The Sound STC • Vol.2 Issue 01
January 2016
Confluence Field Trips: History and site
By Bart Gazzola
I’m interested in the “secret” or “buried” histories of places. This
is just my latest trope within sites of contested narratives. A recent
British murder mystery I watched was built around the “lost rivers
of London” and how a place can exist for so long and change so radically that something is not so much “hidden” as genuinely forgotten. But even if the formally mighty River Fleet became fouled as
Smithfield abbatoirs dumped meaty effluvia into it, until it became
part of the London sewer system, it still shaped the city. The Fleet
defined Farrington Road, and like the River Effra or River Wallbrook or many others, the ‘borders between much of the capital
owes much to its buried waterways’, to quote the BBC.
These are ideas that Elizabeth Chitty asks us to consider in her
Confluence Field Trips. Its interdependant combinations of production and presentation from Dick’s Creek to the VISA Art Gallery in
The Mariyn I. Walker School of Performing and Fine Arts (barely
15 minutes apart by foot, much more distant metaphorically) straddle spaces both public and private.
This gallery manifestation of Confluence “is part of the artist’s
project which includes a website (confluencefieldtrip.ca), walking
project, and performance. From September–November, the public
was invited to CLAIM SPACE | SEE AND BE SEEN | HEAR
AND BE HEARD in three Confluence Field Trips in Canal Valley,
St. Catharines.
The “confluence” of the title is that of Dick’s Creek and Twelve
Mile Creek [...] viewed during Confluence Field Trip #1 from
Brock University’s Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts to Rodman Hall Art Centre. Dick’s Creek is presumed
named for Richard Pierpoint, escaped slave, soldier and settler
griot, but is generally known by the name of Old Welland Canal –
commerce trumping both nature and black history.
[Confluence] was predicated by the opening in autumn 2015 of
two major arts buildings in St. Catharines: the MIW School and
the City of St. Catharines’ FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre.
These buildings overlook Canal Valley, and mark a new phase
in a site rich with cycles of wilderness, industry, abandonment,
and reclamation”.
What you experience in the gallery is indivisably dependant on what “walkers” experienced. Chitty’s insightful words:
“About a hundred people [participated] in seventeen walks
conducted mostly