Shauna Janssen & Thomas Stricklandin conversation with Cynthia Hammond

Points de vue

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2ISBN: 978-0-9937663-1-2

Shauna Janssen & Thomas Strickland in conversation with Cynthia Hammond

9 September 2014

Transcribed by Shauna Janssen Edited by Shauna Janssen, Cynthia Hammond,

& Thomas Strickland

pointsdevuemtl.wordpress.com

Points de vue

VIEW FROM INTERIOR OF WELLINGTON TOWER. PHOTO: SHAUNA JANSSEN, 2011

Front cover photo: Cynthia Hammond Design: Jeff Kulak, jeffkulak.com Printer: Rubiks

Published in Montreal, Canada pouf! art + architecture, 2014 isbn: 978-0-9937663-1-2

Points de vue gratefully acknowledges the support of Concordia University through the Aid to Research-Related Events program (ARRE), the Faculty of Fine Arts, and the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, as well as the support of our partnering institution, the Darling Foundry, and particularly Caroline Andrieux.

VIEW FROM INTERIOR OF WELLINGTON TOWER. PHOTO: SHAUNA JANSSEN, 2011

20 septembre 2014

Monsieur, Madame,

Au nom de l’Université Concordia, La Fonderie Darling/Place Publique et les Journées de la culture, je vous invite cordialement aux événements de clôture de l’exposition Points de vue qui auront lieu le 27 septembre 2014.

Points de vue est une rétrospective d’une série d’ateliers publics organisés autour du thème de la transformation de la tour d’aiguillage Wellington, activités urbaines qui se sont échelonnées sur une période de quatre mois. Présentement en ruine, cette tour au passé historique est destinée à devenir un centre culturel et communautaire desservant les arrondissements du Sud-Ouest, de Griffintown et de Ville-Marie.

Grâce à une série de quatre ateliers ouverts à tous et à toutes, une équipe composée d’artistes, d’historiens en architecture et de conservateurs du patrimoine urbain a créé un format dynamique de consultation publique sur l’avenir de la tour et son importance dans le paysage culturel montréalais.

Notre objectif était d’engager les citoyens dans une discussion concrète sur l’avenir de la tour, de recueillir leurs perceptions, tout en cherchant à solidifier le sentiment d’appartenance à l’égard de l’époque industrielle qui a marqué la ville de Montréal.

Points de vue rend compte du processus et des résultats de chaque atelier, à l’occasion desquels plus de 100 participants et participantes se sont exprimés. Cette exposition suscitera certainement l’intérêt des politiciens, planificateurs et concepteurs chargés de donner une vocation nouvelle et honorable à ce monument, symbole de notre héritage industriel.

Dates de l’exposition : 24-28 septembre 2014

Portes ouvertes : le samedi 27 septembre 2014, de 13 h à 17 h

Réception ouverte au public et lancement de l’exposition : le samedi 27 septembre 2014, de 17 h à 19 h

Fonderie Darling : 745, rue Ottawa, Montréal, Québec

pointsdevuemtl@gmail.com fonderiedarling.org/Points-de-vue-exposition.html

Nous espérons vous voir au lancement de notre publication et à la clôture de notre exposition.

Sincèrement, Cynthia Hammond

Directrice, Département d’histoire de l’art L’Université Concordia Montréal, Québec

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PREFACE

This interview between Shauna Janssen, Thomas Strickland, and Cynthia Hammond took place in Montreal on 9 September 2014. It shares the origins and motivations behind a community-based art and curatorial project titled Points de vue (points of view). The project spanned a year and was driven by an interest in the plan to repurpose one of Montreal’s most distinctive industrial buildings, the Wellington tower. The Wellington tower is located on the historic Lachine Canal, in the Peel Basin - he heart of the city’s formerly industrial core. It was a train switching station from 1943 until its closure in 2000. At the peak of its activities, the tower was a crucial cog in a vast continental network linking the maritime shipping industry, the North American railway companies, particularly Canadian National, with Montreal’s

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port and the Lachine Canal, which collectively formed the largest working-class urban landscape in Canada up until the 1950s. Built during the Second World War, the tower integrated highly advanced technology and electrical switching systems, which efficiently managed the physical matter of railways, trains, an enormous swing bridge (now locked) and lift bridge (now gone). The building is of considerable heritage value in terms of its unusual form, concrete construction, and modernist architectural language. It also summons an era of specialized labour that has now passed. Many of the jobs associated with this tower, such as switchman, signalman, movement director, and bridgeman, live on in memory only.1

Once that memory is no longer living, how will this tower speak to its past? Since 2005, the neighbourhood of Griffintown, in which the tower is located, has been undergoing rapid redevelopment. Its proximity to the central business district and the deindustrializing Lachine Canal are key factors in the rush to acquire property in this part of the city. Numerous nineteenth- and twentieth-century buildings have been razed to make way for condominium projects. The sector is unrecognizable, at street level, from even five years ago. And, if advertisements are any indication, thousands of new condos have been designed exclusively for upwardly-mobile, able-bodied, heterosexual couples (mostly white) in their early twenties.

1 For more information about the heritage of the Wellington tower, see http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/pls/portal/docs/PAGE/PATRIMOINE_URBAIN_FR/MEDIA/DOCUMENTS/TOUR%20WELLINGTON.PDF.

