Banlieusard
This is a french folded book with cover that folds out into a poster. It was commissioned by Artspeak (Vancouver) for an exhibition with artists Jamie Hilder and Heather Passmore. I wrote ekphrastically and conducted research in response to their images and concepts. The writing began in response to Passmore’s found trove of damaged and cracking slides, abandoned snapshots a soldier had taken while on various leaves from his duties in the 1970s. One showed a row of vintage car parked along the road, another was an ambiguously European monument, others were stock tourist shots of “nature” settings carefully sectioned off and marked for hikers. What began to emerge was this idea of mobility or movement not signifying “freedom,” but the impossibility of it. If you look carefully, you will see the soldier never left his car. Along with artist Jamie Hilder’s contribution—a map of all his movements over the one year period, inspired by the map that the Situationists made in the 1960s—I began to think about the limits of the flâneur. I began to think of Passmore’s piece as a map too, a minor net stretched over a field of time. Banlieusard uses sensorial language and imagery to think through photography’s relation to the construction history and memory.