Discussion Island

Introduction

MAY 2017

In the spring of 2017 the Toronto Islands were flooded by exceptionally high water-levels in Lake Ontario. Residents, many of whom took part in the campaign against the city council in the 1980s and ‘90s to remove them from the island, were faced with a new adversary: slowly-rising lake water. Initially brought together by their twenty-year fight to establish a residential lease, island residents are now a close-knit community, bound together by a shared a history of organization of resistance, but also through their relationship to a specific geographic area, and the friend and family ties (Freeman, 1999) developed before and after “the struggle.” This is a community whose “resilience” is understood in terms of its resistance to, and victory over, a dominant “urbanized” culture – the island has no private vehicular traffic, and residents now live in what has been designated public parkland. In its struggle, the community of island residents has resolutely sided with “nature” against the incursion of the city.

Their ability to organize and engage in politics with the city also contributes to a sense of preparedness for, and ability to survive, changes in political climate. However, recent events present a new challenge to the community, and arguably, “nature” – their former ally – has turned against them. The lake has always been a decisive factor in the history of the islands: it was formed by a storm that severed a spit of sand from the lakeshore to form the islands in 1858; in 1954 Hurricane Hazel threatened the integrity of the islands, largely by the kind of lateral wave-action that such storms bring with them. Rising water-levels and the incursion of water upwards, through the sandy-soil of the island itself, is a new and unimagined threat to the land on which they live (Casey, 2017; Keenan, 2017), and to the coherence of their community.

This is a material change in the islanders’ life: the earth becoming unstable, where shoring-up against water no longer works; the earth becomes liquified. The largest of the island’s willow and poplar trees become dislodged from the sodden sandy soil, crawl spaces underneath houses fill with water threatening electric and gas-fuelled heating equipment; post and pillars of fences and houses come loose. The arrival of the Canadian Red Cross further contributed to islanders’ feelings that the flooding places their very health and wellbeing in jeopardy.

Local news media has reported on the possibilities of an engineering solution to this problem – city-wide solutions similar to those undertaken in Seoul, South Korea (Boisvert, 2017) or the “floating houses” built on barges that accommodate the rise and fall of a tide in the Netherlands (Slessor, 2013). Yet some islanders are also at ease with “nature” continuing the process of reclaiming the island that has been underway since the flooding; bird-life is abundant, frogs thrive in newly-formed swamps, carp breed in the flooded baseball diamond. Others, calculating risk to human life over a longer-term, and foreseeing further ‘disaster,’ recommend that all residents abandon the island sooner rather than later (Thompson, 2017).

The level of Lake Ontario began to stabilize once the dam was opened in late May 2017, at Cornwall where the St. Lawrence river meets Lake Ontario. It took until early August for the water-levels to decrease to such an extent that pumps could be switched-off on low-lying areas of the main residential areas of the islands. Islanders are left to work out how to live with this quantity and type of water should it return – as it is predicted to do, given changes in global temperatures, jet streams, patterns and locations of precipitation, that are typical indicators of climate change.

My project aims to grapple with the problematics of the islanders’ situation – indeed, my own situation as a temporary resident here – and to contribute directly to the thinking and practice of how we live with the waters of Lake Ontario now that they have made ‘decisive contact’ with us, which, as Timothy Morton claims (2013, p. 179), marks an epochal shift in human-nonhuman relations.

The project establishes a ‘platform’ for conversations that explore the social worlds formed by the islanders changing relationship to Lake Ontario’s rising water. This platform is a floating sculpture where people gather and enter into conversation – with each other and with the Lake. This echoes the function, and indeed the title, of artist Liam Gillick’s ‘Discussion Islands’ (Gillick, 1996) – plexiglass and aluminum sculptures, hanging at above-head-height (1987 – 1999 – Liam Gillick, no date). In this instance, the platform will be a structure that enables a small group of people to sit or stand together on swampy/flooded land, or in shallow water.

The design, construction and installation of the platform is intrinsic to the research process, providing events through which community members can articulate their thoughts on the ambition of such a technical endeavour, as well as their thoughts and feelings about the recent floods. Once installed the platform will be the venue for further conversations about the islanders’ relationships to the rising-water, the forms of community that are formed through resilience to this and past events, and the potential of new and hybrid social worlds and political processes, that are made possible by the recent floods. It also offers an opportunity for thinking about how such “platforms” figure as a trope of participatory and relational art, and the problematics of the form of politics that they promote.