti artist thinking about braving the razor wire.

In time, graffiti receded from public space. The effect of stiffer penalties, more police, and the natural tendency toward entropy that every cultural movement contends with combined to wipe train walls clean—and then cover them anew, this time with Dexter’s ominous grin.

* * *

Of course, what I’m remembering isn’t a time when advertising was absent from public property. There was less of it, and the city’s relationship to it was different, but it was still present. It always has been.

“Cities have always been ‘commercial,’” Cronin wrote me. Advertising has been seen in public spaces almost as long as people have been gathering together in large numbers. The extent of its presence on public property has fluctuated, but it has always been there.²

The shift that I have noticed in New York over the last two generations—from walls covered with graffiti to walls covered by advertisements—is the result of “intense stress in Western cities” to adopt “urban entrepreneurialism.” As Cronin told me, “cities are supposed to make money and thus be funded less by central government sources.”

Urban entrepreneurialism took root in most advanced capitalist countries after the recession of 1973–1975, which coincided with other major changes in the world’s economies. The power of nation-states to regulate money flowing across borders declined during the late 1960s and early 1970s, making capital dramatically more fluid than ever before. Mechanization and inexpensive long-distance transport allowed corporations to move where they pleased, which freed them up to shop for cities. With central coffers hemorrhaging red ink, large companies promised to move, and bring jobs, to any city that offered low wages, clean transportation, advertising space to hawk their products, and sufficiently venal politicians—all of which created the “intense competition” that motivated Mayor Koch to power-wash trains and lock up graffiti artists.

Adding to that stress, President Nixon announced in 1972 that he considered the country’s urban crisis to be over and that federal money would no longer flow freely to troubled urban areas. To maintain themselves, cities made money where they could. They became both marketplaces and products packaged and sold by mayors. Public resources were privatized, and public space was rented to advertisers. In the wake of the recession, cities across the country decided to make themselves more dependent on the free market for survival, virtually guaranteeing that the next recession would cut even deeper.

* * *

At this point, it feels like I’m putting a lot on the outdoor advertising industry. Maybe I am. Maybe advertisers spend sweaty, sleepless nights worrying about the role they play in homogenizing urban spaces. To be fair (or at least balanced), I decided to call an industry group for its thoughts on the matter.

I ended up on the phone with Jeff Golimowski, communications director of the Outdoor Advertising Association of America, and I asked him if he thought there was any problem with turning public property into corporate advertising space.

“I don’t really see a huge downside to it,” he said. (Which was a disappointment, because when I asked Zukin that question she called it “a form of prostitution.” I was hoping for a virile riposte.) And then he quoted some figures that, he claimed, show that outdoor advertising has been weathering the current recession well.

In fact, Golimowski was not interested in existential questions at all, so I turned to trade publications for insight. In a publication of the Transportation Research Board (TRB), I read about outdoor advertising’s many fine qualities. For one thing, it “cannot be turned off, deleted, fast forwarded, or easily ignored.” The equivalent of a television that receives a single channel and has no off switch. And it can be “targeted geographically to allow for ad message customization along demographic and psychographic lines.” That last passage is remarkably similar to the one I found in Cronin’s paper, but where she was describing, the TRB was bragging.

It’s just as Zukin said: there is nothing left to question.

* * *

Outdoor advertising has been common in North America since the United States was still a colony. It has been debated, decried, and regulated. But complaints about it have been limited to two areas: aesthetics and safety.

Two pieces of federal legislation have been enacted to regulate outdoor advertising, and both do so on aesthetic grounds. Neither addresses the suitability of using public property to advance commercial goals. Four states currently prohibit billboards (Vermont, Maine, Alaska, and Hawaii), all for aesthetic reasons.

In the past, safety was the second major concern. Before billboards were mass produced, irregularly erected signs created fire hazards and caught windblown trash. Sometimes strong-arm men lurked in the shadows behind street-level signs and pounced on unsuspecting pedestrians. In 1911, the St. Louis, Missouri, police were concerned that billboards were being “used as a shield to persons engaging in illicit and improper cohabitation.” In time, regulation dealt with each of these concerns.

