Abstracts - Heritage Conservation Symposium

2017 Abstracts

2017 Abstracts

We are pleased to present the Abstracts for the 2017 Heritage Conservation Symposium

Annette Arsenault- Heritage Conservation in Quidi Vidi Village, Newfoundland and Labrador

Quidi Vidi Village, located within the city of St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, has been the site of considerable debate regarding development in recent years. European setters as early as the sixteenth century, this former fishing village is now a popular tourist destination due to its picturesque nature, which evokes everyday life in Newfoundland outport communities during the height of the cod fishery. Acts of resistance by local women to a new housing development on the waterfront in 2001 led to the establishment of the Quidi Vidi Village Foundation, which now strives to influence development decisions impact the village. This presentation will explore Quidi Vidi Village as a vernacular, organically evolved cultural landscape and investigate how the absence of an adequate heritage conservation framework enabled development to occur which has negatively impacted the intangible values associated with this cultural landscape. It will also describe current efforts and challenges related to the management of the heritage value of the village.

Mathieu Dormaels- Cultural heritage landscapes in Quebec: challenges in local development

In Quebec, landscapes are an essential part of the province identity. Since the development of tourism at the beginning of the 20^th century, landscapes embody the values of Quebec society and testify of its evolution. Nevertheless, it was not until the adoption of the Cultural heritage Act in 2012 that “Cultural heritage landscapes” were officially recognized. Today, landscapes are still an important motivation for tourists to visit, especially in the Gaspe Peninsula, but their conservation struggles with the development of other industrial projects, mainly wind farms.

Nowadays, the legal framework offers different ways for local communities to protect and enhance the values of their landscapes. Several local communities are building local development projects were landscapes are the primary resource to increase their region attractiveness and tourism activities as a new source of incomes. But doing so, they also unveil certain values about their communities and their identity.

This paper proposes to first present an overview of Quebec legal framework on cultural landscapes, and then to expose the findings of a research about how communities, in the Gaspe Peninsula, are developing project based on landscapes and what are the challenges they face.

Lauren Archer- Climate Change and the Hockey Cultural Heritage Landscape

The origins of hockey are very closely tied to the natural heritage resources of Canada. Born of winter, early forms of hockey were first played on our many lakes and rivers. European settlers began to alter this natural landscape almost immediately by building dams, locks and mill ponds. As the sport spread, communities began to build special purpose outdoor rinks, a tradition that is still practiced today as a ritual, taught and repeated every year.

The emergence of the indoor rink introduced built heritage resources to this hockey landscape. Arenas were safer, warmer, protected, and offered a place for spectators to sit, changing the game from a participatory activity to a form of entertainment. More importantly, these cultural resources provided the foundation upon which the culture of hockey was built. Hockey rinks and arenas are important third spaces for communities across Canada, and are often the centre of social life in both small towns and large cities.

Together these resources form a massive cultural heritage landscape that has evolved over time, driven by social, economic, and cultural imperatives, in association with, and in response to the natural environment of Canada. Despite the pervasive role of hockey in Canada there are many threats to this cultural landscape: The cost of playing the sport, which limits participation of New Canadians and low-income families; deterioration of arenas in communities that are suffering economically; and our increased understanding of the risks of contact sport.

None of these threats, however, seem as insurmountable as the threat of climate change and the changing, often unpredictable nature of Canadian winters. These environmental changes are resulting in the loss of the outdoor rink and the unorganized play that these community-defining spaces provide. The traditional knowledge of rinkmaking, when not practiced, is lost. Natural ice arenas, built before artificially-cooled rink surfaces were the standard, are also a disappearing resource, as are the communities that have formed around them. The many and varied responses of the hockey community to these threats provide alternative approaches to protecting and conserving cultural heritage landscapes.

Lindsay Reid- Location, location, (re)location? Moving heritage resources in the age of Ecological Bias

Building relocation is a centuries-old tradition. In Canada there is a long history of moving buildings of every description, from the humble log cabin to the stately home. The reasons for moving buildings range from dramatic interventions due to impending natural disasters such as floods, or massive infrastructure projects like dam-building, to much more prosaic reasons – often moving a building was less expensive than building a new one. Today building relocation is commonly practiced in both urban and rural settings, most often related to new growth and development.

Historically, the guiding documents in heritage conservation, at both the international and local levels, strongly discouraged building relocation unless used as a last resort. The Venice Charter, the founding document for international heritage conservation created in 1964, underlined the inseparability of a monument from its setting. Similarly, the province of Ontario’s Eight Guiding Principles, written in 1989, emphasized respect for original location. Increasingly, however, parameters are emerging with a more flexible approach to considering a building’s setting, based on evolving cultural heritage landscape analyses. This is true in both urban, small town, and rural contexts, where building relocation can conserve heritage resources while allowing places to change.