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Construction has proceeded swiftly, but has been dogged by controversy. Public consultation has been rare at best. Access to public amenities, such as schools, green spaces, and healthcare appears to have escaped the planners’ notice, as have the needs of the long-term residents of the district, many of whom are homeless, transient, or economically marginalized. These individuals are being squeezed into ever smaller and more precarious corners of what has become an epic building site.

Editorials and public outcry have been focused on the district as a result of this impoverished approach to urban “development” but little has changed. The proximity of poverty and excess intensifies with the completion of each new boutique hotel and exclusive residential tower. During one of our preparatory walks on a sunny Saturday in August, we saw a bride in a $10,000 dress sweeping towards the tower from rue Peel. She was having her wedding photos taken on the bicycle tracks that run alongside the Lachine Canal, with an entourage of several well-tanned men in tuxedos in tow. Just before she reached the Wellington tower, she was posed against the backdrop of a tiny vegetable garden that an itinerant community has planted, illegally, on the ramparts of the CN rail tracks, for food.

The city of Montreal’s 2013 call for proposals to turn the derelict Wellington tower into a “community cultural centre” would appear to be a breath of fresh air in this context. Who could object to the creation of shared cultural space? As the following interview suggests, however, culture and community are perhaps more complex, ambiguous, and even more exclusive terms than they might initially appear.

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We set ourselves a rich challenge when we decided to create Points de vue. The questions that motivated us were, how can we find ways to invite diverse voices into a dialogue about the future of the Wellington tower? How can art be a meaningful part of the tower’s role as a cultural centre not just later, but also now, during its contested present moment? And what might the concept of spatial justice bring to an inclusive urban future, for the Wellington tower and beyond? In this interview you’ll discover how a group of artists, curators, citizens, and institutions came together to make art out of public consultation, and how a single building inspired over one hundred people to take creative action, together, on its behalf.

Cynthia Hammond, September 2014

98 VIEW OF THE WELLINGTON TOWER, SUMMER 2014. PHOTO: CAMILLE BÉDARD

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CH As a way to get started, please say a little about yourselves.

TS Well, I trained and worked as an architect for 10 years. In 2012 I completed my PhD in architectural history at McGill University, and have since focused on exploring the potential of collaborative and artistic spatial activities and practices. I’m interested in spatial agency, how people can collaborate with and design the built environment through their own initiatives, rather than relying on what’s been handed to them, or imposed upon them by architectural, urban planning, and redevelopment priorities.

SJ My name is Shauna Janssen. I am a researcher and practitioner who works with communities in urban neighbourhoods. I guess I would call myself an “urban curator”. My curatorial practice is about making space for the development of community collaborations, and working with citizens and artists who have a desire to, or want to participate in the spatial politics of urban transformation.

VIEW OF THE WELLINGTON TOWER, SUMMER 2014. PHOTO: CAMILLE BÉDARD

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CH And I’m a professor of architectural history and interdisciplinary practice who works at Concordia University, Montreal, in the Department of Art History. I’ve been working on urban landscapes, citizen-driven design, and feminist approaches to architecture and cities for some years - and have collaborated quite a lot with you both! Why don’t you start by talking about how Points de vue2 came to be?

TS Points de vue originated, in one way, in the graduate seminar you taught, Cynthia, at Concordia in summer 2013. Cynthia’s students learned about spatial theory, which offers an approach to understanding how people essentially create the spaces they use.

CH Right - every student had the opportunity to create an “urban intervention” in a site of their choosing, and the focus of the course was urban landscapes. The projects had to focus on some aspect of their site’s design and social history, and relate this back to the present moment, to somehow make visible that site’s past controversies for a contemporary audience. They used all kinds of creative spatial practices, like performance, installation, and so forth.

TS After the class ended, the students wanted to take their research to the next level, and were talking with Cynthia about possibly collaborating with her. It was in this context that over the fall of 2013 Cynthia had noted the city of Montreal’s call for proposals to transform the

2 Visit http://pointsdevuemtl.wordpress.com/about/ for more information.

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Wellington tower in Griffintown. The tower had been a control station for switching railway tracks, and the city wanted to turn it into a “community cultural centre.” But they were not planning to do any community consultation about what that cultural centre needed to be, or which community it was for. Shauna had independently come across the same proposal, and had decided to collaborate with Marie-France Daigneault-Bouchard3 on a submission. Once they found out about each other’s interest in making a proposal, Shauna, Marie-France, Cynthia, and her former students decided to put together a submission.4

They proposed to build a kiosk beside the tower and, over the course of six months, hold a series of public events there. The idea was that people from neighbouring districts - really any interested parties - could come and participate in a schedule of urban “labs” that would both gather and share information about the district, the tower, and the proposed retrofit. The labs would facilitate an exchange of ideas about the building’s future. The plan was to collate and curate the information gathered in these labs, and share an exhibition with the city of Montreal and the architects who would do the redesign. Fundamentally,

3 Marie-France Daigneault-Bouchard is a Montreal architectural historian, designer, and curator of architectural exhibitions at the Maison d’architecture du Québec (MAQ).