But historically, policymakers and the politically engaged public have not complained about any of the issues identified by Cronin and Zukin: that outdoor advertising advances the idea that market transactions are the basic form of human behavior, that their presence on public transportation links the rhythms of daily life to those of the free market, or that they degrade public property by introducing commercial messages.

Which makes sense. In some ways, questioning the presence of advertising on those grounds implicates the whole economic system. To ask that local governments keep commercial messages off public property is to imply that there is something dangerous, or at least unsavory, about the free market. As a country, such things rarely occur to us.

It seems I’ve been focusing on outdoor advertising and missing the relevance of the context (a common journalistic mistake). I’m like a man caught in a sandstorm, convincing myself the single grain that worked its way under my eyelid is more loathsome than the millions swirling around me. Cronin made this point early in our exchange. “What we’re really talking about here is capitalism . . . advertising is part of much wider shifts.”

This story, then, is really about a slow encroachment. It’s about the free market insinuating itself into public space over time. It’s not just about billboards on public property, it’s about the ascendancy of the message they relay and the way that message has changed our relationship to public and private space.

To begin again where we began: the New York subway, whose history with advertising makes it an excellent metaphor for broader shifts in the way we relate to public space and the free market.

The first New York subway line, the IRT, was designed by Heins and LaFarge, a prominent architectural firm. It was designed to be advertisement-free. The architects envisioned it as a great public work. The firm hoped that it would be a sharp contrast to the London Underground—the only other electrified subway in the world—which was covered in posters, handbills, and banners.

In Heins and LaFarge’s plans, the IRT’s stations were to be not just stations, but works of art: awe-inspiring public spaces, not blank canvases convenient for hanging billboards. The City Hall station, the most ornate on the line, sported leaded skylights and chandeliers. And every stop on the line could brag of tile mosaic, natural vault lighting, and oak ticket booths with bronze fittings.

On October 27, 1904, opening night, crowds of anxious New Yorkers stormed terminal entrances and shoved their way past police lines. It was a “carnival night,” according to the New York Times: “Every noise-making instrument known to election night was in operation.” That Sunday, the first day most working-class families had free, the IRT was overrun. Thousands had to be turned away after spending hours in line, waiting to marvel at the new public common.

But the city’s taste for the IRT began to sour the next week, when workers hired by the advertising firm Ward and Gow hammered tin frames onto the ornamental tile walls and hung advertisements for Coke Dandruff Cure, Baker’s Cocoa, and Hunyadi János (“A Positive Cure for Constipation”). The public complained about the billboards, and screeds were written against them. The Real Estate Record and Builders Guide called the placards “an outrage.” And McCall’s magazine exclaimed, “Tin-framed advertisements . . . have been made to obscure the real significance of a great work!”

At the time, the IRT was not wholly owned by the city. It was a public corporation, tax exempt and built with public funds, but not completely under municipal control. The subway’s owners had always planned to sell advertising space in train stations, but they knew no one would approve and kept it a secret—even from their architects.

The city sued the IRT to have the advertisements removed but lost. Advertisements have been a given on every subway line built since.

When advertising appeared in the subway system, it was an objectionable, decried, lawsuit-provoking nuisance. But it took hold and, with the exception of the graffiti years, has steadily gained ground. It is now a central part of the experience of riding the train. In just ninety years, the subway system transformed from a public common with a few blemishes into a labyrinthine marketplace where anyone is free to sell his wares, on any surface, provided he can afford the rent. A place where market transactions feel like the basic form of human behavior.

By 1997, the New York City Transit Authority was taking in $38 million from underground advertising sales. That was around the time CBS Outdoor, one of the companies that sells space on the city’s behalf, began leasing entire stations. They call the scheme “station domination,” and promote it as “suited to advertisers who have an umbrella message to impart with multiple facets.”

It was announced in 2008 that space on the walls of tunnels between stations would be rented to advertisers. When trains rumble by these signs they create moving images, like a child’s flip book. There must have been concern that riders would be bored by the advertisements hanging from the walls and ceiling of the train between stops. Advertisers paid the city $125 million that year, and no one complained.