In this paper we trace the history of building relocation and look to examples from Ontario to better understand how attitudes and policies have changed over time, and what factors were taken into decisions to move buildings. Using case studies including the John Duncan House in North York, the St. Lawrence Seaway project and Upper Canada Village, and the Heritage Markham Estates, we explore the legacies of these changing attitudes and to what extent a building’s authenticity is affected by relocation. We investigate how a cultural heritage landscape approach informs our view of building relocation and its role in heritage conservation in the future.

Zeynep Ekim- Ruin-Ophilia: Preserving the Narrative without Restoration

Once vital aspects of safer navigation routes and icons of industrial development, Imperial Towers of Lake Huron dominated over the Bruce Peninsula coastal landscape for almost two centuries. Similar to many other engineering works, advancements in technologies rendered these Towers impractical, leading to their disposition. While they were once purely functional structures, their contribution in the development of regions rendered them as cultural landmarks. Embedded in the social narrative(s) of the locale, they helped foster a sense of place and a communal identity.

This presentation will focus on my Master’s Thesis, which explores the ways larger narratives of significant engineering works can be communicated through design interventions? Taking the Nottawasaga Lighthouse in Collingwood as a case study, a revitalization strategy is developed to initiate a dynamic interaction between past, present and future narratives without “restoration”. Explored methodology aims to be a prototype for the revitalization of the entire series of Imperial Towers.

Rebecca Dolgoy, Sarah Gelbard and Amanda Montague- “But what about the…library?”: Place-Forward Place-making

As the city of Ottawa looks forward towards a new central library, drawing momentum from the plethora of architecturally stunning and urbanistically revitalizing libraries built across the country in recent years, we are invariably asked to consider what it means to build a library for the twenty-first century. While public consultations focus our attention on the future and what we might want a library to be, there is a conspicuous absence of thought given to the library as it is or as it might have been. The official public consultation asks: “If we build a new library, what else would you want it to be?” This question reflects an approach to place-making (and place-marketing) that prioritizes development and building something new. These future visioning exercises rarely engage with the existing landscape or with the presence of the past in contemporary culture.

Our aim is to offer a venue and series of exercises where we can collectively ask: “But what about the library… of our past?… of our present?… as a library?” When separated from the proposition of a new building for the future, what does the public discussion about the public library become? How can place- making help us hold the multiple and changing meaning of place and carry the past forward with us in meaningful ways? The first iteration (or pilot) is through the Cultural Memory Workshop, an Ottawa-based initiative that brings scholars and community members together to work through the presence of the past in the local context. A session will be held on March 23 rd at the Ottawa Central Library where we will discuss the history of the building and engage in several workshop activities (e.g. geo-tagging, photo essays).

This presentation will also feature a workshop component. Check out the Registration Page for more details!

Heena Gajjar and Amita Sinah- Dwarka Lost and Reclaimed: Planning for a Resilient Landscape

The coastal peninsula of Okhamandal in Gujarat, India is a popular pilgrimage destination, especially the holy city of Dwarka established by Krishna and swallowed by the sea upon his death. The environmental history of the region is marked by a continuing tussle between humans and nature in reclaiming land from sea. Archaeological findings on the coastal edge of Okhamandal date its settlements back to 15^th c. BCE and changes in the shoreline suggest that rising sea levels inundated coastal settlements built and destroyed more than once. Now the flat peninsula is once again threatened by continuing rise in sea level caused by climate change and faced with desertification due to salt ingress. One of the four major holy sites across the Indian subcontinent, this landscape of immense cultural significance is visited by nearly two million pilgrims annually. The ongoing infrastructure development is harmful to its fragile ecologies and disturbs the ambience of its sacred sites. It is proposed that the lapsarian approach to landscape design guide the conservation of Dwarka and other pilgrim sites in Okhamandal. This will promote resiliency, encourage a faith based environmental ethic, and will be effective in managing sacred sites in a sustainable way.

Angela Garvey and Hallie Church- It’s not ours to name

The Willowbank Community Love Garden was first cleared and sowed by a group of volunteers in the spring of 2014. Situated near the starting point of an ancient portage route around Niagara Falls, the garden is a dynamic element within the richly-layered landscape of Willowbank estate.

The focus of the presentation is to consider the Community Love Garden as a sensitive heritage landscape intervention, a living conservation strategy, and an expanding act of cultural interpretation within a designated National Historic Site in the Loyalist village of Queenston, Ontario. We will share the story of the Garden through dialogue with several of the individuals who formed and maintain the space and who, in turn, have nurtured rich cultural exchange among the varied users of the Willowbank landscape. We will ask questions and listen in order to develop an understanding of the different relationships, feelings and associations connected to this space.

Darlene Bearskin, Dr. Sarah Pashagumskum and Laura Phillips- Exhibitions, Landscape, Community Cultural Heritage and Healing: The development of a travelling exhibition- “Footprints: A Walk Through Generations”

We, the Cree people of Northern Quebec, identify ourselves as the Eeyou of Eeyou Istchee, The People of the Land. Through themes related to ‘walking’ this exhibit celebrates teachings, values and the rich cultural history passed down from our ancestors. This exhibit follows the evolution of travelling through our eyes, allowing visitors to experience our stories, arts, and traditional technologies, sharing in our culture. Beginning with childhood Rites of Passage, we share the importance of walking and making our first footprints on Mother Earth. In walking for ceremony and journeys, we respect the many teachings of our Elders that are passed from generation to generation.