4 This group self-named as the “636 Collective.” The collective, made up of Erika Coutu, Adeline Paradis-Hautcoeur, Chantale Potie, and Pascal Robitaille, were joined by two other Concordia graduates, Camille Bédard and Noémie Despland-Lichtert.

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the labs were imagined as as a form of creative public consultation.

That proposal was not accepted by the city, but certain members of the group decided to go ahead with the project anyway. Over the winter and early spring of 2014, the original proposal evolved into the four labs that have taken place in the summer of 2014, called Points de vue.

CH Shauna, can you speak a bit to how Urban Occupations Urbaines5 was another kind of origin for Points de vue?

SJ Something I have been passionate about for years is the reuse of deindustrialized and post-industrial spaces for cultural purposes. This was the subject of my doctoral research, in which I explored the transformation of these kinds of spaces for and through artistic activities. I was keenly interested in the relationship between art practices and the post-industrial built environment, especially those that have gone into disuse or have largely been abandoned. To explore these interests, in 2010 I initiated Urban Occupations Urbaines (UOU), a curatorial platform that brought artists and communities together over the cultural politics of post-industrial landscapes.

And of course the Wellington tower, in its ruin and abandonment, is a perfect vehicle for thinking about the future of post-industrial space and how artistic practices can connect these spaces with the sense of

5 See http://www.urbanoccupationsurbaines.org for more details.

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place that is very fugitive in rapidly gentrifying areas like Griffintown. Points de vue was really formed by the coming together of and collaboration between the students, UOU, and Thomas and Cynthia’s design-research alter-ego, pouf! art + architecture.6

CH So the Points de vue proposal was a collective creation, and came out of a number of shared concerns about Montreal’s urban past and future. It was in essence seeking to recognize and include different kinds of spatial agents, through art, and the concept of the right to the city.7

SJ Yes. As Tom mentioned, the city didn’t accept our proposal. I think that’s because it was a radical proposition. It’s important to emphasize that we were not proposing a redesign for the tower. We were proposing a process of public consultation with the aim of reaching different constituencies, to find out what they had to say about the building’s past, as well as its future. The city repeatedly leaves public consultation out of the process where urban development projects are concerned. I think the concept for Points de vue

6 pouf! art + architecture was co-founded by Cynthia Hammond and Thomas Strickland in 2006. See http://www.pouf.ca for more information.

7 The right to the city is a concept made famous by French sociologist, Henri Lefebvre (1901-91). But in recent years it has been taken up and deliberated from different perspectives, particularly that of gender, location, disability studies, and so forth. A useful introduction can be found in the Australian exhibition catalogue, The Right to the City (2011) http://emergencity.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Tinsheds_catalogue_23MarchFINAL1.pdf

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is very strong… to host public consultations through creative activities within and with the built environment.

Throughout the winter I searched for other possible venues to hold the Points de vue labs, once we knew the city did not want the on-site kiosk. In the spring of 2014 an opportunity came up to hold the urban labs in association with the Darling Foundry8 as part of their Place Publique9 series.

CH It’s clear that the Wellington tower has galvanized many different agents who are part of this story. It was the building that prompted this interest and commitment. I like what you were just saying, Shauna, about connecting with urban space through art. Your point about the role of the artist in place-making also makes me think about Tom’s history as an artist and curator as well. Tom, can you say a little about your work as a curator in Calgary with Art City?

TS My longstanding interest in art and cities has been very similar to Shauna’s. When I was in architecture school at Dalhousie, my concern was urban outsiders, particularly

8 The Darling Foundry is a visual art centre located in a former foundry works in Griffintown, Montreal, in the same neighbourhood as the Wellington tower. See http://fonderiedarling.org/en/.

9 “Place publique” was inaugurated by the Darling Foundry in the street space immediately in front of the gallery as a way to increase the amount of public and cultural space in Griffintown, where rapid gentrification and redevelopment have dramatically shrunk the availability of both. See http://fonderiedarling.org/en/Place-Publique.html.

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homeless youth. I wanted to learn how they inhabited the city in different ways, ways that worked for them. Often these kinds of constituencies contravene “normal” approaches to city living, and I wanted to learn from this difference, and ask how urban and residential design might be informed by such difference.

Then, when I was in Calgary I encountered a public art organization called ArtCity. One of their provocations was to ask how art could work within the urban frameworks, and perhaps offer another way of interpreting urban space and life. When I started working with ArtCity myself I saw how some artists closely aligned their practice with civic ideals, but of course there were other artists whose work contested those ideals, and questioned how inclusive the normative city really is. Often the artists who worked against the grain were subsequently censored by the city. One of the things I became very interested in was how the smallest of gestures could be profoundly political, and thus alarming or threatening for certain forms of authority. It really showed me how small, creative, and critical gestures can have a big impact on the public discussion of what a city is, what it should be, who it should be for, and so forth.

CH For both of you, in different ways, the city has been not just something artists make work about, but rather has been something to collaborate with beyond the gallery system. Can you talk a bit about how you see this project as “art” and, by extension, how you conceive of the role of the “urban curator”?

