Category: stratawalks

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stratawalks walks

Montréal Mile-End

HPU led a Strata-Walk (Montreal Mile End Version) as part of the 4th edition of Montréal Monochrome at articule artist-run centre in Montréal. MONTRÉAL MONOCHROME IV: STUDY HALL offered a framework to explore how artistic modes of production can challenge conventional systems of education. It was an opportunity to actively exchange knowledges on alternative, misrepresented and marginalized ways of learning and unlearning.

The theme of this edition signalled a concern with questions about conventional forms and spaces of education, and its intersection with other practices and other modes of cultural production. It indicated a growing interest in a body of artistic production that engages with knowledge production and sites of resistance. By and large, MONTRÉAL MONOCHROME IV: STUDY HALL was an attempt to critically respond to institutionalized education that perpetuates systemic oppression.

Articule
262 Fairmount O.
Montréal, Québec
https://www.articule.org/en/home

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stratawalks walks

Victoria Street/Avenue

Strata-Walk: Victoria Street/Avenue

The HPU led a stratigraphic walk to map the different layers of meanings, stories, and systems that make up a place. With the help of a list of prompts, the HPU explored the urban landscape in three different cities, on three different continents! It took place in Sydney, Australia (where HPU member Sarah Truman led with members of WalkingLab), Windsor (with HPUers Donna Akrey and Taien Ng-Chan as part of In/terminus Research Collective’s Stories of the City exhibition opening), and London, England (with composer David Ben Shannon). Each group collectively mapped the “strata” of that street on that date.

Victoria Avenue (Windsor)

In Windsor, it was a very wet walk, full of weather, with heavy clumps of sleety-snow falling onto our attempts at mapping en route. We focused instead on note taking and chatting about the street and about the particulars of Windsor culture. For instance, many of the street names are French, pointing to the old city roots as a French settlement, but locals have anglicized the pronounciations (for example, Pierre Street is pronounced “Piry”). The US-Canada border is, by some strange twist of geography, north of our location. One participant decided to map the responses of strangers when asked to tell their favourite story. The group reached our destination towards the end of Victoria and University Streets and decamped to a nearby pub to finish our maps over some pints. Many thanks to In/terminus and to all those hearty souls who bravely came out for this wet and chilly walk!

Victoria Street (London) Strata-maps

Victoria Street (Sydney) Strata-maps

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stratawalks walks

Residency: WalkingLab

The HPU is in summer residency at WalkingLab, OISE (University of Toronto)!

In 2016, the HPU spent three months in residence with WalkingLab in order to further research and expand our methodologies, specifically our “Strata-Walk” technique that urge you to identify the different layers of strata that make up place as a way of provoking your attention, and can be adapted to any method of mobility. As participatory workshops, the Strata-Walks function as public pedagogy and relational art, where the emphasis is on the inter-relationships between people and environments, and the creative element does not lie in the making of an object, but in an event. The prompts can be used in groups or by a solo walker. As a method, it focuses on sharpening the mind’s attention to place, as well as the body’s. 

WalkingLab is an active laboratory for research and development on walking methodologies. It aims to generate a diverse range of walking research related to civic engagement and critical public pedagogy, experiment with different media and mobile technologies, and compose an anarchive that attends to the live, temporal and performative nature of walking research. http://walkinglab.org/residency/

Read our contributions to the WalkingLab blog, as those of other residents, here!