Foreplay;
This is new hypermedia; a counter-archive, a liberational database, a creative infrastructure.
There are many narratives that you could piece together about what happened here, what is happening here, and what can happen here*, next.
One narrative is this; over the past six decades, our decisions about how to plan and make a home were guided by a cosmology of economic development that relies on outward intervention. It makes a god of capital and a saviour of technology.
Banks, investors, real estate developers, property managers, construction companies, architects and architecture partnerships, information technology companies, consultants, lawyers, local conservation and advocacy groups, city councillors, and city residents, form this familiar system.
This system – of objects, subjects, patterns, and domains – this network – built in so-called Canada, is not new, it is adapted relational infrastructure.
In an attempt to make newness, a New World, we – settlers – protected ourselves through amnesia, we forgot that to be continuous with the Old, to remember and reiterate it, does not mean that it stays the same.
By tending to the root system, decay can become compost that nourishes change.
Despite existing in the midst of systems and architectures that attempt to colonize, to privatize, the finite and infinite space between us, we are wayfinding to life, love, resistance, and reclamation.
Remembering, remembering, remembering, and re-enchanting the world we dis-enchanted**, a web of relations that holds us, together.
As we near a seventh*** decade,
foundation myths crumbling,
framing warping,
exterior rippling,
interior out of touch,
what can we dismantle, what can we recover, what can we transform, and what can we sustain?
What will emerge, here, instead***?
*These questions were shared with me by Sheila McMath, Artistic Director at Inter Arts Matrix.
**Here, I am adapting from John D. Caputo’s writing on disenchantment within The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event, via Casper ter Kuile.
***Seven is a significant number in many cultural cosmologies. It is present in Haundenosaunee culture through the seven generations principle and in Anishinaabe culture through the seven grandfather teachings. In Christian and Jewish scripture, seven is a number of completion. Likewise, in Celtic cosmology, seven represents a complete cycle, the completeness of north, south, east, west, earth, sea, and sky.
****There is an alternative, always.
Conception;
🌑 New Moon
Your great-grandfather, your grandfather, and 4 of his brothers operate over a dozen gravel pits in the Kitchener-Waterloo area. They excavate and inter material throughout this region.
Business is booming. Your mother – a child then – remembers a driveway full of cars, deliveries of pop, chocolate bars, nuts, and family parties at the Coronet Motor Hotel.
Photo from a postcard. Source: Lee Aaron.
*
In 1971, students in Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory use a packet-switching computer network called Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) to sell some cannabis to their peers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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In the 1970s, the economic balance tilts toward Waterloo, a growing university town and ‘high tech centre’; Kitchener is seen as ‘crumbling industrial infrastructure’.
The tallest building in Kitchener-Waterloo is a tower at King and Water. This is the local headquarters of Canada Trust, a non-bank financial institution headquartered in London, Ontario.
Waterloo Trust, a local institution for 55 years, is a part of Canada Trust now. Walter Bean, past President of Waterloo Trust, is the deputy chairman and vice-president of Canada Trust until 1973.
*
Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates meet at Ampex, while working on a CIA project – the hardware and software design of a Mass Storage System. In other words, a large-scale memory system.
Ellison reads a paper called “A relational model of data for large shared data banks” by E.F. Codd, putting forward a vision for relational database systems. The abstract of the paper opens: “Future users of large data banks must be protected from having to know how the data is organized in the machine (the internal representation).” Ellison, Miner, and Oates coalesce around this vision.
Software Development Laboratories (SDL) is founded in 1977. Their first office is 900 square feet in Santa Clara, California. Their first client is the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency. Their first product is a relational database.
A relational database is modelled after first-order predicate or quantificational logic. A relation is a ordered list or set of elements where each element belongs to a data domain. Data is organized into queryable rows and columns. Users state the information that a database contains, and what they want from it. The database management system software describes structures for storing the data and ways of retrieving it through queries.
In 1979, SDL changes its name to Relational Software, Inc. They release Oracle. Oracle after ORACLE, the codename for the CIA project that they work on together. This is their relation, this is their domain.
*
I go to the Oracle, weight of my portable Smith-Corona in hand. It is June and a heat wave. We enter the double doored entry-way and peer at an abandoned reception area. The Oracle is now on the 9th floor.