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TS This is something we had to consider very carefully - how Points de vue is art. In some ways our project fits with relatively common art practices. The most obvious of course is the fact that our exhibition of the Points de vue outcomes will be shown in an art gallery. The project has also had support from partnering institutions whose mandate is to foster the arts - the Darling Foundry and Concordia University’s Faculty of Fine Arts. And what we are doing, curatorially, in the gallery show, is connected in very practical ways to art’s histories, modes of presentation, and associated spaces.

But in some pretty deliberate ways, the project also poses a challenge to the traditional notion of art as an object in a white box. This is a space imbued with expectations of specialist knowledge, and as such proposes that art is produced by insiders and is to be observed from a distance. What we bring into the gallery are images and objects that were collectively amassed, through our urban labs. Our question is not, “what is art”. This, I think, is taken over by more interesting questions about who art or “culture” is for, and what does it aim to do? To this end, we have thought carefully about how the public will encounter the images and objects of Points de vue once they have come in from the street, into the gallery.

CH The aim also is to make connections with the project participants, too, who will come and see the show, see themselves and their collaboration represented. And I know you are thinking a lot about how representatives of the city and the design communities will encounter

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the representation of Points de vue.

TS Yes. One of the things, for example, that philosopher Elizabeth Grosz proposes is that art has the capacity to make things visible.10 We’ve thought a lot about how curatorial practice can attend to our ideas about the tower, our collaborations over the summer, and how these both can become visible and legible for an audience who will, we hope, be inspired by the show.

SJ Thinking about the role of art in Points de vue leads me to the question of creative practice. What we have been curating and facilitating as co-directors of Points de vue and our urban labs falls within the realm of socially-engaged practices, different forms of participation and collaboration. The objects on display in the Points de vue exhibition represent for me the process of engaging our lab participants in ideas around collectivity. What we have done in these labs is invite different publics into a creative practice that has allowed them to contribute directly. The exhibition contents are really an index of multiple layers of collective actions, dialogues, and themes that we’ve shared with participants. And also content that participants have brought back to us - how they have questioned and challenged us. So the exhibition is also about inclusivity and transparency…it’s fundamentally a representation of our creative process. Thinking creativity as a social practice versus making art opens up, for me, other ways of approaching cultural production and how to curate this kind of work.

10 Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York, Columbia University Press, 2008) 72.

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TS Shauna, you’ve been very successful at translating your professional training, and special knowledge and abilities from your background in theatre to the urban setting of Griffintown. For example, it is clear in the design of the labs that each has been thought about in terms of perfomance, or their performativity. Everyone has a role to play, or multiple roles to play within each lab. Each lab itself is planned to set in motion a series of focused events, within which are scripted and site-specific discoveries.

SJ Absolutely, there’s been an enormous amount of planning and thinking deeply about the content and what steps were necessary in order to put our activities into play. At the same time, we could never be sure of the outcomes. So yes, there is a performative, experimental, and improvisational aspect to curating this kind of work, in the labs themselves, the walks, the show.

I think this is always the case when working in the public realm. You don’t know what you’re going to get back, in terms of response and input. There are incredible learning moments that come with doing this kind of work. It’s key to be aware of the contingent nature of urban curating.

CH So urban curating is really about a kind of spatial and social contingency, but one that you have deliberately crafted, and of course around a particular concern - in this case the Wellington tower.

SJ Certainly with the urban labs we had a vision of what

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we wanted them to be, with specific aims, but yes, we needed to remain flexible and open to input and learning from our participants. This is part of the collaborative process. My theatre training taught me that participating in collaborative creative work is about active listening, observation, and being able to change the project in response, in process.

CH What you are saying relates to witnessing, which is a theme we’ve all remarked on throughout this process in terms of how the building is a witness to its past - for now at least. And I know you both feel that the exhibition needs to be another kind of witness, to the events over the past summer. The exhibition for me is going to be a bit like a nesting doll. I think it’s significant that it will be made public in the context of the Darling Foundry, which is itself a post-industrial space that was converted for cultural uses. It’s also a space that, through its retrofit by L’OEUF Architects and Atelier in situ, makes manifest its industrial past. I think it does this in a way that’s meaningful for a lot of different, local constituencies. And the Points de vue exhibition is about another industrial-era building that is looking ahead to what we hope will be a similar future.

But I want to come back to the original call for proposals to convert the Wellington tower into a community cultural centre. This is something I think many people in the arts and elsewhere would support. It’s not as if the city was aiming to turn the tower into yet another condo project or exclusive, boutique hotel. But Points de vue takes issue with the way this intention

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has played out thus far. Can you talk a bit about why this is so, and by extension, how you see the project as activist?

TS Our question, when we saw the initial call for proposals, was who was going to be included in this “community” centre - who would have the privilege of participating in the call for “ideas” about what a cultural centre is? The call was directed toward architects and designers with engineering knowledge, or skills related to construction. How many people who live in the South-West would be able to quickly and easily produce architectural renderings? These were a required part of all submissions.11 So it seemed to us that the original call limited who could have a say in the repurposing of the tower.

For me, the activism of Points de vue has to do with participation. We are challenging the city to reconsider who is capable of sharing in the decision about how to transform this important piece of industrial heritage. We don’t want there to be any assumptions about which “community” or public it is for - there should really be a debate about this, given all the social inequity in the vicinity. In hosting these unusual public consultations and reaching out to a broad range of communities and stakeholders, Points de vue is, we think, in contrast to the city’s approach.

