Aditi Ohri
This paper describes the research process leading up to an intervention orchestrated in a historically working-class neighborhood in Montreal, Quebec. Pointe-Saint-Charles, also known as the Point, has been experiencing rapid gentrification following condominium developments along the nearby Lachine Canal in the early 2000s. My intervention took place within the context of a graduate course in the Art History department at Concordia University, titled “Industrialization and the Build Environment,” led by Dr. Cynthia Hammond. As a class, we immersed ourselves in the neighborhood through an anti-poverty not-for-profit organization, Share the Warmth, which has been working in the Point since 1989. We sought to examine and understand various components of the built environment in the region through oral history, film, and architectural and spatial theory. I was interested in Megan Boler’s feminist pedagogy of discomfort (1999) and work by the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS) at Concordia as well. Intending to highlight the invisible aspects of lived experience that produce the built environment of a given place, I conducted interviews with long-term residents of the region with the intention to collaborate and produce an artwork that would enable an audience to empathize with the embodied experiences of my interviewee. The outcome was a walking tour of the Point through the experiences of Steven Wells, a resident of the area since 1999. I led my peers through the neighborhood, stopping at places Steven described in our interview, and prompting participants to read excerpts from his transcript out loud. My initial goal was to attempt what Erica Lehrer (2011) calls an “imperfect attempt to bear witness.” My process was grounded in observations about the built environment of Pointe- Saint-Charles at the intersections of spatial theory and social justice.
The Point
Montreal was founded as a colonial hub of the French and, later, British empires. By 1830, Montreal’s La-chine Canal, directly north of Pointe-Saint-Charles, was bringing tons of goods in and out of the city to and from distant metropoles and colonies. Throughout the 19th century, Montreal was a very important trading port, generating the majority of Canadian wealth. The canal’s factories employed thousands of workers who settled in Montreal’s southwest neighborhoods. The population in the Point was predominantly Irish, French-Canadian, English, and Scottish. In the 20th century, Portuguese and Italian immigrants settled in the neighborhood, and today, immigrants from South and East Asia also live in the Point. Following the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959 and the subsequent closure of the Lachine Canal in 1970, factories shut down in large numbers, leaving many residents of the Point in search of work elsewhere. Between 1961 and 1991, almost half of the district’s population left the Point. Those who remained forged grassroots alliances to fight the city’s sudden unwillingness to maintain the district in the wake of deindustrialization. The city began to shut down parks, neglected to maintain infrastructure such as streetlights, and even planned to construct a major thoroughfare in the area that would displace hundreds of households in the 1960s. Community organizers fought against this proposed development and worked to create amenities such as community gardens, a health clinic, women’s shelters, and food banks.
In the past two years, Pointe-Saint-Charles has become home to 2,000 new households, the majority of which are middle to upper class. The tensions of economic inequality are palpable in present day Pointe- Saint-Charles. Walking along Rue de Coleraine in September 2014, I stopped at an alleyway to read an aggressive question spray-painted onto a fence. “Pourquoi cette palissade?” the black letters glared at an adjacent condo, clearly indicating the direction of the question’s gaze (Photo 1, see page 89). This intervention in the landscape of an otherwise peaceful alleyway ties social tensions to physical space. My perspective suddenly became informed by an awareness of the abruptness of gentrification in the Point, and the subsequent vulnerability and anger it provokes in those whom it threatens to displace. Walking further south down the alleyway, I saw a second intervention in black spray paint, likely done by the same hand: “t’as quoi à cacher?” marked on a fence (Photo 2, see opposing page). This act reveals the fence as a signifier of separation, built to resist interaction with a surrounding community. The alleyway seemed generally well maintained compared to most residential streets in the southern part of the Point. The question “what do you have to hide?” addresses the privilege inherent in the construction and renovation of private spaces. The question connotes a tone of exasperated dispossession, accusing those living inside the fence of hoarding wealth.
Inspired by these emotional responses, I wanted to explore the intersecting boundary between the identity of an individual and the identity of a place (Davidson, 2007). As former factory buildings along the canal are redeveloped as condominiums, the Point is branded as an up-and-coming neighborhood. In formulating my project, I wondered whose interests are validated and whose lives are erased in this real estate narrative? I wanted to bring attention to the stories of people whom gentrification renders invisible and threatens to displace. Although the highest concentration of Montreal’s subsidized housing can currently be found in Pointe-Saint-Charles, many co-operatives will lose their government funding in the next five years due to austerity measures, forcing rents to increase exponentially. Meanwhile, not a single condo development in the Point integrates middle and low-income units into its building designs. My intention was to destabilize a viewer’s dominant narrative about the Point by having them step beyond their comfort zone and experience the neighborhood from an underrepresented perspective.