If we can travel the distance between ad-free great public works and “station domination” in less than a century, what is on the horizon?

I asked Cronin and Zukin whether there is any sacred space, any real estate a city would never lease, any area people would not allow the free market to touch. Neither believed there is any such thing. They would only concede that the public makes determinations about what is acceptable and what is not, and that those determinations change over time. “In history, there are no givens about what is deemed suitable for advertising,” Cronin said.

The Great Recession is creating support for her claim. When municipal budgets went into the red, “suitability” became a fast-moving target. It is a harsh irony, but as the instability of the free market has again pushed cities across the country into debt, they have dealt with their losses by monetizing more property and making themselves more dependent than ever on the free market.

Recently, a Texas high school offered to lease its roof to an advertising agency so the agency could place a banner on it large enough to be viewable from passing planes. School districts all over the country have begun renting advertising space on the sides of school buses. Some cities have placed posters on their garbage trucks. Chicago gave naming rights and exclusive advertising rights to the North/Clybourn L stop to Apple. In exchange, the tech giant will make repairs to the station. And New York City sold the naming rights to the Atlantic Avenue station (excuse me, the Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center station) in Brooklyn for $4 million.

We now live in a world where it is possible to append a price to almost any area. Public and private spaces have become so blurred that we hardly make the distinction anymore.

Only decades from a time when subway station posters were controversial, people lease their outer surfaces like mayors lease tunnel walls. Boxer Bernard Hopkins rented his formidable back to an online casino during a title fight in 2001. They placed an oil-based temporary tattoo on it. Professional volleyball players regularly do the same, and so do MMA fighters. And over the last few years many average, everyday folks have discovered that they can earn a little sideline by auctioning the temporary, or permanent, rights to their skin on Ebay.com or through the firm Leaseyourbody.com. A gentleman from Alaska who calls himself “Billy the Human Billboard” has been negotiating his own prices (recently reduced to reflect the depressed market) since early 2009.³

We have come to accept that the right to use virtually any space is a matter of negotiation.

* * *

Recently, the Dexter billboard was replaced by an advertisement for Hyatt hotels. The new commercial appeal greeting me on my way to the 1/2/3 line is just a logo, a desk, and a chair. They are unoccupied. The room they’re sitting in is otherwise empty. The billboard might be saying, This room is waiting for you; Come, luxuriate in this serene hideaway; or, No one in their right mind would stay in this bleak rat hole. Like the Dexter billboard, I am not sure exactly what is being conveyed.

I stare for a moment, obstructing pedestrian traffic, trying to make sense of the message. But I don’t have the patience. More than anything, I don’t want to think about it. In fact, after this binge, I want to avoid advertising all together.

It is dispiriting to admit that this is not an option. Even if I avoided the subway system and school buses and never looked up at billboards, I could never be sure that I wouldn’t turn a corner some day and come face to face with a young entrepreneur, hand outstretched in friendship, the Budweiser logo tattooed on his forehead like the mark of the beast.

I cast my eyes down for a moment’s reprieve.

And walk past a crushed Starbucks cup . . .

And a receipt from Key Food, the store’s logo emblazoned at the top . . .

And a Wrigley’s gum wrapper . . .

And . . .

1. Anne Cronin, “Advertising and the Metabolism of the City: Urban Space, Commodity Rhythms,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24 (2006): 615–32.

2. The first outdoor advertising I have been able to find reference to in academic literature appeared in Egypt 5,000 years ago, when slave owners posted notices advertising rewards for escaped slaves. For more information, see Charles Taylor and Weih Chang, “The History of Outdoor Advertising Regulation in the United States,”Journal of Macromarketing 14, no. 1 (1995): 47–59.

3. Billy’s Web site, which contains his advertising rates, a lengthy biographic essay, and links to videos showing him being tattooed, can be found at http://billythehumanbillboard.blogspot.com/.

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Work from Chinese artist Cao Yingbin.