Happy to announce our first phase of funding for Terroir, our Urban Cloth was successful!… slated to begin in mid April 2014, we are still grantwriting for the rest of the project.
So, Terroir; what does this mean?
Terroir “a sense of place,” is the sum of the effects that local environment; geography, geology and climate have on a product created from the land.
In wine making, Terroir refers to land imparting unique qualities to grapes, specific to a growing site.
What is the Terroir of the margins?
Layered with history of First Nations, European and Asian settlement, crossed by industry and trade, where inner city decay and urban gentrification intersect.
What is the cloth we weave from this place?
Can diverse threads weave a new Social Fabric?
Working with post-industrial land turned urban parks and in the interstitial spaces of the public domain along the edges of downtown Vancouver; this project weaves together First Nations gathering traditions, early settler agricultural methods and contemporary environmental art practices through shared investigations for urban cloth production.
Physical labour assisted, witnessed and transformed into dance.
Seasoned gardeners, urban youth, artists, historians and plant specialists join in, examining labour and ritual, as they are linked through intention, concentration, and repetition. The urban cloth produced becomes a performative installation on the land from which the fibres grew, danced upon the landscape
Looking at specific sites and sharing ways of gathering; growing, weeding and foraging we produce local cloth; gaining knowledge about our immediate urban environment and sharing principles of land stewardship and self-sufficiency from different cultural perspectives
Re-landscaped industrial lands become both participant and forum for discussing overlapping histories and perspectives. Informed by the plants that grow, we collectively sow/forage/harvest/spin/dance and weave a hybrid cloth of this place. The land provides the cloth, but is also the loom weaving us together in our shared purpose of discovery
The integration of our collective disciplines, research, histories and experiences refined into
Terroir: an urban cloth
Our social fabric made from common threads.
We are so thrilled to take the things learned from our first research into this large project that builds lots of relationships in our community for earthand gleaners! next year we are proudly working with the following iindividuals and organizations.
Key Partners:
Sharon Kallis: lead artist, project coordinator
Mirae Rosner, Tracy Williams: lead artists
Environmental Youth Alliance: agricultural assistance
means of production artists raw resource collective
Martin Borden: documentary
Community Partnerships include:
• Enterprising Women Making Art (EWMA)
• Purple Thistle Youth Collective
• Oppenheimer Park
• Carnegie and Britannia Community Centres
• Urban Native Youth Association
• Vancouver Park Board: arts, culture and environment department