It’s hard for me to pass up an opportunity to wander around a city, especially one I don’t really know. So back in March when I had a chance to visit Toronto, I decided to spend a day out text walking in the downtown neighbourhood that radiated out from where we were staying.
I was struck with the thought of how different that neighbourhood seemed to feel from neighbourhoods in Vancouver, Montreal, Washington D.C., Banff, and Calgary where I’ve also done some text walking. This makes sense though since each location, each neighbourhood, has its own personality, activity, history, and sensibility. And also, I know that I come to each day of text walking from a slightly different place as well.
In the months since that time in Toronto, I started to play/work with my gathered material (the photographs/words) and this process initially led to a poem and the bookwork titled PERISHABLE PROOF.
As much as I love the feeling and experience of holding a small bookwork in my hands, and reading by flipping through pages, I found myself also wanting to try to work on a PERISHABLE PROOF video piece. So I started … but this past summer was a rather tough time. Difficulties with my lungs and larynx made it almost impossible to work with my voice, and much of the time it was also hard to focus on language and certain tasks like writing or the nuanced process of working with video. Still, I’d come back to the gathered words regularly, spending time with the images, and slowly, sporadically, I began feeling my way back into my creative process.
This fall I was able to dive back into the video project more fully.
Once again I am flooded with the (re)realization of how wonderful it feels to be immersed in a process of listening and building, returning to language and being through sound.
So anyways, here’s the video … to Ronto,
(October 24th, 2018)