And it’s been really successful. Our labs have opened

11 For more information about the original call, and the four design teams retained for the second stage of the retrofit competition, see http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/portal/page?_pageid=1576,117337570&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL.

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up new networks and social relations, even friendships. We’ve made space for diverse perspectives about the tower and its importance.

CH So the project is activist in that it brings very broad themes of accessibility and democracy to bear on this building, in this place, now.

TS Yes, Points de vue is a platform that allows the public to act out their right to this space.

CH I think it’s really interesting that we’ve seen both arguments start and friendships develop through the Points de vue workshops. People have had a chance to debate, and find priorities in common. I agree that the labs have provided a platform for the exercise of citizenship, something the city’s original call for proposals did not do. The industrial heritage of Montreal is perhaps its greatest collective inheritance. In this way Points de vue is not just about one building. It’s about opening up the question of design and the future of cities… it’s about the shared cultural politics of deindustrialization and the question of access to such spaces after they’ve been transformed, made profitable, and sanitized.

SJ The question of activism in creative work is a complex one. The naming of Points de vue speaks to our position, I think. Our desire has been to see a future for the tower that retains parts of its past, and can be accessed by multiple, diverse users.

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CH So, culturally, there have to be multiple ways “in” - it can’t just be an interpretation centre about the district’s industrial past for new residents who have no connection to that past. Or tourists. It’s incredible that a brand-new hotel is one of the first major projects to be built.

SJ Right. What the city is asking for, and what will most likely happen, unfortunately, is that the tower will be given a singular and definitive identity. This means that the degree to which it will be a truly accessible and inclusive space - a real community space - is in doubt.

What has been paramount for us has been to create an alternative process. Jeanne Van Heeswijk is a Dutch urban curator. She’s described this kind of work as “radicalizing the local.” What is effective about her practice, and I think what we have also put into play with Points de vue, is a durational approach - socially-engaged practices require time when working to build relationships with different publics.

CH I see Points de vue as a counter-thesis to Montreal’s twentieth-century history of urban change, which has a woefully poor record in terms of taking the viewpoints of urban residents into account. And of course, that’s how groups like Héritage Montréal got started - the activism of people like Phyllis Lambert, who documented buildings in Old Montreal and elsewhere that the city was demolishing en masse in the 60s and 70s. Lambert was then, as she is now, a really public figure - she did so much to raise awareness about and

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fight for the importance of the built environment as a whole, as collective heritage.

SJ That’s true, and I see our work as also belonging to a genealogy of community activism in this particular neighbourhood. This history became evident to me during my work through UOU. I know you both also discovered an activist spatial history dating back to the 1930s in this district with your project, dog parc gallery.12 So fighting for the right to the city goes back a long way. In the 1960s Joseph Baker, an architect and professor at McGill’s School of Architecture, initiated the Community Development Workshop13 with his students. More recently, in 2007, an ad hoc group of community activists working and living in Griffintown formed the Committee for the Sustainable Redevelopment of Griffintown (CSRG).14 Much like we were with the Wellington tower, the members of CSRG were mobilized by the city’s plans to revitalize the neighbourhood without public consultation.

12 pouf! art + architecture published a piece about this community-oriented art project in Montreal’s South-West in On/Site Review in 2013, which can be accessed online: https://www.academia.edu/7721369/Biting_Back_Art_and_Activism_at_the_Dog_Park.

13 For more information please see http://www.griffintown.org.

14 For more details about the Community Design Workshop see Joseph Baker, “An Experiment in Architecture.” The Canadian Architect 18 (1973): 30-41. Baker also features working with the Community Development Workshop students in Michel Régnier’s documentary film, Griffintown (1972). Web. 30 October 2012. http://www.nfb.ca/film/griffintown.

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TS I agree that our involvement with the neighbourhood and how it is changing has been durational. Shauna’s work with UOU and our work with the dog park on rue Olier extended well beyond three years. Points de vue has been in process for almost a year and will probably go far beyond that. This kind of creative, spatially-situated work requires a commitment to the people and to place… it becomes an emotional, and even physical attachement to the people and place because of the project’s duration. I think working in this way does, in contrast to the rapid pace of the current urban renewal project, radicalize the experience of place.

CH Since you’ve worked as an architect, Tom, how do you feel that this durational aspect differs from the way that the design disciplines tend to approach their sites?

TS Working as an architect showed me that when designers and engineers arrive at a site like the tower, for example, they look at a set of plans, perhaps refer to some demographic studies, then decide on how to repurpose the building. The building’s design is largely a factor of architectural discourse, economics and client relations. When they are done with the project their only real relationship to the building, for years to come, is to attend to repairs resulting from a item that was not correctly specified in the drawings and so forth. Their relationship to the site is a legal one, a contractual relationship with the building’s owner.

CH I think this question of the durational precedes our involvement with the tower, obviously. When I’m talking

INTERIOR VIEW OF WELLINGTON TOWER. PHOTO: SHAUNA JANSSEN, 2011

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with various participants in the labs, I notice how often people articulate some kind of personal investment in the tower. Some have been residents of Griffintown, St-Henri, Little Burgundy, or Point-St-Charles for years. Others are new residents who are curious about the area’s past. Some people have family who lived and worked, historically, in this part of Montreal during the industrial era, but have left. So some of our participants are hoping to connect with a part of the industrial landscape of Montreal in a very autobiographical way. Others have moved here from another urban centre that has seen rapid gentrification in formerly industrial zones. They want to get involved here before it’s too late. Other people have come just because they’ve noticed the tower on their way to work, and have always wanted to know more about it.