The materials used to create the objects included in the exhibit demonstrate the wealth of resources on our land, while the techniques illustrate our skill and artistry. Audio, video and photographs reveal the sights and sounds of our land and our people. Compelling artwork by contemporary Cree artists is featured throughout the exhibit, illustrating another mode of creative expression in our cultural identity.

Our presentation will discuss the development of this exhibit: content development, community consultation and contributions by the Cree community to share how this collaborative process attempted to capture the spirit of the land and the people to create an exhibit that will resonate with visitors from all backgrounds. Using memory, tradition, stories and objects, we demonstrate these themes: The Earth is Our Mother; Rites of Passage; Clothing through Generations; the Wealth of our Land / the Strength of our People; Iiyiyiuimuwin (Cree language) / the backbone of our Culture; Travelling through Time and Eeyou Istchee; Walking with our Past towards a Better Future. Walking was once an essential aspect of Cree life, culture and survival. An expression of Miyupimaatisiiwin (living life well), this exhibition encourages healthy living, healing and inter-connectedness with the land that sustains us all.

Ben Gallagher and Aubyn O’Grady- Material Distance: Memories and the Poetics of Landscape

Our proposal for Dynamic and Migrating Landscapes is to create an audio-visual projection piece that merges our visual and written practices, allowing for a simultaneous exploration of the bodily impacts of climate change and the consequences of inheritance and futurity on these changing landscapes. Combining footage taken in the Yukon and Toronto with poetry written in Scotch Village, Nova Scotia, we will produce an affective exploration of distance and identity in relation to current ecological realities. By creating out of the living pedagogies offered by the landscapes we are embedded in, we suggest that such creations offer a new perspective on both conservation and arts processes.

Emma Bider- Sounding the World: Imagining ontologies as mobile through sound and song

In exploring the field of ontological anthropology, I have found many traces of song and sound in several scholars’ works, which speak to musical ways of knowing and being in the world. The aim of my paper is to provide new modes of imagining how ontological ways of being are affected by the displacement of peoples. I seek to intervene at the intersection of anthropology and ethnomusicology and argue that sound and song-making can and should be taken into account within an ontological framework. To embark on this task is to weave together several seemingly disparate historical and narrative threads, exploring, ultimately, the sounds and songs of the Tuareg of North Africa. I intend on first briefly exposing what I see as the gap between ethnomusicological and anthropological research in the domain of sound ontology, as well as exploring some reasons why anthropologists may be overlooking sound as a constituting force. I will then examine how several anthropologists and ethnomusicologists have understood and written about sound and song-making, in order to demonstrate the ways sound and song are shown implicitly to be part of ontological practices. Finally, I will engage with the sound-stories of the Tuareg, a group who, though nomadic and increasingly displaced, nonetheless carry with them very particular ways of relating with the world, which transcend the binary of home and wilderness. I intend on engaging with ontologies that lie in the relations invoked through sound, and the cosmologies brought into being through music. When sound is understood as a primary act of being in the world, it opens the possibility for understanding ontologies as not only embedded in a singular place, but as potentially mobile and flexible.

Marie-Paule MacDonald- Trajectories and Territories: Hendrix Soundscapes

By nature a nomadic performer, Jimi Hendrix wandered into many metropolitan, small town and rural locations throughout his career, evaluating and experimenting with sound in situ. He amassed a body of knowledge of Rhythm and Blues, and honed a musical practice that remains influential, using urban and atmospheric noise, feedback and an inventive array of original guitar sounds, eventually harnessing the guitar, amplifier and recording studio to create spatial soundscapes.

He roved throughout the Seattle area as a youth, often with his younger brother in his care. He left school to play in bands, then left his hometown for basic training in California, then an army stint, then resumed playing in bands. In his early days on the road, with no real home, whether touring or navigating the metropolis, he explored new territories, labyrinths of urban sound. When Hendrix moved to New York he wrote lyrics about sleeping in alleys. Hendrix was an urban wanderer and seeker of sounds, attracted to the ordinary streets of the city, and local clubs at the scale of the neighbourhood. This text, images and maps trace and track some of his trajectories, locating addresses and identifying particular local situations to accumulate an overall impression about places and their occupants—the families, friends, and entourages. A series of addresses, vicinities, and geographies gather together an empirical narrative. Whether, or even after the buildings, streets, or entire blocks are now gone, the accrued awareness of these places and the search for place and context in a particular era of sound could be described as an ‘anti-dematerialization.’ These trajectories and vicinities form the basis of research on the role of urbanity and soundscape in the musical expressions of Hendrix, in an era of conceptualism and progressively dematerialized aesthetic practices.

Passerelles- Passerelles/Vivre le patrimoine – Richelieu Park cognitive maps workshop

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