VANCOUVER, BC - PORTLAND, OR

Trip: September 13 - 18, 2018 - Workshop with J.B Mackinnon + Workshop with Adam Kuby

HOST CITY

The concluding trip of the series brought KANVA to the West Coast of both Canada and the United States. Arriving to Vancouver, crossing the border to reach Portland while passing through Seattle – a packed itinerary over 4 days.

To the mind and eye attuned to natural landscapes from Eastern Canada and Quebec, wilderness throughout the West Coast appears super-sized. The abundance of nature makes itself apparent immediately as soon as one steps foot outside the airport.

VANCOUVER

Arriving to Vancouver on a flight from Montreal, KANVA members were astonished by the height of the trees, the density of greenery, the grandeur of the mountains, all of which bring a strong visual awareness of the natural habitats surrounding and cohabitating with the human city. Nature becomes an important actor in the daily landscape and experience. The scale of this wild scenery provokes humility towards the natural environment and keeps the discourse of cohabitation in the foreground.

SEATTLE

Departing from Vancouver, a road trip took KANVA south along the coast of the Pacific Ocean. One natural landscape follows another, each as breathtaking as its predecessor. Nature simply makes one want to stop, get out of the car, breathe in every bit of fresh air, touch every moss-covered tree. On the way to the concluding workshop, KANVA members visited Seattle in passing. Surrounded by water and mountains, the city hosts such architectural icons as the Seattle Public library, and the Museum of Pop culture, to name a pair. To introduce themselves to the work of the Portland artist & the Prix de Rome collaborator, Adam Kuby, KANVA visited his work Hydro-Geo-Bio. A work commissioned by the City of Seattle Office of Arts & Culture as part of the 1% for Art and construction funds, this permanent installation nestles 29 bird houses within an exposed wall of a storm water holding tank.  

PORTLAND

Portland, a city settled in the mountainous landscape, shows a lot of public transit development. And this is only one of the factors that put the city on the map in terms of its eco-friendliness.

“Everything just grows so easily here”, says Adam Kuby with a content smile. This probably is one of the influencing factors on the way residents occupy their own property. It seems that every piece of land here is being used to grow something. Flowers, fruit trees, tomato plants use up every inch. This applies not only to gardens hidden away behind houses but to the front yards as well, where planting beds prevail. 

HUMAN ACTIONS/IMPACTS ON THE NATURAL LANDSCAPE

There are two most notable human actions that were experienced throughout this concluding trip.

The first is perhaps negative, and deals with amnesia of all of us, human beings, as we move through time, from generation to generation. Arriving to Vancouver and experiencing the city for the first time, KANVA members were blown away by the grandeur of nature. Tall white pine trees punctuate the landscape and raise one’s gaze upward. A human is humbled by their presence. However, listening to their observations, James McKinnon brought to the table his much-explored notions of baseline shifts and amnesia of past states of nature. Every single human being on Earth has his/her personal perception of wild nature, and of what it once was. In reality, every generation develops a visual image of what wild nature was when they were only children, and this image stays with them throughout their lifetime. It becomes for them the primordial description, a baseline measuring tool to evaluate how much damage is being done to the planet by humans in one lifetime. Stories like “When we were kids, all this was a forest… When I was little, people were allowed to swim in this river…. etc, etc, etc” become staples as people of that particular generation grow older. Rarely do people go through the effort of trying to visualize and grasp the image of nature from a 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 500 years ago. This generational amnesia allows human beings to say that “things are not so bad”, and to help forgive the continuous destruction of landscapes and habitats. To quote James MacKinnon: “We need to forget what’s come before; we need to forget what we destroyed; we need to forget what we’ve lost, as we proceed in a particular direction, in order to continue to justify moving in that direction.”

And so, as it stands now, the white pines, at which one can marvel today in Vancouver are not even 10% of the grandeur that once reigned there. The biggest giants have all been cut down to build ship masts, and others continue to be cut down in batches to allow for land development.

The second experience is positive, a true modern-day wonder, that KANVA members had the privilege of witnessing on the evening of their arrival to the city of Portland. The trip being in September, it coincided with the migration of Vaux’s Swifts towards Central America and Venezuela. These migratory birds congregate into large groups and pass along the West Coast to stop for a few nights inside a specific chimney of a school building in Portland. Starting at dusk the performance begins. The lawn gets filled with spectators, and before even a single bird appears, the excitement is in the air as if before a major sporting event. A bird appears out of nowhere, then another, then another, and before you know it, there are thousands of birds swarming above. In perfect unison, the flock seems to shape-shift itself to form a funnel, and levitates until every single bird finds refuge inside the chimney for the night.

And the beautiful reality as that humans choose to let the birds be. They don’t interfere, they don’t put up a chimney cap to prevent roosting. It turns out that the Chapman Elementary School in northwest Portland houses the largest known roost of migrating Vaux’s Swifts in the world! This human action, or perhaps a deliberate absence of action is something to learn from. Perhaps, a true co-habitation is possible!

WORKSHOP

The fifth workshop of this Prix de Rome series was held at the Graduate School of Journalism on the beautiful campus of University of British Columbia. Two (2) KANVA members travelled to Vancouver to meet & hold the workshop with James Bernard MacKinnon, who in turn invited several participants that helped to expand the conversation and bring new outlooks on the human relationship with the natural environment. Many thanks to Kelty Miyoshi McKinnon (landscape architect & Partner at PFS Studio, Vancouver), Nick Page (professional Biologist with a degree in landscape architecture, BLA, MCs, RPBio) and Latoyia Gooder (student) for participating.

The sixth and final workshop, held at Adam Kuby’s studio & residence in Portland, Oregon, gathered a lively and diversified group of artists, ecologists and city officials. Adam Kuby was joined by Linda Wysong (interdisciplinary visual artist), Dawn Uchiyama (stormwater system division manager, Bureau of Environmental Service, Portland), Randy Gragg (director, Portland Parks Foundation), Peg Butler (environmental artist, designer and project manager with degrees in Landscape Architecture & Geography), Toby Query (ecologist, City of Portland & founder of Portland Ecologists Unite!), and Fernanda D’Agostino (artist). Whilst guided by the exercises of the workshop, a total of nine (9) participants delved into discussions of sustainable living initiatives becoming more and more part of people’s lives, and their consequences on the natural environment. 

KANVA members present on the trip: Rami Bebawi, Olga Karpova