Adrian Blackwell Evicted May 1, 2000 (9 Hanna Avenue) Gord Anderson's Studio 2000

In 2000, Adrian Blackwell documented a series of studios at 9 Hanna Avenue, just before everyone was evicted.  9 Hanna had once been a munitions factory: huge steel-mullioned industrial windows, inexpensive, voluminous.  As with all studio buildings, they happen only when there isn't a more lucrative use for the building, a day that inevitably comes along, in this case the first of May, 2000.  Blackwell's thirteen Cibachrome contacts (20" x 24") were printed from the film lining a pinhole camera which was fixed to the ceiling of each studio.  Each camera was scaled to the proportions of the room below, and lined with film on the four sides and back of the box, thus recording the entire space.  

They are up right now at EyeLevel, an exhibition at Pith Gallery in Calgary.  One sees a row of fat cruciforms, filled with such warm complexity that they glow like icons.  Because pinhole camera exposures can be long, people often appear to be drifting through the spaces photographed as if they were phantoms, which of course, shortly after the photo and then the eviction, they became.  

The pinhole camera is the lowest of photographic technology.  Once the image is captured, much can be done with it at increasingly sophisticated levels, but the original light on film is photography at its very essence.

When I registered with Corbis to use a photograph of the Ho Chi Minh Trail after a US bombing raid for the last issue of On Site, they sent a little gift: plans for a pinhole camera you download, cut out and fold together.  Now that everyone has a digital camera, there is a rise in the use of the pinhole camera.  Very curious.

Stephen Gill. A Street in Hackney. photograph.With the ubiquity of digital cameras that take fool-proof images, and lots of them, it is interesting to see how many photographers persist in using film, but are doing something else with it. 
Just as photography originally freed the making of images in paint from a kind of graphic fidelity, so too does the digital camera free photography from the faithful recording of what the eye supposedly sees. The speed and clarity of digital imagery allows film photography to become something other than its resolution and depth of field.
Stephen Gill puts things found on the street, where he took this photograph, into the camera as he loads his film.  Although he can control what is aligned in the viewfinder and what is sitting on the film, he has little control over how the image turns out.  It is something like catching things out of the corner of your eye as well as what the eye is taking in straight ahead. 
I suppose he also controls which images he chooses to show – this one is particularly beautiful: a boring terrace in Hackney made mysterious somewhere deep in the camera.

1906 staged example of a dunce cap

Was this ever real? or was it seen in a cartoon and taken for fact.  Whatever, it is appropriate for a week spent not being able to get things off ftp sites, not being able to understand pieces of impenetrable text wanting to be articles for the next issue of On Site.  There is something about academic writing: when you are doing it, and I certainly have done my fair share of it, the mind is so full of theory, concepts and ideas that this strange kind of prose siimply unravels of the end of the pen, with its own syntax, vocabulary and density.  A year later and you yourself cannot even understand it. 

I always wondered if foolscap, that archaic size of paper we used in school when I was in the little grades, was the kind of paper used to make fool's caps, but evidently not.  Totally different etymology and something to do with a jester's cap watermark on the original paper.

Odd how the head is the place where so many signifiers are placed.  Perhaps not so odd, we are our visage, and hats and haircuts top off that visage, telling everyone you are not just a pretty face, but a rich pretty face, or a silly pretty face, or a rich not-so-pretty face.   god, life is exhausting.   

So there it is, how to tie a gele.  The material is either aso-oke – a Yoruba hand woven cloth, silk or printed cotton, but heavily starched.  How starched is subject to fashion, evidently they don't make them so stiff these days, but I found that on a Nigerian website so not sure how straight or cool that comment is.  Many of the commericial sites show them in rayon and quite floppy.

They are outstandingly beautiful when you see them on new Canadians parading down the horrible strip that is 17th Avenue SE in Calgary.  The women are like tall flowers, and I'm not being patronising here, they really are stunning.  The dresses and matching or contrasting geles are stately, calm, solid and absolutely individual.  I'm sure there are nuances in how one pulls out the top of the wrapped material, invisible to many of us, but again, subtle indications of class, wealth and self-worth. 

One does wonder how long it takes for such subtleties to disappear when there are so few people to take account of them.  Or do they become frozen, unable to develop with fashion trends in the original culture.  I remember hearing of people who had emigrated to Canada and, on going back to England, found that the England they had known was completely gone, and they appeared as relics from a bygone era.  It does happen. 

A Fascinator, ready to wear.