INTERIOR VIEW OF WELLINGTON TOWER. PHOTO: SHAUNA JANSSEN, 2011

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All this to say, we don’t seem to be the only ones who see the repurposing of the Wellington tower as a key moment of transition in the city. I’m struck by how enthusiastic the participants seem to be about the opportunity to discover things they didn’t know before about the site, or to share what they know. A number have asked to be involved in the making of the final exhibition, too.

Something we haven’t talked about so far are your own personal feelings about the tower. As the co-directors of the Points de vue platform, and also as residents of Montreal, can you describe your impressions of, or feelings about the Wellington tower and how these are related to the work you are doing?

SJ I discovered the building about eight years ago when I was cycling on the multi-purpose path that curves around the tower and along the Lachine Canal. My relationship to the building intensified about four years ago, when I started UOU. I brought an artist into the building because at this time it was still possible to get inside. At that time what struck me most was the post-industrial life of the building.

The tower is a ruin of in the deindustrialized landscape. So it bears many traces of its post-industrial uses and interventions. It already has a cultural identity. There is a recent history of the building being used by squatters. And of course since the city decided to repurpose the tower, those using the building for shelter no longer have access. This displacement really underscores for

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me the issue of spatial agency that Tom was talking about earlier… the different and informal ways that people make and transform space that fall outside of or contravene building codes and urban planning.

CH So one type of use is ok, officially, and another is not - meaning that even now, before it’s been retrofitted, a certain type of user or resident is privileged over another. And Points de vue aims to respond critically to that position.

SJ Yes. What is also significant for me about the building and what attracts me to the tower is its irregular shape and scale, the views that the tower affords of the city and Lachine Canal. I love the way it cantilevers over a very public and now touristic multipurpose path. Many people and commuters pass by the building every day.

Its location is strategic because of the railway tracks, but also because it is geographically situated as a meeting point of many neighbourhoods. The tower really embodies an interstitial urban history. From the beginning, one of the recurrent themes in Points de vue has been our observation that the tower is a witness to the many changes to and different users of the cultural landscape that surround it. It is active in its indetermination. For us, the agency and cultural value of the building lie in its material traces of multiplicity. These traces should not be covered or tidied up. They really need to be visible, accessible, and retained in the future.

2928 THE OLD SWING BRIDGE NEAR THE WELLINGTON TOWER. PHOTO: SHAUNA JANSSEN, 2011

TS For me the building has become more resonant over the process of facilitating and curating Points de vue. I had encountered and remarked on the building previously because it is a spectacular form. It’s hard to miss for this reason, but also now because it’s located at the intersection of a series of large-scale development projects - multi-story residential towers primarily. I was drawn to the building as a form but I have since become very attached to it as a part of the city’s history, how people have used it since its closure in 2000. So for me too the building is already performing very well as a cultural centre. It already has art - it’s covered in beautiful artwork. The small green spaces just in front are well-used as resting places for cyclists, and these

2928 THE OLD SWING BRIDGE NEAR THE WELLINGTON TOWER. PHOTO: SHAUNA JANSSEN, 2011

provide great views of the canal and railway bridge beside the site. Its future redesign needs to surface all this, not bury it.

CH I feel that the Points de vue workshops are achieving this kind of surfacing, and it’s personal for me too. I first saw the building when I came to Montreal for the first time in 1994. I arrived and left by train, so I passed quite close beside it. It’s always been a sort of sentinel for me since then. It’s not a surprise to me, when I tell people about the Points de vue project they know exactly which building I’m talking about. They usually describe it back to me - ruin, graffiti, dirty, white, oddly-shaped. I get the sense that the tower helps people to locate themselves in the city of Montreal. I think of it as a “point of intensity” in the city, in the way that Eyal Weizman uses that term.

I notice that ever since Points de vue began last fall there have been deepening layers of separation between the building and us. We can still touch it on the canal [southern] elevation, but since the start of the summer we cannot access the back of the building anymore. I feel that’s a big loss.

TS Some of the workshop participants have shared different stories and ideas about the tower and its purpose. It’s begun to take on a kind of myth-making power.

CH Do you have anything you want to say about our collaborators or participants?

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SJ The Points de vue team has been amazing! What has made this work so rich is the diversity of skills, training, and knowledge that our collaborators bring to Points de vue. For example, Marie-France Daigneault-Bouchard, Noémie Despland-Lichtert, and Camille Bédard have trained in architectural history, education, and design. Chantale Potié and Adeline Paradis-Hautcoeur specialize in art history. These women have professional associations with the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC), Héritage Montréal, and the Maison architecture du Québec (MAQ), so that’s been very enriching to our process, too.

And the diversity of our participants has been really inspiring too. They’ve come from all over the city! Our workshops are thematic and I think this attracted different kinds of interest. We’ve seen such a range of cultural backgrounds, genders, and ages… including a small child who has participated in almost all of our workshops. Our participants make me think of how Bruno Latour sees community forming not around some notion of an essential, shared identity, but rather around shared “matters of concern.” They came because they share a stake in the tower’s future.