We enter through a second set of doors into a lobby of vaulted ceilings and marble walls. Light fixtures echo the pointed domes overhead.
(The night before, I dream that you and I go to the building and I get a restraining order against you. It’s a nightmare. Me against you, you against me, us against the building, the building against us.)
You and I wander around the lobby.
She approaches us and asks what we are doing, we say we are looking at the artwork.
You veer toward the doors and I go to the map, begin scrolling through the Directory, About,
She returns
*
Foundation;
🌓 First Quarter Moon
A creation myth is a story of how humanity, the world, or the universe originated; a story of everything.
A foundation myth is a story of how something within that everything came to be. A people, a country, a city, a company, an empire, a domain, a database, a building.
A foundation problem can be a crack in a house or something deep in the theory, deep in the story, a something that may require too much time or too much memory, too much money, within the current economy to compute. It feels intractable. Maybe it is traceable.
*
In 1985, the Bank of Canada’s 10 year mortgage rate is 12.12%. At King and Water St. in downtown Kitchener, Trudy Buss sets her mortgage on fire with the help of Terry Osbourne, a Canada Trust executive. Trudy’s daughter watches on as the paper catches flame, then curls.
No one is sure what the effect of this action will be on the high inflation rates. The affect is what matters.
Four years later, in 1989, Terry Osbourne of Canada Trust and Hans Pottkamper of Truscan Realty announce their plans to build a new 12-storey, double-tower complex at King and Ontario St. for $45 million dollars. Truscan is the real estate branch of Canada Trust.
So, how did Truscan acquire the land?
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Domes, a form of vaulting, have a long lineage within the human story of building. They shape the heavens above our heads. They echo through the architecture of empires.
These structures can be supported by different materials – stones, bricks, beams, cables, concrete slabs – even by air. Pneumatic structures – inflated or air-supported structures – pose a unique foundation problem.
They must be held down to the ground by a force equal to its (internal air pressure * ground area). Without this grounding force, the structure will become unbalanced, deform, and may partially or totally collapse.
Pneuma, the Greek word for breath, can also mean spirit; a mix of air and fire. Too much air can extinguish a fire or make it engulf everything around it.
*
The land is ‘given’ to them. 100 acres that is theirs if they will clear it. Later, they buy the land where the first company is located.
The baby of the family, your grandfather, is always figuring out how to make some money. As a child, he gets a hand-crank rolling machine and begins to sell cigarettes to the working men.
His mother is living with brain cancer, and so, when he is not selling cigarettes or playing or learning to read, he goes to collect the linens that need washing from the church. She is a sacristan, meaning that she is responsible for caring for sacred objects – materials required for worship.
He hears chants and mumbles to remember them.
Nobis post hoc exsilium ostende
O Clemens, O pia, O dulcis Virgo Maria
He becomes a man who buys land and holds it. He wants it to mean something for the future. He wants to keep you safe. The ancestors, before him – they want to not have to move again. Maybe if the land belongs to him, you won’t have to.
Growing up, he tells your mom as she enters a room “to always look for the exits”, she stores this inside and tells it to you too.
Your uncles work in the pits like the generation before them. Your mom and her sister do not. Stories upon stories, written in shorthand, guide them toward assistance and secretarial work.
Until your mom has a revelation, down by the water in her 17th year, that she wants to learn more. She jumps into her car, speeds into town, and registers for grade 13. She lives at home, goes to university, and graduates just past the tipping point of the 80s.
*
Otto Wagner is born in 1841, dies in 1918, and is re-evaluated in the 1980s. A second, more comprehensive translation of his seminal work Moderne Architektur is published in 1983, making his theories accessible to a new generation of architects and their students.
Wagner lives and works in Vienna. He is an architect, furniture designer, and urban planner; a secessionist, a modernist, a maker of Gesamtkunstwerk. He and his peers in the Viennese Secession movement reject tradition to embrace the avant-garde, to seek a kind of transcendent unification of arts.
Moving from Art Nouveau into geometric modernism, Wagner builds churches, hospitals, train stations, and post offices. He insists on modern materials – steel, glass, and aluminum.
He never fully abandons ornamentation, but integrates it with the underlying construction. The purpose of beauty, he feels, is to give artistic expression to function.