There is a kind of English hat called a fascinator, generally worn on the side of the head.  There is no hat part, usually just a little disc or a comb with strange feathers attached.  
Camilla wore one for her wedding to Prince Charles. By Philip Treacy, it was an aureole of feathers trimmed close to the quill so it looked like a halo of wheat.  A mystical sort of crown to say 'take that!' to everyone who doesn't want her to be Queen Camilla.
I find this kind of hat as bizarre as the makaraba, but not as much fun.  It really does smack of 'society' and general uselessness, part of an ethnic dress code that means much to those who wear them.   Sarah Ferguson wore one to Diana's funeral – black, gay, defiant; Sarah the renegade princess who escaped. Her fascinator was a little black box with thin black feathers shooting out of it, worn over her ear.

It is all seriously  frivolous, and as we here generally only wear hats when it is freezing out — thick, woolly things – I do wonder where it is that Canadian society allows frivolity.  Certainly not in its dress.  Hats have traditionally been indicators of social status, the best hat being the crown.  Indeed, the top of a hat is still called the crown.  In Canada, and in the US, supposedly we do not have a rigid social hierarchy revealed through sartorial codes so perhaps the hat as a defining moment is no longer readable.   Something must have replaced it, I don't believe there is such a thing as a non-hierarchical society.   Just can't think what it would be right now.

Makoya Makaraba. design 3: Look at the Score.

Michael Souter, a Cape Town graphic designer started Makoya Makaraba (with a 'b'), a township community project near Cape Town at Diep River that trains unemployed people in makarapa production.   
One senses a lawsuit in the offing, as Baloyi's story on his website ends with 'Baloyi's authentic Makarapas will now be marketed under the name Baloyi Makarapas (TM) ensuring that not only is his role as the originator of these unique creations recognised, but that his hard work is rewarded and his intellectual property protected'.
But, but, Makoya Mararaba is a community project, and its website states, heroically, 'We are a small company that train and help uplift the people from the Township communities on the Cape Peninsula ... We strive to create permanent and meaningful employment for individuals from previously disadvantaged backgrounds'.

Ha!  However, FIFA's website ignores these two projects and presents Newtown Projects in Johannesburg, part of an urban regeneration project.  Newtown Projects is going into high production for FIFA 2010.  They 'stumbled' upon a robotic arm from the automobile industry.  Paul Wygers, an architect who started Newtown Projects makarapas says, ingenuously, 'there are two pinch points in the process; cutting them and painting them.  If you can get rid of the pinch point of cutting them, which is the most labour intensive part of the whole process, you can up the numbers'.  They can do 1000 makarapas a day: huge employment opportunities for painters.  They too employ the underemployed, about 35 painters on a production line, some of whom just do the base, some brushes, some airbrush.  
Baloyi started by doing 2 a day, who knows how many Makoya does in a day, maybe they too have a robotic arm but somehow I doubt it.  Makoya's makarabas start at R270 (CAD36).   Baloyi's basic makarapa is R99 going up to R299.  (CAD13-40).

There is such an exuberant graphic sensibility at work here, hardhats become fantastic, towering sculptures absolutely integral to South African soccer culture.  FIFA 2010 is a powerful endorsement of South Africa's survival, its culture and its future —attention will be diverted away from corruption, poverty and South Africa's support of Mugabe.  These enormous sporting events, like the Vancouver Olympics, really seem to propel both cities and their regions into some other stratosphere for the duration and when it is all over, so many things have changed. 

Montreal's blue roofs

Owen Rose of Montreal wrote about extensively gardened roofs in On Site 17: Water.  These Montreal rooftops are more than container gardens, and not as heavy as green roofs with their .5-2m of earth (generally known as green roofs or intensive gardens) which required quite massive structural support.  New, highly efficient substrate of 3-15cm allows garden plots on almost all kinds of construction.  Rose calls them blue roofs, perhaps because of their water retention: they collect rainwater up to a point and release the rest into city storm drains, lessening the load on infrastructure during intense storms.

We had an article by Helmuth Sonntag in On Site 2: Houses on a rolling rooftop garden in Weisbaden, planted with rows of lavender and rosemary. It is a bylaw requirement there and in much of Germany that the roof collect water and that the water be stored.  

The sense that the rooftop is the displaced ground plane is part of Le Corbusier's 1923 Vers une Architecture: that development should not take away access to land.  He saw land as a source of leisure, but land is land, and if you want to grow kale on it, so should you be able to.  

When I got my small Inglewood house in Calgary the neighbourhood was mostly old Saskatchewan farmers who had come off the land in the 1930s and 40s and gone to work for the CPR.  Inglewood is next to CPR's Alyth Yards in southeast Calgary. Flat land, Bow River, sandy soil substrate with good drainage, a warm micro-climate, and, in the 1980s hardly a tree to block the sun on all the huge gardens in the back yards.  Leafy neighbourhoods were a sign of wealth, poorer neighbourhoods were quite bleak.  Well, with gentrification, trees now flourish and my yard is completely shaded and I can't grow a thing.  The roof gets more sun than the ground.  I would like a flat platform over it that I could put a garden on.  I think I'd rather this than photovoltaic cells even - lower technology, a parasol for the roof, lots of food.

a namelss photographer from Belarus. Dachas in Minsk - small cottages in the countryside where city dwellers come to party and grow their food

Back to Cuba.  Before 1989 57% of Cuba's daily caloric intake was imported and using gardens to grow food was seen to be a sign of poverty and underdevelopment.  The response of the government was to launch the urban agriculture movement as a contribution to food security.  Out of necessity, gardening was no longer just for the poor, but has been integrated into daily urban life.
 