So the labs have really been about creating tiny, temporary communities through collective action to engage with the past, present, and future life of the tower.

3130 URBAN ARCHEOLOGY LAB: THÉO POTIÉ EXAMINING THE CONTENTS OF A DUMPSTER. PHOTO: NOÉMIE DESPLAND-LICHTERT, 2014

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CH This interview is going to stand as a trace of the work you have been doing, long after the exhibition is over. When you think back on the labs, what stands out for you as the most meaningful moment? And why?

TS For me, it was during the lab on archiving urban change. This lab was designed to offer a kind of contemporary, urban, archaeological discovery along the walk between the Darling Foundry and the Wellington tower. We had prepared all sorts of simple forensic tools for the participants to use during their walk, and we brought small groups to places that one would normally ignore on a walking tour of a city, such as old parking lots and derelict sites.

CH That was really fun. We asked everyone to wear safety gloves and locate little bits of debris - traces of the city - and put them in bags. Their job was to note down the characteristics of the object, its location, and so on. All this was against the backdrop of the building cranes, piles of rubble, and streets cordoned off for massive road works. It was quite dramatic! And you asked the participants to consider whether their “artifacts” spoke to the past, present, or future of this part of the city. They loved it. It was as if we had given them permission to discover this place in a really personal, hands-on way.

TS Yes, the participants took on their role very joyfully. They went much further than we anticipated. People were clambering all over building sites, exploring under buildings, going into dumpsters - places you are not supposed to go.

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One participant even crawled underneath the steps leading up to a condo sales pavilion. She wanted a single playing card that she spotted there, on the gravel. This moment was really a subversion of what this building normally invites visitors to do: arrive, walk up the stairs, enter, and look at the condo products as a potential consumer.

CH Instead, she found something of her own, that connected her to this particular place in a playful way, and she did this with the support of others who were involved in the same activity. We all cheered her on and celebrated her find. It’s now a personal memory of placemaking, for her and her team.

TS And what I observed was the pleasure and joy that participants took in all this, in the practice of doing something in this space, something other than what the design was signalling them to do. It was wonderful to see the participants asserting their agency and allowing their curiosity to guide them. So for me, what stands out was seeing the participants teasing apart the city in a way that was both creative and political.

CH They seized on these tiny pieces - and some not so tiny pieces - of urban change, like a treasure hunt. The curators’ questions helped us all to think about how our fragments might have played a part in the making, unmaking, and remaking of the district. And the objects and locations inspired so many questions, in turn, from the participants. I really liked the creative spatial deviance that the lab seemed to

3534ARCHIVING URBAN CHANGE LAB: ISABELLE PICHET RETRIEVING A PLAYING CARD UNDER THE STEPS OF A CONDO SALES PAVILION. PHOTO: CYNTHIA HAMMOND, 2014

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inspire - I don’t think we had anticipated it would be quite like that!

TS Yes! Creative spatial deviance. And we cleaned up the city a little bit too. What about you, Shauna?

SJ There are two moments that stand out for me. The first one belongs to those moments of collectivity around the tower, at the end of each of the urban lab walks.

Arriving as a group and occupying the space beside the tower at the end of each lab always felt very significant. Because, as you said earlier Cynthia, access and proximity to the tower is increasingly difficult. By temporarily using the green space next to the tower we succeeded, I felt, in making it public.

I notice too that each time we arrive at the tower as a collective entity I feel a great sense of relief. This is partly because every time, for every lab, we had designed a different walking route between the Darling Foundry and the Wellington tower. We didn’t know, when we left the Darling Foundry’s place publique, if all the groups would arrive at the tower on time, as planned, likewise whether the activities we planned for the participants would actually work out. Somehow, though despite all the contingency, we all managed to come together at the end of each day, and these were always really warm and positive moments.

3736 ACESSIBILITY AND PUBLIC SPACE URBAN LAB: PARTICIPANTS AT THE WELLINGTON TOWER. PHOTO: CAMILLE BÉDARD, 2014

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Another pivotal moment for me was connected to our theme of spatial justice. The spatial justice concept emerged around our thinking about public space and accessibility. Spatial justice is not a new idea - geographer Edward Soja has been “seeking spatial justice” for years through his work with unjust urban geographies in Los Angeles. Precedents like this inspired us to explore the ethics of accessibility in our lab on public space, and really facilitated our dialogue with our participants on the topic of inclusive design practices. We had a great discussion about accessibility as it relates to physical disabilities, invisible disabilities, gendered space, and spatial exclusion. The concept of spatial justice is still unfolding for me… its not just an idea, it’s a spatial practice, an ongoing action.

CH It’s a fundamental way about thinking of the city in fact.

SJ Yes. And we wanted to give this a form, for the purpose of our workshop. So we created a spatial justice emblem, which took shape as a small, grey wooden panel with a bright orange “equal” sign in the centre. It’s simple, visually, but we really wanted it to be legible. So we talked a lot about its design, which was inspired by other justice symbols, like the Human Rights Campaign’s equality sign for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer (GLBTQ) rights.

