2016 – 2018

Photo: Marko Simcic

The Foreshore is a public research project in collaboration with Kimberly Phillips and hosted by Access Gallery and the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver. The series has included a bi-weekly series of discussion sessions, three mini-artist residencies, open studios, workshops, and performances.

Thematically, The Foreshore explores poetic activist strategies, radical philosophical proposals, and politically engaged artist practices. Describing the land that is submerged and revealed by the tide, the foreshore is the wet part of the beach, a place of unclear jurisdiction, and thus of contestation, friction, and constant movement. Those who dwell in this zone must continually adapt to a changing environment. The foreshore conjures narratives of trade and exchange, habitation and nourishment, resistance and violent erasure. It might similarly evoke our contemporary lived situation in this place. Our questions were: The Foreshore exists at the edge of the city. Can we bring it to the centre? Can there be land that is not property? In conditions of appearance and disappearance, what is, as yet, unseen?

Nineteen discussion sessions featured brief presentations by two people drawn from the visual art community, as well as thinkers and practitioners working in poetry, housing rights, architecture, economics, song, theatre, history, and others. Sessions 18 and 19 took place in Prince Edward Island as part of the Artist Run Centre Association’s (ARCA) conference Flotilla.