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Kirsten Forkert
Writer: Jaynus O'Donnell       Edited by: Sylvia Borda
Misplace: park zones in a mobile society

Jaynus O'Donnell: How did your position as an 'outsider' or 'newcomer' to the community affect the responses to and outcome of the project?

Kirsten Forkert: It meant that it was hard to find participants. I did 2 newspaper interviews and met quite a few people, and people knew about the project, but they were a bit shy about participating. Also there were tensions around the role of the gallery and its relationship to the community, as I realized after going to a town meeting. The gallery was seen as isolationist and elitist. And to be fair, they could have done more to develop relationships with individuals and organizations who shared similar interests or politics, and they could have involved the community in ways that didn't 'dumb down' their programming. However, the gallery also takes a lot of flack for not programming local flower painters, which is unfair, given that the people who seemed to be making the complaints were those who had the money, the skills and the resources to start a community arts space if they wanted.

But all this made it harder to contact local residents. I decided to directly approach people, like going to town meetings and community development meetings, meeting with a local urban planner, an activist and an elementary school class. Or talk to the people who worked at the gallery and lived in Oakville, who knew people in the community.

I was very aware of my out-of-place-ness in terms of my own habits, and having to adjust how I lived. For example, I'm used to walking down the street and buying groceries or being able to go for coffee. In Oakville, I had to ride my bike half an hour to the supermarket or the café on the main street. I never got quite used to the distances. When I told people about riding my bike from one place to another, they were quite curious because they were used to thinking in terms of driving.

Being an outsider was a situation I didn't want to abuse. On one hand it did lend a particular perspective (notably that of someone who has always lived in cities). On the other hand, I wanted to be careful about stereotyping people or making blanket statements. I'm aware that artists have historically played the role of outsiders, for a variety of reasons, whether it's the avant garde and its emphasis on oppositionality, or because collectivity (being an 'insider' is so often articulated in such conservative terms).

However who is and who isn't an outsider gets very slippery in a place like Oakville. For example, I talked to someone who had lived in Oakville for 10 years and she said that people still didn't see her as a 'real Oakville resident'. That's why I was also interested in the story in the local paper (which is on one of the logs) about the man who was living in the shack under the expressway. He was born and raised in Oakville, and had many relatives in the area. It was a reminder of the poverty that still does exist, and that it's not just outsiders.

It gets even more contentious because Oakville is now being targeted by the Ontario government for immigration. This is making a lot of people nervous (from what I saw in the town meetings) because the people who will be coming will primarily be young families, who may speak different languages and have completely different cultural reference points. The worry seems to be around a loss of coherent identity or sense of community, as defined through ideas of the North American small town (in opposition to Toronto!), which I would argue is a nostalgic one and excludes a lot of people. At the same time, I can appreciate the desire to go to the corner store and share the same jokes with the person behind the counter, or knowing your neighbours. I think where it gets messy is where ideas of insider and outsider cross over with questions of class, race/culture, or private property vs. renting.

Jaynus O'Donnell: Can you please expand on your idea of public space as a metaphor for democracy.

Kirsten Forkert: When I think about public space, I'm not thinking so much of the official or bourgeois public space/public sphere of Habermas. It's more to do with ideas of common ownership, free and equal access and collective responsibility. Perhaps it's closer to that old idea of the commons. I'm interested in how we can conceive of those terms in the context of consumer culture and neoliberal ideology, where it's all about thinking in terms of individuals: entrepreneurial thinking (there's a great article on this called 'Foucault and Neo-Liberalism: Biopower and Busno-Power')
independence from public infrastructure and especially individual consumer choice. I do feel that democracy and the market are increasingly conflated right now. And in this context, when we think of responsibility, we so easily conflate personal responsibility (concern for the family or immediate neighbourhood) with social responsibility (concern for the society at large).

But what we also see right now, especially in the US, is collective identity articulated through family values, religious fundamentalism and nationalism. So I'm interested in other ways of thinking of collectivity, and that's why I'm interested in public space as a metaphor for the public sphere, rather than, say, the market.


 
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