We distributed the spatial justice panels to participants at the beginning of this lab. We then asked them to identify spatial moments or situations where they could

3938 SPATIAL JUSTICE EMBLEM, FOR THE URBAN LAB ON ACCESSIBILITY AND PUBLIC SPACE. PHOTO: CYNTHIA HAMMOND, 2014

detect some kind of inaccessibility or spatial injustice. Again, our walk took us from the Darling Foundry to the Wellington tower.

CH And this route is essentially an enormous chantier. It’s very intense to pass by a newly-built condo tower with a box-tree shrubs and a Starbucks on the ground floor, and then just fifty feet away the street has been torn up, rubble is everywhere, there’s no sidewalk or street signs, but there are still homeless people trying to find somewhere to sleep in the ever-shrinking interstitial spaces. They are very vulnerable. And, because of how

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messy and unregulated the streets are, due to all the building projects, residents or visitors with restricted mobility are really vulnerable, too.

SJ Right. So our idea was that when lab participants located these kinds of spatial injustice, they would set their panels literally into the built environment. It was a symbolic gesture ... supposed to mark or communicate

PARTICIPANTS ON THE SPATIAL JUSTICE ROUTE. PHOTO: CAMILLE BÉDARD, 2014

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the experience of exclusion, and the way these changing spaces are often really unfair to the people who are already there. So each emblem, as used by the participant, served as a tiny spatial intervention… a symbolic object intended to empower people as they move through the city and experience the spatial injustices of the built environment.

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CH So the emblem gave the participants the opportunity to critically consider and remark upon what they saw to be a lack of access. Rather than just moving past that injustice.

TS That’s right. And as we have been doing these workshops there have been moments of clarity about what spatial justice is for us and how we participate in it. I think the main thing we all share in when we end up at the Wellington tower is our collective discovery that this post-industrial landscape is not empty. And I think that Points de vue in a way is asserting that the tower is already the cultural centre that the district needs. We’ve been collaborating with the tower as that cultural centre, in its present state.

DETAIL OF WELLINGTON TOWER. PHOTO: SHAUNA JANSSEN, 2011

4342 URBAN GREENING LAB, DARLING FOUNDRY: ROGER LATOUR PREPARING TO PRESS PLANTS. PHOTO: SHAUNA JANSSEN, 2014

CH The labs have us moving through the landscape with a greater agenda than simply getting from point A to point B. The labs encourage us to observe specific details, and this opens our eyes differently. But seeing how fellow-participants encounter this urban landscape is also transformative. Because of their diversity, we find ourselves touching and listening to the city differently, from dfferent perspectives of age, physical access, gender…all this puts the tower in multiple contexts at once. I would say we’ve had about one hundred people come together, as our original group of artists, curators, and students did, over this building and its future.

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Tom used the word “joyful” earlier, and that for me is a good word to sum up the spirit of these walks. I’m struck every time, at the end of the labs, by how participants don’t want to leave. Even when it’s been pouring rain! People stay. They want to talk with each other and with us about what they’ve discovered, what they’ve seen for themselves. They always have more questions to ask and thoughts to share about the tower.

CH So - what’s the future for Points de vue?

SJ The Points de vue project belongs to the future of the Wellington tower. I think we’ll keep this platform active for as long as it needs to be active. We all been asking ourselves how we might continue to do this kind of work with other communities and in other cities, as clearly it has been resonant here. I think that probably sooner rather than later we will need to create a new identity for this kind of curatorial work so that it can encompass multiple projects, spaces, and publics. I think we need to start a centre for spatial justice!

TS That’s it!

CH I’m in!

4544 SHAUNA AND TOM. PHOTO: CYNTHIA HAMMOND, 2014

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COLL ABORATORS

(names in bold indicate a curatorial role)

Camille Bédard Erika Coutu Marie-France Daigneault-Bouchard Noémie Despland-Lichtert Cynthia Hammond Shauna Janssen Adeline Paradis-Hautcoeur Chantale Potié Thomas Strickland Pascal Robitaille Alyse Tunnell

GUEST SPEAKERS

Arseli Dokumaci Jessica Hart Roger Latour

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PARTICIPANTS

Caroline Alexander Daniel Alvarez Théodore Alvarez-Potié Amin Bastas Mélanie Binette Anja Borck Vincent Brière Pauline Butiaux Micheline Chevrier Isadora Chicoine-Marinier Jean-François Cliche Daphné Cliche Gabriel Cliche Élise Cliche Catherine Comptois Fréderique Corsa Emma Despland Caitlin Dixon Claudia Edwards Matthieu Gagnon Eman Harman Stephen Kelley Nima Navab

Laurie Neale Matthias Numberger Laura Josephine O’Brien Itai Peleg Isabelle Pichet Marina Polosa Dana Rempell Imogen Rempell Renata Ribiero Simon Emmanuel Roux Dounia Salamé Alicia Segura Lama Sfeir Sonali Shah John Toohey Elizabeth Trinh Keith Turnbull Olivia Ward Oisín Ward-Dyer Caoimhe Ward-Dyer Zoë Wonfor Jane Zdansky

Shauna Janssen & Thomas Stricklandin conversation with Cynthia Hammond

Points de vue

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ISBN: 978-0-9937663-1-2