Other kinds of informal food production include the dacha on the outskirts of Russian cities.  Originally summer houses for the wealthy, they were nationalised after the revolution and after WWII gardens were started on unused land by squatters.  Squatters' rights led to the formalisation of gardeners' partnerships – permanent use of the land for agriculture, access to power and water and the right to build a small house on the now-leased land.  There were also plots allocated to mixed gardening at the edges of the fields of collective farms.  
Since 1989 most dachas have been privatised, the house, cabin, cottage more important than the garden function.  However, Russian agri-business, like all industrial farming, uses pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilisers, etc., and the chance to grow one's own fruit and vegetables is both part of the dacha tradition and an opportunity to grow clean food. However, much of the land around European cities has toxic and historic levels of metals in the topsoil, so the cleanliness of the dacha crops, depending where they are located, is only relative. 
For the wealthy the dacha is their country estate, for the modest it is their allotment garden, for the poor it is affordable food, if they have access to a bit of land.

I wonder if one could calibrate the eagerness to engage in permaculture, transitional food production or urban agriculture depends first of all on the level of threat to food security, and secondly on the particular social attitudes to farming in each society.  New wealth is notorious for trying to put a great distance between it and anything to do with labour.  Stable wealth realises that it is dependent on labour, somewhere, and perhaps does not feel that holding a shovel or a rake indicates a loss of status.  The transition town movement in Britain is huge, for example. 

No matter where one lives there is always a segment of the population which carves out an alternative life of growing food, keeping chickens, knitting and sewing and making their own houses, and heaven knows, Vancouver Island, the Kootenays and the Gulf Islands are epicentral alternative societies.  Where it starts to matter is when local food production is shot through all levels of society from top to bottom, from the homeless to the CEOs; from itinerant peasant to oligarch; from old to young; from urbanite to rural farmer; from hippie to hummer driver.

Then, and only then, will Kyoto and Copenhagen strategies start to work.

Kristina Taboulchanas. Organoponico La Calsada

The Transition Town network started after a transport strike in Britain when the country was allegedly within 2 days of running out of food, so dependent are western countries on imports. 
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the further tightening of the US embargo, Cuba's intensive chemically-dependent agriculture sector also collapsed. We toy with visions of a world without oil, but Cuba was an island with hardly any oil: no transportation, little energy for food storage, freezing or refrigeration, no more fertiliser or pesticides and farmland largely given over to a cash crop: sugar for export.  The USSR took Cuba's sugar crop in support of the Socialist Revolution: once it was gone, so was Cuba's export sector. 

In what was known as The Special Period, the Ministry of Agriculture formed an urban agriculture unit which supports organic gardening methods for gardens on public and unused land:  27,000 such gardens in Havana alone.  Depending on the size, huertos populares employ individuals to community groups.  Old methods are used: manure, compost, worms, weeding, crop rotation and inter-cropping (crops under, on and above the same piece of ground).
With huertos populares and the state-owned organoponicos (raised beds full of compost on paved or infertile land), produce stays in its own neighbourhood, obviating transportation costs.  The Ministry of Public Health supports herbal medicine, so the production of medicinal herbs is an important sector.  Schools have gardens, hospitals grow their own food, individuals have chickens, gardens and fruit trees in their own yards.  The large collective farms still operate and supply staples particularly to Havana and Santiago de Cuba, which together have 3.2 million people and not enough urban space for total garden self-sufficiency.  However, no longer are Cubans dependent on state distribution of food.  The huertos populares and privados and the marketing of the produce are independent, once they are established and supported in their start-up by the Ministry of Agriculture. 

I think one could look to present Cuban agricultural policy to see what a world without oil might look like: traditional, co-operative, better food, a closer relationship to the land, even if it is a back yard stuffed with vegetables and fruit trees, less packaging, less transport of green tomatoes and rock-hard avocados, bananas that are ripened chemically in shipping containers. 

Of course Cuba has an unemployment problem, again because of the embargo which prevents a good many things, but also provides many hands to work these gardens. In 2003, the agricultural sector provided 22% of all new Cuban jobs.
 
There's the irony: the 'unemployed' are busy sustaining life, feeding people, cultivating the soil, making it all better, improving their communities, culture and bodies.  We have unemployed people, we even have homeless people: might we give them something valuable to do, making them valuable members of our towns and cities?