The Foreshore Listens 2018
Inspired by the mixed texture of self-published artist zines The Foreshore Listens responds to, expands on, and incorporates elements of The Foreshore sessions. The process of developing these audio works started with recordings commissioned from past Foreshore Session presenters. Invited to consider to a series of prompts from a foreshore in the distant future the responses range from ambient recordings to poetry to foley of a longed-for place. These are by Bracken Hanuse Corlett, Lindsay Dobbin, Journée sans Culture, Laiwan, Justin Langlois, Cecily Nicholson, Kristina Lee Podesva, Carol Sawyer, and Jay White and can be listened to below independent of the zines. The Foreshore Listens was produced and launched in 2018.
Vanessa Campbell, Stacey Ho, Sarah Moore, and Dan Pon were then invited to work from the session recordings, the commissioned works, and to make curated or commissioned additions to the existing material. In their work they have drawn out complex constellations of thought and insight otherwise latent in the series and crystallizes their depth and urgency.
An Index of speakers in this podcast HERE
Embodiment – Stacy Ho
In developing this podcast I return to thinking about the body as it is situated within histories and power structures that include entities such as the land, plants, animals, and other human beings. The continuous exchange between the personal and the social flows through the point of the body. For me, it is important to consider how queer, speculative, and collective gestures enacted by the body can move toward accessibility and justice, or as Denise Ferreira Da Silva phrases it “nothing less than the end of the world as we know it, which is decolonization”. The voice may be understood as a sonic manifestation of the body. Outwardly, it carries and transmits knowledge through oral, musical, vernacular, and narrative traditions. However the voice is also breath, involuntary noise, and the silence through which you can hear a heartbeat.
With:
Cecily Nicholson
Jay White
Lindsay Dobbin
Stacey Ho
“I Want” text piece collectively produced with Carmen Papalia, Arlene Bowman, romham pádraig gallacher, Taryn Goodwin, Jotika, Myah Catherine Rose Wallace, and aly de la cruz yi
Readers: Alex Muir. Alize Zorlutuna, Ash Goertz, Byron Peters, Dan Pon, Elisa Ferrari, listen chen
An Index of speakers in this podcast HERE
Water Weight, Friction Possibility – Dan Pon
We are situated at the boundary of land and water, the edge of the known. The tides lap at the margins of the possible and hint at hidden worlds, a deep marine of nothing and everything. Beyond the euphotic zone light is fleeting and we must endeavour to go looking for anything we hope to find. Likewise the pages of our own stories are layered and compressed into the strata of the earth or spoken and heard and spoken and heard until they atomize into the very air we breath. We negotiate the confluences, our interventions a record of (mis)use. Uncovering each others’ experiences, both known and felt-known, takes a generosity of listening. Thank you for listening.
With:
The Garden, 2018, T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss
Saltwater City, 2018, Sweden Xiao
Composition for Layered Voice I, 2013, Lief Hall
Mazu, 2014, Lief Hall
Field recordings, Dan Pon, 2018
Laiwan, A New World is Reversed, 2018
An Index of speakers in this podcast HERE
Sea Legs – Sarah Moore
Sea Legs wants to hold you in the spaciousness of multiple past, present and possible future shorelines, and to give you the footing to see from there; a compilation of what I heard in the Foreshore Sessions and audio works about space, story and tide in the city. I’ve pulled out threads of buried stories and cramped spaces, and tried to bring forward the many ways contributors are
working to push aside heavy layers of institutionalized impatience and erasure to let in the more open physical, temporal, emotional and psychological space we need.
With:
Lindsay Dobbin, Recorded August, 2018 in Mi’kma’ki (Nova Scotia) at Minas
Basin, Bay of Fundy
Carol Sawyer
Justin Langlois, How to Measure the Distance to the Foreshore, 2018
Journée Sans Culture
Lindsay Dobbin
An Index of speakers in this podcast HERE
We Call You to Witness – Vanessa Campbell
For this audio zine I used the witnessing part of Musqueam ceremony to call each listener to open their mind and heart to the responsibility of remembering, recalling and recounting the words and stories they hear collected. Selections
have been made from the important projects and reflections presented during the Foreshore Sessions thinking about the significance of indigenous languages and oral history. For millennia, the histories and cultural embodiment and expression
of our people have been communicated strictly through an oral tradition.
The Musqueam speakers in this recording are all new language learners, and newly connecting with the rich repository of tradition and heritage carried by the language itself.
With:
Megan Harkey
Lawrence Guerin
Courtenay Gibson
Kristina Lee Podesva
Mack Paul
Jen Weih
Responses To The Foreshore
2016-2017
JUSTIN LANGLOIS – HOW TO MEASURE THE DISTANCE TO THE FORESHORE
An imaginary series of instructions for locating the foreshore, or perhaps, understanding a certain kind of distance from it. Most resonant if listened to at least one hour after sundown.
LAIWAN – A NEW WORLD IS REVERSED
Named after the subtitle “A New World is Revealed” from an online introduction to Christopher Columbus’ journal entries outlining his first journey in 1492 of his arrival in the Americas. Laiwan reads the two journal entries starting from the end to the beginning, where thus the text is reversed. A meditation on the question how do we re-embody the whole, so as to learn to put aside the agendas of human exceptionalism and anthropocentricism?
JAY WHITE – UNDERWATER
Audio crafted from cooking areas in the artist’s house and studio. Kettles, porridge, coffeemakers and a wood stove make soundscapes that span two times and places: Nex̱wlélex̱m (Bowen Island) permeated with the sounds of machinery and a speculated future in Ktaqamkuk (Fox Cove / St. Bernard’s, Newfoundland) a place of family and home.
JOURNÉE SANS CULTURE
A collective reflection on processes of gentrification. Originally created for use as a frame for a discussion around the role of artistic communities in those same processes.
LINDSEY DOBBIN
A sonic meditation on the space and time when the tide is almost fully in, and the water has almost fully gathered at the upmost or final edge of the shore– a place of incredible force and volume and chaos.
KRISTINA LEE PODESVA – WHERE THE FIGURE MEETS THE GROUND
A suite of recordings that take inspiration from the foreshore’s site of flux and perpetual re-articulation.
With thanks to Jasmine Valandani, Exquisite Erika, Coqui Thody, Yun Nam Podesva, Alan McConchie + Richard Scholtz
BRACKEN HANUSE CORLETT
Reflecting on the pressures of art making –The feeling of wanting to recoil, retreat, and pull back.
CECILY NICHOLSON – FORESHORE POETICS
Considering the effect of systems of authority and control on our human bodies as well as those non-human entities that populate and enrich our environments and experiences.
CAROL SAWYER
Ambient recordings and descriptions that contemplate the history of Vancouver’s now erased foreshore zone along the border to False Creek flats.