Otto's motto: "Artis sola domina necessitas" (Necessity is art's sole mistress).
In 1982, Relational Software Inc. changes its name to Oracle Corporation. The company goes public on the NASDAQ in 1986, and by 1987 is the largest database management company. Oracle makes $100 Million USD in sales, and has 4500 users in 55 countries. Oracle measures things for progress that way.
In 1988, they induce Procedural Language for SQL (PL/SQL). This language includes elements such as conditions and loops. It can handle exceptions. Combining the data manipulation abilities of SQL with programming language allows developers to build more and more complex applications within Oracle’s environment. They release the Transaction Process Subsystem, targeting banks and financial institutions.
It is a boon and a boom. In December 1988, their market capitalization is $937.4M. In December 1989, it is $2.4B. Oracle joins the S&P500 and moves headquarters to Redwood Shores, California.
The air is hot and humid on my skin. I feel the weight of the radio swaying in my pocket as I cross the intersection. I approach the building and begin the dance.
Tired and wired, I start moving my limbs and my hips. I float and thrash down the sidewalk. I feel their eyes and the lens of your dadcam on me from across the street. My own eyes are concealed. I need some kind of protection from the brightness of the core.
I’m devoted now. The t-shirt ripples against my skin and pulls taut to my chest as I flex and bend. I reveal the real thing and the image of the thing. Spinning until I’m dizzy, then running away.
Framing;
🌕 Full Moon
A movement is underway to revitalize downtown Canada, to encourage people to rediscover the centre of their cities.
The hypothesis is that downtowns are drained of their vitality. What is doing it? The movement of people and businesses out from the city centre into suburbs – a trend continuing after World War II.
Now, transport and linkage systems are creating greater mobility and freedom of location.
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Are you scared to gather? To dwell in a place?
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In Kitchener, one revitalization tactic is the King St. Facade Plan (1987). The plan contains suggestions for restoring original facades or creating new ones with a more ‘sympathetic streetscape presence’.
On the block where Truscan wants to build their complex are commercial spaces for Athlete’s Foot and Nabour Stores. Above these businesses is a blank stucco facade that the plan calls ‘unfortunate’ and recommends removing to restore the original brick.
Next to it, is the Medical Arts Building, a six storey 1920s style facade. The plan advises ‘conservation of the original facade and sound upkeep’.
Load bearing stone masonry is fairly common here, steel-framed art deco facades less so. It is an architectural rarity.
The Local Architectural Conservation Advisory Committee (LACAC) wants to protect this structure. Truscan wants to demolish it.
There is a phone call, an omen and an admission: “they don’t need it”. Truscan could build without it.
So, LACAC puts forward a proposal that would integrate the art deco facade into the design of the Canada Trust Centre.
In late February of 1990, the city council agrees to preserve the art deco facade by issuing a heritage designation to the building.
Steven Smith, Vice-President of Development for Truscan is displeased and calls LACAC’s recommendation “uneconomic”.
A story begins to unfurl that the project is threatened.
Mayor Dom Cardillo urges construction unions to call ‘Kitchener aldermen’ to make sure that the project goes forward. Several articles run in the newspaper weighing the decision.
In a ‘flurry of backroom meetings’ Truscan lobbies city councillors and, three weeks later, the building is de-designated. Truscan, can, will, go ahead with demolishing the building.
They do not take the option of waiting 270 days from the heritage designation to legally demolish the building. It would escalate costs.
Of the costs, Truscan’s lawyer and the “Achille’s heel” of council, Ron Sills, says “we’re going to build it away”.
After the de-designation, Canada Trust offers to dismantle the Medical Arts Building facade and give it to the city at no cost. They decline.
Of the building, a former member of LACAC later says, “they didn’t need it, they wanted it”.
It is something about cost. It is something about underground parking. It is something about power. It is something of a pattern.
*
Oracle arrives in Kitchener-Waterloo in 1993. Their first office is in an industrial park on the outskirts of the City of Waterloo.
*
Across the ocean, in Geneva, CERN is releasing a software called the WorldWideWeb (W3) into the public domain. This technology works on top of a global information infrastructure known as the Internet, which is growing out of its origins in ARPANET.
