Material Memory: With words as their actions, 2014-2019, Ottawa

Lisa Rapoport - PLANT architect inc

When we started our work as PLANT in the mid-1990s we were lucky to work on a series of projects that called into question how we would approach our understanding of the landscape, and what the role of material was within that dialogue. At the time, we observed that people did not seem to understand their local landscapes from an ecological, nor from a cultural point of view. They did not have a deeply felt tie to the land at a time when environmental concerns were just beginning to resurface after the 1960s. We created a series of architecture, landscape, furniture and installation projects whose aims were to heighten people’s awareness of their landscape, their environment, with a particular interest in the traces that past and present culture left or were leaving on the land. We believed that people must be engaged in their environment before they would take a role in sustaining it. Engaging meant staging personal and collective experiences on the site where Conversations often figured prominently as project names and subjects. The cultural, aesthetic, historic and social framing of the place would lead to a deeper revelation of that landscape, including its systems and ecologies. Nearly 25 years later, with society’s significant collective knowledge and fear of climate change, we believe that this is still just as relevant. There is an abstractness to the global crisis that needs to be bridged with a deeply ingrained visceral connection and intimacy with local place.

On Site’s call for articles posited, ‘that the beloved tropes of narrative, identity, myth, textuality…are luxuries we can not afford right now; they seem irrelevant in the face of both the present and our future.’ We do not think this is precisely true – we think the material future is a step in the continuity of the material past. Although narrative, identity, myth and textuality are abstractions, we have explored their capacity to be concrete, experiential and physical – in effect material. For us, material exploration has always meant exploring how material experience influences and reinforces memory. What we touch with our hands and feet – the materials that wrap around us – make a memory impression through our body experience. Heaviness, lightness, roughness, smoothness, light absorbing, reflective, solidity, laciness, materials that come from the site or site processes, or are revealed on the site, material that grows and diminishes with time, can tell a visceral story that recovers the past and re-presents in the present. I titled this article ‘Material Memory’ because just like muscle memory which creates synaptic grooves, we feel material memory creates permanent mental maps of place and community, both more relevant than ever.

Two examples from this period illustrate this, Sweet’s Farm, 1994-97, and Dublin Grounds of Remembrance of 2007, below. An integral part of these projects was finding the worth, the lost or buried meanings on the site. These were each assembled pieces of land – delimited by surveying and ownership concepts rather than being defined by inherent ecological, geological, phenomenological or cultural meanings of the sites. Our own direct exploration of these sites, and our desire to deeply ‘know’ the sites eventually became the subject and programme for future users, to guide their immersion in the site. These projects were deliberately designed to make you slow down and notice. The projects encourage a daily/habitual use of the site, to experience the nuances of change, to understand that using the site creates history on the site, and unites past histories with emerging histories, to build material memory. The projects were a form of story making and story telling. In our current instantaneous culture this slowness of story telling is even more difficult.

At Sweet’s Farm’s 85 acres (1994–1997) this exploration was cultural and processbased, and included reconfiguring 1000 mink cages into a diningroom in a clearing; an annually growing twig fence made from the forestmanagement cuttings that measure this practice; wooden furniture, pathsand look-outs made from natural tree-fells – all to create a looseitinerary for exploration. Each of these elements helped create animmersion in the material-ness of this landscape, and allowed the familythat owns it and their visitors to know it through their materialexperience.

Sweet Farm

In 2007, we won the competition for a monument to honour the service of US veterans. The Dublin Grounds of Remembrance eschewed a traditionalmonument in favour of a park promoting the act of habitual walking andsocial gathering, reinforcing a journey of remembrance and creating newsignificance for a piece of remnant land. Starting at a copper loggiathat frames a ravine and gathering space, the walking route uncovers thenatural site, and re-contexualises an adjacent revolutionaryeracemetery. A 510 foot-long bronze handrail shaped to hold your hand back,along with a limestone path with alternating granular and smoothsurfaces, guides and paces the walk. The changing sound of shoes on theground, the hand polishing the bronze, the punctuated end points, allreinforce this walk as an act of remembrance.

It is in this context that we created With Words as their Actions (2014–2019) the winning entry for the Lyon Station Art competition, partof Ottawa’s new underground transit system. In this project we havecreated a materially immersive experience that revels in the act ofstory/ history telling, and in who tells the stories. It immerses theviewer in a tactile, textual, visual and exploratory material experiencefor seconds to only a few minutes, although likely on a regular basis.

Each subway station’s artwork was given a theme. The Lyon station theme was Bytown – Ottawa’s name prior to its becoming the Nation’s capital in 1855. Founded in 1826, Bytown was a bustling place for industry, (primarily timber) as it was strategically located at the junction of the Ottawa River and the newly built Rideau Canal. How could we reveal Bytown in this remote place – far below grade at the lower concourse level, far from the nineteenth century? Our first stop was the library and archives to try to understand what actually happened between 1826 and1855, the short life of Bytown. Our best source was the Ottawa Historical Society where we discovered an excellent essay presented by Anne Dewar in 1953 called ‘The Last Days of Bytown’, a careful and colourful documentation of all aspects of life in Bytown on the eve of becoming Ottawa, from road conditions to civic amusements, the state of the city coffers to the editorial and advertising content of its newspapers. This was interesting enough, but led us to a new exploration into how this history came to us.

