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A Situation

But what action have we taken? Interventions are for emergen-cies. And sometimes, something turns into nothing; and some-times, nothing turns into something. As you know by now, thephrase, create this situation, is rooted in a 60s youth countercul-ture movement, with roots in street theatre and symbolic politics.Simon, authoritatively denes symbolic politics as the ability toenvision and represent change. They are gestures worked on, tobe worked out, in aesthetic form. Actions forever falling on deafears; always limited by their necessity for interpretation.

Again, interventions are for emergencies. Avoiding simple reac-tion to the ailments of contemporary urban life, weve looked to

our heros of the city for guidance, Francis Als, Andrea Bowers,Guy Debord, Fredrick Engles, Harrel Fletcher, and many more. Intheir lives, work, and writing, weve found clues for re-imaging cityspace, and our interactions in it. Weve taken these precedentsas workable solutions, and in a caffeinated state, adopted them toour city, and to our lives. Its been a process of misquotation.

It happened more than once

The three of us have met on Sunday, twice a month, since Febru-ary. We meet, drink coffee, eat, and talk. Simon, makes mockgestures towards formal meeting etiquette by drafting agendas;including topics like our feelings, and our feelings about the proj-ect. It takes us awhile to focus; the agendas dont entirely help.With clear direction or not, we always re-enter into the circulation

of the city.

I only driftBy Amber Landgraff, Sean Martindale, and Simon Rabyniuk

A Situationi only know i drift without youMeeting Agenda, Feb. 22ndSome Dogs I Know

SymposiumToronto, Ontario, CanadaTo the Beaches!Free TimeBios


3/11

Spending entire days together, we generally bundled culturalevents into our meeting time. There is a certain narrowness to ourbackgrounds, relationships, and activities. Or, a visible pattern toour use of Toronto. Regardless of the size of the city, by virtue ofbeing a city, it is big. And, big cities are built through repetition; arepetition of needs, and a repetition of desires. A city's large scaleprovides the room required for all possible permutations to ndform in neighborhoods, based on wealth, ethnicity, or lifestyle; withhandfuls of spaces to meet.

Our meetings have served as an occasion to at least marginallyveer from the familiar. Our three lived lives literally exchanging

familiarities.

Our Feelings

How does any one feel while in the city?

Its expensive to live, hard to nd work, over crowded, the afford-able housing stock is shrinking, neighborhoods are being turnedover, working class people are being displaced to the under-ser-viced margins, zoning variances are allowing an unheard of con-centration of bars in certain residential neighborhoods, sexy condotowers have shitty branding and worse advertising campaigns. Itsexciting, there is a sense of possibility, people are working hard,opportunity exists, including interaction with diverse people andideas. Again, how should one feel? We're not really po-litical;

although, we each have our ideals.

Our Feelings about the Project(a subset of Our Feelings)

We know each other beyond this work. Although, this project hasallowed us to set aside time to meet regularly. Our feelings aboutthe project dont simply mirror those for each other. Clear commu-nication, inciting focused action, feels good of course. Frustratedexpression, failing to nd audience does not. Weve experienceboth; and continued to speak to each other in spite of it. A running

joke emerged, our 'stupid idea song'. It was a not so subtle way tocall people on bad ideas.

i only know i drift without you

From our earliest conversations on we expressed an interest inexploring unfamiliar areas of Toronto. We discussed wandering asa tool for having new experiences. Past work led us to the idea ofsmall public interventions. We also held the belief the city wouldprovide our necessary materials.

Amber, spoke rst, misquoting bp Nichol. She choose the line Ionly drift without you, for its beauty. Walking south of Queen W.,through side streets, we collected and ordered found materials.Courting impermanence, we xed maple keys, paper, twigs and

pepper in the realm of language. As a group, it was an action sur-prisingly unaware/unconcerned with any potential audience.


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5/11

meeting minutes

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Some Dogs I Know

For our second project we decided that we would choose a loca-tion, a material to work with, and an action to perform. Amber wasin charge of determining location and she chose Toronto's HighPark because of the large number of dogs that she knew would bewalked in that area. (Amber is easily distracted by dogs). Whenwe arrived at the park we wandered around, letting the park revealan action to us. While we wandered around, we pet as manydogs as we could. We found that we were making a collection ofnames of the dogs we were petting. We decided that that couldbe our action meeting dogs and that we could make a poster

with the names we were collecting attached to different drawingsof dogs. The next time we met we brought the posters we hadmade. We postered around Leslieville because it also had a highpopulation of dog owners, a small attempt at introducing Toronto'sdogs to each other.


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7/11

I begin the conversation, because I often begin the conversation.

Amber: I feel like the city is more than the sum of its parts orrather that each part becomes a place that is wholly its own uni-verse, with each of these little universes overlapping and ulti-mately making up the city as a whole. I miss the feeling of livingin a small place where I know everyone and everyone knows me.It is so easy to be anonymous in the city. I think that somehow, insome small way, I have been using these visits as a way of insert-ing myself into the city, giving myself a place here a place thatwe can occupy together.

Simon: But youre forgetting that living in the city is a struggle itsdifcult to nd work (and getting increasingly more difcult), livingexpenses are high, and entertainment - doing something - al-ways seems to cost money. When you think about it, even these

activities that we set for ourselves in creating a situation involvespending money, even if its just for a coffee or tea. There is anirony in the leisure industry where free time depends on thetotality of social conditions, which continue to hold people underits spell... [it] is tending towards its own opposite, and is becom-ing a parody of itself. Take camping for example, with roots in oldGerman youth movements, sleeping under the stars was a protestto bourgeois convention. While their protest has passed, campinghas not, becoming a huge industry. We are sold huge quantities ofgear to allow us to get out.1 We are caught in a capitalist sys-tem, and it doesnt seem like there is any real way out.

