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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