Anne Dewar was a member of the Ottawa chapter of the Women’s Canadian Historical Society, which was founded in 1898. This historical society was Ottawa’s first, and from the late nineteenth century until after World War II, all of its members were women. While their husbands were building with wood, stone, rail ties and financial capital, the society’s members were building an edifice of words and stories. In 1955 they decided to include men in their membership and it changed to its current name – the Historical Society of Ottawa. However, in 1898, 72 years after settling the area, these women recognised that an oral passing of history was no longer sufficient, that the material culture of the settlement was being lost through the generations:

‘Friday June 3, 1898. At 4pm, thirty-one of Ottawa’s most prominent women assembled in the drawing room of the Speaker of the House of Commons’ apartment in the Centre Block on Parliament Hill. The purpose of the meeting: To form an Ottawa branch of the Women’s Canadian Historical Society. Lady Edgar called the meeting to order and the ladies took their seats... Among the attendees at that meeting on June 3 were the wives of a number of prominent men who represented both political parties as well as the senior ranks of the public service and the upper echelon of the city’s business community.’

— The Historical Society of Ottawa website

Their task was to speak across centuries, but they were also women of the nineteenth century. Did they bring their knitting, their needlepoint, deftly stitching while participating in the excited and perhaps radical chatter of creating the society, tasking themselves as the keepers of history? Their research was carefully documented, but the texture and excitement of their conversations – the oral aspect of them sharing their research – is lost. With Words as their Actions attempts to capture this ‘speaking across centuries’ by collapsing time and memory threads (the actual historical content — the history of Bytown, the moment of founding, the 1953 presentation of Dewar’s work, the present and the utterly contemporary fast-paced experience of the subway) just as the thirty-two women would have hoped, passing on oral history while doing ‘women’s work’. The artwork immerses us in their salon and their words; we feel part of their oral history.

Anne Dewar’s 5,000-word text (over 6000 in the French translation) is waterjet cut in a 72–foot long curving stainless steel curtain that weaves in and out of the station’s columns. Alternating lines of text are cut through on one side in English in Roman letters, interwoven with the French translation in italics cut through from the other side. The nearly 12,000 words subtracted from the steel, the curvaceousness of the metal and the alternating line work make a lacy curtain that recalls the intricacy of hand embroidery, knitting and other fabric arts traditionally considered women’s work. Long, sinuous and lacy, the sculpture mimics a long drawn out story with its many asides. As you move along, in it and around it, it quickly transforms from solid to sheer. You need to walk it to read it. You want to run your hand along it like a kid running along a curtain.

Meant to be read in small increments in the few minutes that you have at the concourse level of the station, the sculpture encourages repeated readings over multiple trips to eventually get the whole text. The text cannot be instantly consumed, but instead mulled over, slowly building a mental image of the Bytown that was. Like nubbles or drop stitches in the fabric, bookmarks create a structure for how to do that: each paragraph is marked with a turned out drop cap letter (like mediæval manuscript chapter openings), creating a pattern of ‘bookmarks’, allowing you to pick up where you left off the next time you are at the station. Dewar’s text is a vast inventory that allows for (or is even best enjoyed when) dipping in small doses.

The lady heads are silhouettes of the society’s 1898 founders, paying tribute to these women who kept Bytown alive. The silhouettes were drawn and extrapolated from the few extant photographs in Canadian archives – in some cases only a single photo exists – of each individual woman. Their names are etched into their collars. Some were prominent in their own right like Lady Edgar and Zoe Laurier, some by association with their husbands, and others were young and unmarried and have virtually disappeared from history. In the sculpture, their silhouettes are gathered in conversation presiding over the curtain, passing knowledge to each other as equals. Although referencing Victorian era silhouettes, these are drawn as profiles rather than being solid (shadow) heads, the transparency allowing a layering that reads like the ladies are talking across the room, with the viewer immersed

With Words as their Actions knits together past histories from the end of Bytown and its history up to1855, to the women gathering 43 years later in 1898 when enough history was made to fear its potential loss, to the writing in 1954 of ‘Last Days of Bytown’ recording that history. Collapsing these together, the sculpture presents history as it is made: by collective effort, after the fact, through the act of story-telling and by means of a persistent rereading and re-presentation in the present. However, unlike an archive or a historical museum, the artwork embodies this as a physical experience, etching a new groove.

For us, what started as a giddy exploration 25 years ago – a deep dive into the physicality of materials and landscape – has broadened as we have become more instrumental in our approach to memory in all manner of project types. We have come to understand that illuminating a landscape or a history was just the first step to the goal of reinforced and embedded collective memory of place and community. It is one that demands deeply impressed material experience – a form of persistent storytelling.

With Words as their Actions is a permanent artwork at Lyon Station on the O-Train Confederation line LRT and is part of the City of Ottawa Art Collection. An exhibit about the artists’ processes is on at Transformations: 24 artists, 13 stations, 12.5 km in Corridor 45|75, Rideau Station, O-Train Confederation Line LRT, Ottawa, Ontario from September 2019 to January 2020.