The W3 is described as ‘a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents’. Hypermedia based on hypertext – ‘text which is not constrained to be linear’. Hypertext and HyperMedia – the world’s first website writes – ’are concepts, not products’.
The public release of the Web accelerates an ongoing commercialization of the Internet from basic network service provision to use of the infrastructure itself to sell things.
On August 11, 1994, the first secure online credit card transaction takes place. A college student sells a copy of Sting’s 1993 album Ten Summoner’s Tales to their friend in Philadelphia for $12.48 plus shipping.
On August 12, 1994 The New York Times writes “Attention Shoppers: Internet Is Open”.
*
That same year, the Swiss Army stops using homing pigeons after 77 years.
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Sketches of the building feature stainless steel gridded spires that crown the corners of the clock tower as well as the summit.
A representative of Truscan reviews the sketch at one late meeting then says, “get rid of them bird cages”, and they are gone.
They fear that birds will gather, and shit on the city’s first Class A office building.
The framing for the building’s glazing is aluminum and they consider painting the mullions – vertical and horizontal pieces – burgundy. This too is discouraged. Too gaudy. Too garish. Too bold.
They settle on a metallic silver for the mullions, with PPG Azurlite glass – blue-tinted, very good thermally, and good for light transmittance.
*
In 1995, Oracle announces a product strategy devoted to the Internet age. They unveil new software and a new data warehousing plan. They store and analyze troves of information, like customer data, producing business insights to guide corporate strategy and sales.
Oracle works with IBM and Unisys to define a Common Warehouse Metadata protocol to be submitted to the Object Management Group. They grow a consulting practice.
Oracle, like other tech companies, emphasizes client-server and client-service relationships as their product-based revenues stagnate. Growth requires maintenance. Software is becoming a service.
*
The Canada Trust Centre will be the last office tower opened in downtown Kitchener until 2020.
Exterior;
🌖 Waning Gibbous Moon
The human eye ball is first and foremost a mirror. You take an image in, its light rays, its encoded information, and it is reflected into your mind-body-spirit.
There is all of the light we can see, and the light we can’t – radiowaves, x-rays, seismic shifts, cosmic hums. This light can sometimes be made visible through technological appendages and through art.
It’s not so much visible/invisible, on/off, 0/1, as it is you-me, between – us. Shadows, where light and not-light – dark – meet, hold information too. They give form to being.
*
The king is a thing, a place filled by a being. But, to be a Kitchener king is a glorious thing.
Or so they say. So say the ads that the Canada Trust Centre, Truscan Realty, runs in the local paper. Getting it on The Record who is who, who is a tenant.
Who will pay rent to be a king? Mostly law firms, consulting practices, banks, and businesses.
One of the earliest tenants of the building is Pattern Discovery Technologies Incorporated, which emerges from the Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) Lab at the University of Waterloo. Their pattern discoveries lie in data mining, analysis, and optimization for industrial processes.
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The king is gradually crowned by two domes, and the comparisons to boobs, breasts, tits, is instantaneous. It’s called the ‘Dolly Parton building’. Skaters call it the ‘titty bank’.
(*)(*)
The domes themselves are produced by a local agricultural manufacturer. They know how to create domes from sheets of metal, curved, then fastened together. Drive around the Waterloo Region and you will see domes atop farm silos – towers that store bulk materials like grain, cement, or woodchips.
The domes’ form is functional. Their spires work as lighting rods.
The third dome, on the front of the building, tops a clocktower. A clocktower that echos the clocktower that adorned the old, Beaux-Arts style Kitchener City Hall from 1924-1973.
The clocktower is dismantled in 1973 and reassembled, then dedicated, on July 1, 1995.
(*)
When data is kept within a specific department or system, isolated from other data, it is said to exist in a silo.
Oracle advocates for data warehouses and data lakes.
*
At first glace, it is difficult to locate the relationship of the building to architectural movements.
It is not quite art deco or modern or mid-century modern or post-war modern or post-modern. It is not even metamodern.
It is semio-modern.
It is an architecture of signs, symbols, information, and communication patterns, channeling the spectrum from modernity to antiquity.
*
You are born, and given your grandfather’s mother’s name for your middle. A name that sounds like flowers. She is born on the first day of the year and, you, on the first day of the harvest.
The Word said, Let there be Light. And your father whispers vowels into your ear.
