Drowned World

TORONTO WATERFRONT 2022 RESIDENCY

We are an artist-duo who are based on Menecing/Toronto Islands. We work as individual artists but collaborate on specific projects, where our interests coincide. Our proposal emerges from our lived-experience of the effects of climate change as residents of Toronto's waterfront district. In particular, we will focus on the effects of rising water-levels on the people, fora and fauna, rocks, sand and soil, and built infrastructure of the area that surrounds Toronto's Inner Harbour. Our methodology is participatory, and is designed to create opportunities for conversations between local participants, stakeholders, and a multi-disciplinary group of experts, to explore the themes of the residency. Our methods take the form of artistic interventions and experiments, participatory performances, and collaborative making. We draw on experience, garnered from our previous projects as a partnership and as individual artists, to craft methods appropriate for each project. We often work together with our children, and consider intergenerational participation as a key objective of our projects and residencies.

The focus of our research and of subsequent projects undertaken as part of this residency, will be on the effects of rising water-levels on Toronto's waterfront. We have lived with the early effects of this, when the Toronto Islands flooded in recent years, and have taken part in emergency food-mitigation work, and witnessed the ongoing environmental assessment processes and infrastructural work undertaken by the TRCA and City. We are aware of this problem being shared across the shores of Lake Ontario and beyond, and of the complex interactions between natural phenomenon and human political processes which together produce tangible effects of climate change for us all.

In this residency we want to explore the ways in which future effects are imagined, compared to current conditions, and to past events. In our work more generally, we are interested in the ways that the imaginary, symbolic world, has an overarching and persistent grip on how (or whether) material reality is acknowledged. For example, we have worked recently with the persistence of so-called “magical thinking” during the SARS COV-2 pandemic, and the ways in which material interactions between virus and humans has been denied in favour of ideological models that see humans as able to “magically” evade the viruses effects through constructing new ideologies and imaginaries. We see similar habits of thinking at work concerning climate change, and wonder at the ways in which imaginaries are constructed to avoid facing up to material effects on people, and on the planet. The effects of rising-water in cities such as London and Venice have long preoccupied artists - J.G. Ballard's first novel, Drowned World imagines a city accessible only from its rooftops, for instance. We aim to generate a new body of work, made with and for residents of Toronto's Waterfront, that begins to pay similar attention to this theme.

PopeCullen

November 2021