Second Spring invites seven artists, academics and educators to Trout Lake (John Hendry Park) for two days of workshops, lectures and performances. Hand-appliqued textile sigils form the walls of a portable wooden frame, functioning as a stage for events to take place.
In part born out of the interests of real estate speculation in East Vancouver, parks like John Hendry Park emerged out of the “City Beautiful Movement”, which were designed for the livelihood of the workers of extractive industries and to reduce juvenile delinquency. It’s current reputation of having a high coliform count reminds us of the dark histories of the environmental destruction of Vancouver’s early colonial industries which left much of the China Creek flats and False Creek uninhabitable for decades. These obfuscated histories and ecologies that surround the lake form the backdrop out of which a gathering of artists, writers, and educators are brought together to contemplate the invisible communications that occur between plants, animals, and humans. How do forms of invisible communication structure, relay, and describe our adaptation to contradictory landscapes? Second Spring considers suburban park land as generative, fostering all manner of adaptation and mutation.
Workshop with educator Matthew McBride (VAN), suitable for children and adults
This workshop experiments with combinations of water and on-site soil samples in the ecosystem to determine which combination produces the most effective filtration. Discussions around erosion and sedimentation poses questions as to how they affect wildlife and human communities within Trout Lake Park. Key Terms and vocabulary: Water cycle, groundwater recharge, percolation, precipitation, runoff, sedimentation, erosion/erosive force
Workshop with artist Igor Santizo (VAN)
Coyote Texts Back aims to engage the intersection between public spheres (plural), the wilderness of the imagination vs the reproduction and enforcement of domestication. By using the blind ubiquity of smartphones, the project by way of: an experiential workshop, writing, twitter texts, and a poster; aims to interject -irreverence and intuitive reflection, to the archetypal coyote both locally real and beyond. Not as a divorced part, but as integrated Being in these most Interdependent and tragic days. // Anthropocene Blues. Are we woke yet?
Workshop with writer Chanelle Adams (USA)
A ceremonious experiment in transmission on Trout Lake (networking of knowledge). We will transmit, receive, and exchange around the lake and read aloud from some texts. This is an experiment in the relay of information, not through paper trails but through hidden communications and transference of impressions.
Tiziana La Melia will be reading poems written in response to modes of visible, invisible and buried communications 1. Corduroy Road: a ballad dedicated to the memory/groundskeeper (Lori Spears) on the rusting agricultural homestead of two scenic artists famous in Beaverlodge Alberta, Euphemia McNaught and her Friend Evelyn McBryan, who followed the construction of the Alaska Highway. 2. Niscemi Oak Walk: Encounters with cake as a metaphor for territory and time while visiting the ancient oak cork trees that surround a Mobile User Objective System (MUOS) in a Nature Reserve in Niscemi, Sicily. MUOS is a narrowband satellite communication system that employs dish antennas at four worldwide sites to relay secure voice and data communications to military networks and mobile receivers like smartphones. 3. Bubbling up, uncertain and transmitted from Trout Lake and its underground networks of creeks to crack open the final joke, or poem.
Ellis Sam will be performing as ETcallshome, a songwriting project based around improvisation and chance with digitally generated audio. He gravitates towards the sound of noise inherent in musical recordings, amplifying and composing these frequencies into new rhythmic spaces for wordplay to occur. Alongside some songs, the running thread of this performance will focus on breathing as an instrument and a form of noise. ETcallshome will be working with a jogger in the park to create a live soundscape that could be carried and heard from its auditory epicentre to the lengths of the landscape’s perimeter
she-orc was raised in suburban Ontario by humans.
“Possessive Poisson Poison” with Chanelle Adams
“Possessive Poisson Poison” with Chanelle Adams
“Possessive Poisson Poison” with Chanelle Adams
“Coyote texts back” with Igor Santizo
“Coyote texts back” with Igor Santizo
“Runoff, Filtration, & Groundwater” with Matthew McBride
“Runoff, Filtration, & Groundwater” with Matthew McBride
ETcallshome
ETcallshome