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Kirsten Forkert
ABOUT ANGELA DORRERS PILGRIMAGE FOR EDMONTON
1. Pilgrimage Office
Angela Dorrer has been working on her pilgrimage for Edmonton for the past few days. It's an ongoing process of gathering information: collecting stories, rumours , phrases and images to create an ‘unofficial' and intentionally subjective map of Edmonton, and a sense of its collective psychology as a city. She has a pilgrimage office in the gallery space, where a map of Edmonton, drawings and notes are accumulating over the wall.
Both the process of collecting the information (through questionnaires) and the ‘office' itself reference the anthropological, and more official/bureaucratic procedures. However, the role Angela is playing is an intentionally subjective one: to interpret the information into symbols, metaphors images and poetic texts, which will make up the ‘pilgrimage' walks later this week. In this sense the work raises questions about the role of art or of ritual as primarily symbolic activity, and around other activities (such as anthropological research or urban planning for example) as primarily functional activities. In an art context, the process of collecting and interpreting the material is made public; in an anthropology or urban planning context, would these activities take place behind the scenes? Would an anthropologist claim to be operating in an objective, ‘scientific' realm, while Angela is not? But, similar to the anthropologist, does it take an outsider to allow us to see our own society in a new light?
Angela is allowing the responses of local inhabitants to generate the raw material/content for the work. This reflects a common approach to works in the festival: where the artist plays the role of translator or facilitator, and the subject matter comes from responses from or conversations with participants, rather than using his/her own autobiography as a basis for the work. It's an approach that may come out of questioning the conventional role of the artist. Such an approach also raises questions around the relationship of the artist-facilitator/translator to the participants, and especially in terms of bringing together a broad range of interpretations (from the responses to the questionnaires) into the framework of the pilgrimage walks. Which responses will be included, if it isn't possible to include everything? In conversation, Angela said that historical pilgrimages presented a unified point of view (such as a religious perspective), but contemporary pilgrimages involve many different perspectives. Perhaps part of the work will be the negotiation of how to preserve these different perspectives, while knitting them together into a narrative (the walk through the city).
2. Pilgrimage Tour
Angela Dorrer's “Pilgrimage for Edmonton” was the result of her interpretation of the responses to the questionnaires on Edmontonians' relationship to their city. From this she had created a series of symbolic gestures, to be performed in locations around Edmonton, in the framework of a ‘pilgrimage' (which, interestingly, seems to be more common in Europe, where Angela is based, than in North America). We began at the gallery space at Latitude53, where we purchased our pilgrimage kits, and were anointed with oil on our foreheads. We then walked to various locations in Edmonton, including a parking lot, a streetcorner, the Starlight(a local bar), a former Native burial ground that are now the Epcor grounds, the Legislature, and the High Level Bridge. Some of the symbolic gestures included: reading a poem by Novalis, drinking Jagermeister, making a phone call, blowing gold dust, and telling a ghost story.
These gestures and locations functioned as ‘touchstones' for the recurring themes and stories that came from the survey responses—in a sense Angela's role was to identify these themes, identify what she felt were the most important, and to condense them into a series of these gestures.
The project was an interesting response to the situation of being an outsider in Edmonton (and transposing one's context onto Edmonton, without considering its appropriateness, partly to due with a lack of time). Angela foregrounded the subjective nature of the process, and by being very clear about her role and the role of the participants (the survey respondents and the participants in the pilgrimage). The ‘pilgrimage office' element was also significant here, as a way of making this process public and open to participation (rather than only showing the ‘end product').
While the ‘pilgrimage office' involved activities conventionally associated with doing historical reseach, such as visiting the city archives, the territory she was working with was the unofficial: rumours, myths, stories, etc. In some cases the stories she found out were some that people in Edmonton were not familiar with. For example, one of the actions was what she called the “purple city”, where you stare into the yellow lights near the Legislature for a couple of minutes then look at the city lights, which look purple. One of the people I spoke to said that she had never done the “purple city”, even though she had lived in Edmonton her entire life. This reveals how partial and specialized local knowledge can be, or how we can be unaware of aspects of our own city, perhaps because they are so familiar.
This is the difference between the Edmonton Pilgrimage and more official ‘history tours' that focus on entertaining facts and anecdotes (and where you sense that other histories are being suppressed). Most of the research did not make claims on the authority of fact or official history, although Angela often began each story with the phrase “the Edmontonians said…” , “the Edmontonians think…”, basing an authority on the survey responses.
The overall picture that emerged was a city that held a sense of pride, but also a sense of frustration, specifically at the lack of ‘culture' and urban, public life (people on the streets etc), in my experience, an experience common to many North American cities (we feel that North America is about car culture, malls, sports, suburbia and a general lack of political/historical awareness, and long for a Europe that is about public space, support for culture and political engagement). Edmonton was a city constructed on a boom/bust economy, and, like other cities, its progress was based on injustices (epitomized by the Epcor plant built on the Native burial ground). Angela's attitude towards these issues was one of compassion. One particularly poignant moment was when we called the help line on the High Level Bridge, and told them that we were celebrating the fact that fifteen years ago, someone chose not to commit suicide.
The overall mood of the pilgrimage was one of celebration. She was quite generous towards the participants, allowing them to participate as much or as little as she wished.
I have noticed that there is a lot of work involving walks, guided tours and unofficial histories. While I see the historical/theoretical precedents in this work as the Situationists, psychogeography and the concept of the derive (one I have also worked with in my own practice), I also wonder if it is inspired by a sense of loss of connection to place and public memory in an increasingly transient and fragmented society, but wanting to base itself in everyday, present-day experience, rather than nostalgia for an 'authentic' past.
PILGRIMAGE FOR EDMONTON: from May 20th - 25th the pilgrimage was be created at the pilgrimage office, which was open to the public (Tuesday to Friday: 10 - 6 and Saturday: Noon to 5 p.m.) The public was invited to contribute knowledge to help create the Pilgrimage.
Pilgrimages: Friday, 27 May, 9:00 p.m. (Night Pilgrimage) and Sunday, 29, May 2:00 p.m. (Day Pilgrimage). Both take two hours and start at the gallery At the beginning of the tour a "pilgrim's-kit" can be bought.
VISUALEYEZ 2005, A FESTIVAL OF PERFORMANCE ART
with support of: Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation of the Arts, Edmonton Arts Council, Canadian Heritage, the city of Edmonton & others
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