When you are 11, you open up an old family photo album and find your image staring back at you across the centuries.
*
Interior;
🌗 Last Quarter Moon
Toronto Dominion Bank acquires Canada Trust in 2000. The $8-billion dollar requires the approval of the Minister of Finance under the Competition Act. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business says that this moment marks the end of the Trust industry – the best opportunity to develop a strong second tier of banking, to develop more consumer choice.
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Nine pigeons fly approximately 5 km, each carrying a packet containing one ping. The Bergen Linux user group, known at this moment as CPIP (Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol), receives 4 responses. This implements IETF RFC 1149 – IP over Avian Carriers (IPoAC).
*
The one you love is born. He remembers riding the elevators at the back of the building up and down with his dad and sister. Looking out over the city, together. Southwest. Over the streets, treetops houses, apartment buildings, factories, studios, and shops.
The elevators, shaped like small houses, feel like home.
*
In 2005, Oracle acquires TimesTen – an in-memory database. TimesTen databases are persistent, highly available, and quick to access. Accessing data in memory eliminates seek time. These databases are used for high-volume online translation processing like financial trading, or read-intensive applications like location-based services.
*
You spend lots of time in the car, parked at the TD Canada Trust at University and Weber. Waiting for your parents to finish their transactions. Listening to the radio and singing along from the backseat. Looking up at the clouds. Imagining you’re like a bird.
*
In the original plans for the development, the elevators look out over a glass-enclosed atrium formed between this building and another half of the building that is never built. A public-private dwelling place overtop Hall’s Lane.
But they don’t get the rents that they hoped for. People aren’t willing to pay that much.
And the reassurances that big new tenants will move in, that occupancy won’t be an issue, begin to wane.
*
You go and ask an Architect, what is in the domes?
*
I point the dadcam at the building, lit from within, and without by dotted streetlamps; a quarter moon hangs in the inky midnight sky overhead.
You and I
Riding the spiral back down, a bare tree outside, wind rushing in window, pen to paper, pondering. Free to enter, exit, exist.
Post-Construction;
🌘 Waning Crescent Moon
Beneath the domes are mechanical spaces, with functional semi-circular oeuvres set into each face of the building.
It is hard to know what’s in them without going inside. The Architect says, we have to get you up there.
*
Oracle acquires NetSuite in 2016 for $9.3B USD, and shortly afterward, moves into 55 King St. W.
Larry Ellison, formerly the CEO, is now the Chief Technology Officer and Chairman of the Board. He maintains a 40% stake in the company, and is among the top 10 richest people in the world – often fluctuating between 2nd and 5th place.
In 2017, Ellison gives $16.6 Million to Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces (FIDF), the largest donation in the non-profit organization’s history. It is estimated that his total contributions to FIDF are over $30 Million.
US provides $3.8B in military aid per year through 2028
-Paramount Skydance, CBS, media merger deals -TikTok, Trump administration -old and new media
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In 2017, Europro – a commercial property management company – buys 55 King. St. W. The building is a part of a million square foot Kitchener-Waterloo portfolio that they purchase from Dream Office REIT. Dream Office (formerly Dundee REIT) purchases the building from Blackstone and Slate, who purchases it from Skyline REIT. During the Dundee acquisition of 2011, the building is a part of the largest office portfolio ever acquired by a Canadian REIT.
*
Your grandfather passes on in 2014. He leaves behind earthly property – money, land, a house, a cottage, a rusty green truck – and an unfathomable void in your family system. Data corrupts and relationships collapse.
Each of his earthly properties are sold or distributed among family members, internet-connected strangers, and development companies.
What remains is a trust, a holding company that no longer holds anything. The holding company closes now.
*
You call the City of Kitchener, and they call you a customer.
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You are an ancestor.
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TD Canada Trust is the second largest bank in Canada. TD is known for being patrons of the arts. Their Toronto headquarters at 76 Wellington Street West houses the TD Gallery of Indigenous Art.
In 1961, Allan Lambert, the chairman of the bank, has a vision for an ‘Inuit art collection’. The Bank is looking North as the region is ‘opening up’ and wants to celebrate ‘tomorrow’s frontier’. By 1967, the collection contains 1000 ‘items’. For 20 years, the collection travels between museums and galleries.