Amber: I think that I prefer to think about it not as forgetting thatliving in the city is a struggle, but that the struggle is worth it for theexperiences that the city reveals to us. We couldnt be doing the

things that we are doing if we werent in the city.

Sean: Is that really true? We are choosing to deal with materialsthat we nd wherever we are and we could nd these materialsany where.

Amber: The materials might be present any where, but what weare doing with them is at least partially determined by our locationwithin a city broadly, and Toronto specically. Take the action thatwe set for ourselves in High Park that could really only occur ina city. In the country people have a different relationship to theirenvironment and open spaces. There is an obvious communityof people that, perhaps by necessity, walk their dogs in High Park.Their relationships to each other are also determined by theircontext. People recognize each other because of the dogs, they

might pass each other unknowingly if it werent for the presence oftheir pets, not even realizing that they are sharing the same spaceoutside of the park.

Sean: So what you are saying is that our interaction in a locationis determined by that location even when we arent specicallymaking the choice for that to be the case (like we are doing withthis project)?

Amber: Is that what Im saying? Im not sure. I think that thisproject has helped to solidify my feelings that living in Toronto isdifferent than living in some of the other places I have lived in be-fore. And the way that I interact in the city also changes becauseof the fact that it is Toronto and not somewhere else. But Im notsure if I can describe how this relationship to the city manifests

itself exactly in my interactions. I mean, really, the fact that you,Simon, are coming into the city in order to take part in this proj-ect with us, changes your experience of being here. It becomesa different experience than that of someone who is spending alltheir time in the city. The things that we are doing are things that Imight conceivably be doing anyway because I live here and spendtime in some of these locations. But you are always travelling tobe here and travelling to return home, that must inuence yourexperience, even if you aren't conscious of it.

We are interrupted by the arrival of the bill. The restaurant is smalland we feel like we have taken up the table for long enough. Wepay the bill, we leave Yasis Place.

1 Theodor Adorno. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. (New

York: Routledge, 1991). Pg. 190.

I recorded our conversation because I record all of our con-versations I was hoping that by recording the things that we

spoke about we could fnd the purpose behind what we were

doing. I think that these conversations are demonstrative of

something, although I am not sure exactly what is demon-

strated. Perhaps in some small way the roles that we eachtook on in the project are revealed. But then again, perhaps

not.

Symposium


8/11

To the Beaches!:Distant Places Are No Longer Different Places

For our third project, we decided to act as tourists in our own city.Not such a stretch really, considering that we are transplants fromother parts of the province/country. We choose the Beaches be-cause none of us had explored it before.

All of our projects for this zine involved exploring Toronto in waysthat we hadnt before; here we explicitly wanted to let others guideus in a more direct fashion. We consulted with strangers for insid-er tips about where to eat, where to go, and what to do; wondering

what the collective experience of a neighbourhood could show us.After several locals thoughtfully directed us back downtown, wespecied our interest in the district at hand. When a security guardat Torontos Water Works, our nal stop, offered to take a groupphoto, it felt like we had successfully embodied our tourist roles.

N

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Legend:

Event

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

An expressway, a street, a shoreline

Helpful Baker: Have you ever been to this bakery before?

Us: Actually, we haven't been in this area before.

Helpful Baker: Are you familiar with any Can. Lit? Michael Ondaatje, refers tothe Water Works building, just East of here, in In the Skin of a Lion-- it's anArchitectural marvel.


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Us: If we were going to the beaches what would be the best stop?

Helpful Transit Worker: Any where here to the end of the line.

Helpful Beach Elderly Sisters: Have youbeen to Queen St.?Us: No...Helpful Beach Elderly Sisters: Walk a bitfurther on the boardwalk, Queen St. hasshops and restaurants.

Us: Is there anywhere that you would rec-ommend for lunch/brunch?

Helpful Young Family: You could go toFresh on the Beach or Sunset Grill. Noplace is better than the rest.

Us: Were down here for the day, any sug-gestions for what we could get up to?

Helpful Restaurateur: Well its a nice dayso you could walk by the lake. Theresnothing on Queen St except the SunsetGrill. Do you have a car? You could takethe streetcar downtown it goes right to theEatons Centre.


10/11

When not dressing up in cardboard robot and space suitcostumes little Sean, liked to pretend that he held a Bachelorof Design from Emily Carr University and maintained an en-gaging multidisciplinary practice. He fondly dreamt of the daywhen he might attend the prestigious Ontario College of Artand Design as a bright-eyed and irrationally idealistic gradu-ate student in the Interdisciplinary Masters in Art Media andDesign program.

Amber Landgraff is an emerging artist/curator living in theToronto area. Her work often takes the form of performativegestures and public interventions. She is currently interestedin pursuing collaboration and connection in as many differ-ent ways as possible. She has been involved in multiplecuratorial projects including It's like a revolution!(XPACE,2009) and The Matter of Loss(Art Gallery of Ontario, 2009).Her artwork has been also included in the Infnite ExchangeGallery2008 (Sub Zero, ICA, San Jose) and Eyelevel Re-

shelving Initiative 32008 (Eyelevel Gallery, Halifax). Shehas exhibited performances and installations in Toronto,Edmonton, and Guelph.

Simon Rabyniuk is an ofce administrator living in theGreater Toronto Area. He enjoys working with artists. Hehopes to have the opportunity to do so again. If so, he wouldbe interested in exploring the topic of conict mediation. Hecan be reached at .

Theodore Adorno, The Culture Industry: Free Time

Bios:

Thanks, Lauren and Rose, for some dogs.


11/11

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