Many of these items are created in the context of co-operatives which agents of the
*
It’s an act of repetition. The patterns of accumulation form architectures of extraction.
If colonial projects never ended, just changed character, who are they now, what are they playing at, and how do we write them out of the story? How do we lay them to rest?
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In 2022, the University of Waterloo migrates its Student Information System, Quest, from on premises storage to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure environment.
*
That same year, Reuben George, speaks for the Tsleil-Waututh Sacred Trust Initiative at TD Bank’s Annual General Meeting. The Bank is considering financing an expansion of the Trans Canada pipeline.
The Tsleil-Waututh Nation does not consent. George says, “TD talks a good game about Indigenous rights and environmental responsibility, but you continue to walk in the opposite direction by financing fossil fuel projects that violate Indigenous rights.”
*
They say that data is the new oil, is the new uranium.
What then is a data centre?
What then is a neural network in relation to nuclear fission?
What then is a cloud?
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Ternary computing
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architecture implies an asymmetry between labour and work, design and construction
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TD Bank now operates down the block at King and Francis St.
The new tallest building in Kitchener-Waterloo rises overhead. “44 storeys of stylish and modern living” at an “ideal address for today’s groundbreakers and trailblazers”.
It’s called TEK Tower, and I wonder, who will be able to live there?
*
Who calls here home? And, does it call them too?
Can we call one another by name?
Keys;
You and I, we, not breaking and entering, but breaking through absence; presence.
Security chair vacant, able to wander through time and space, to re-make it our place. Commonplace.
Rushing to the elevator and pressing all the keys. Returning to the memory and adding a layer. Floor by floor understanding, what it takes not only to build something but to sustain it.
All this empty space, open space for dreaming. Never null of context, continuity, community; we work with our lineages and warp the grid until it becomes a portal.
Landing again, new forms emerge. Other worlds of inter-being.
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Aftercare;
Thank you to the Grace Schmidt Reading Room at the Kitchener Public Library for ample space to write and archives to travel through time. Thank you to Sam Nabi, Fitsum Areguy, and Teneile Warren for your collaboration, care, and belief in this project.
Thank you to Rick Haldenby and Jeffery Hanning for so generously sharing your multi-generational architecture expertise. Thank you to Isaac Zepeda-Ayala for photography, videography, collaboration, and the encouragement to lay it bare with love. Thank you to friends and community members like Julie Hall, Lauren Prousky, Zahireen Tarefdar, Karlie Haining, Zoe Masseo, ZY Xue, Terre Chartrand, Sefora Catana, and others who sent me pictures of my beloved building, grounded me with heartfelt questions, or shared poetic insights about liberation, relationships, re-generation, home, and the (in)finity of space that deeply shaped this work.
Thank you to my parents and grandparents (biological and otherwise) for teaching me how to care for systems, to re-imagine architecture, to gather community, to attend to the unexpected, and to move with spirit. Thank you to my aunts and uncles for seeing me and allowing me to see them. Thank you to my sister for making any and every place feel like home. Thank you to all my ancestors who entrust me with their stories – the terrible, the banal, and the beautiful. Thank you to my teachers. Thank you to the (at least) 11 places that I have called home so far, and the 3 of them that became home most deeply. Thank you to this land for (re)birthing me and teaching me love. Thank you for being here.
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SADiE (they/she) is an artist, writer, and queer theologian living and creating on Treaty 3 and Haldimand Treaty land near O:se Kenhionhata:tie (Willow River) – a place colonially known as Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
By daylight, they work as a Program Coordinator at CAFKA – Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener + Area and study at Conrad Grebel University College, University of Waterloo.
By moonlight, they write poetry and make assemblage sculptures that incorporate artistic techniques from ceramics, textiles, print-making, and painting, with found or foraged elements.
Their emergent studio practice, Otherworlds, brings together art work, creative facilitation, research, design, strategy, and mediation to guide organizations or communities in transition through imagining, creating, and sustaining different futures for themselves.
Her work draws from past and present lives, inherited and acquired lineages in spirituality, technology, political economy, (de)construction, and excavation to question the origins of energy and distributions of power within relational structures. Sadie is happiest looking at the moon, finding things on the curb, holding a warm cup of coffee while chatting, and playing side-by-side.