Steven Wells
I first met Steven Wells at Share the Warmth on October 6, 2014. We met for two interviews in November (Photo 3, see page 90). We talked at length about a variety of topics that ranged in emotional intensity. He spoke of voter registration, racist vandalism in the Point, police harassment in Little Burgundy (an adjacent Montreal neighborhood), the potential closure of his co-op in five years, and feeling uncomfortable walking hand-in-hand with his partner in public. We also discussed the history of Montreal’s gay village, a largely unknown legacy that we both agreed would be beneficial for gay youth to learn about. Steven illuminated a perspective that I did not often see reflected in discussions of gentrification in Montreal, and felt it important to me that a larger audience witness his story.
In Pedagogy of Discomfort, Megan Boler (1999) describes the process of witnessing as a mode of receptivity to knowledge that engenders empathy and a sense of responsibility to reflect on one’s actions and privileges. Boler constructs the act of witnessing in contrast to spectating, wherein the viewer is not obligated to critically reflect on their value systems. Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (1979, 1993) and audio-walks such as Walking the Post-Industrial Canal, produced by the COHDS, inspired me to use the format of the walking tour. In theatre of the oppressed, one person recounts an experience of marginalization and fellow participants re-enact the situation with an alternative conclusion that empowers the storyteller. Although I did not alter Ste- ven’s words for the walking tour, it was my intention to empower his perspective and validate the political importance of his experiences of
race, sexuality, and class in the built environment of the Point. Our conversations reminded me that people who are different from what society deems normal often move through public spaces in a way that is guided by feelings of exclusion and avoidance. This reality is not usually perceptible to those who move through the same spaces with the privilege of feeling safe from physical danger, and it is exactly this privilege that I sought to illuminate.
Conclusion
On November 13, 2014, readers were performing Steven’s words in public spaces throughout the Point (Photo 4). My aim was to facilitate the dissolution of distance between the reader’s and Steven’s experiences (Boler, 1999). In recounting stories on harassment and uncomfortable realizations about his sexual orientation, I saw my peers experiencing Steven’s perspective of the Point. They were not mere spectators to his narrative. In conversations following the walk, one participant reported that they felt as if they had an “out-of-body experience” and another stated that they came away from the intervention with a deepened understanding of their white privilege. It is impossible to state that all participants reflected on privilege in the same way, but it is encouraging to know that this strategy has the potential to succeed.
Although Steven did not attend the walking tour, he met my colleagues at Share the Warmth shortly afterward. He reported feeling shy but very curious. He told me that he knows people who would be willing to share their stories if I were interested in doing this again. We met again in January 2015 and he let me know that this project pushed him to consider more of his life’s events, to think critically about what it means to be a Black person in Canada, and to have more difficult conversations with family members. He mentioned that he now aspires to write an autobiography that connects his life story with the history of gay culture and racism in Canada.
Steven was initially surprised by my idea but approved and encouraged me to execute the intervention in this way. I feel this was an effective way to invite participants to meditate on lived experiences of racism and homophobia and negotiate their personal relationships to these issues. These marginalized narratives have only recently begun to be discussed in public fora, but they are at present underrepresented in the media and largely absent in discussions about Canadian social policy. This absence points to the urgency for stories such as Steven’s to be told in a context that allows listeners to become witnesses and agents for positive social change.
References
Boal, A. (1993, 1979). Theatre of the Oppressed. New York: Theatre Communications Group.
Boler, M. (1999). A pedagogy of discomfort: Witnessing and the politics of anger and fear. In Feeling Power: Emotions and Education. New York, NY: Routledge. 175-202.
Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (2015). Post-Industrial Montreal. Retrieved from http://postindustrialmontreal.ca/
Davidson, J., Bondi, L. & Smith, M. (2007). Introduction: Geography’s ‘emotional turn.’ In Davidson, J., Bondi, L. & Smith, M. (Eds.), Emotion- al Geographies. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 15-32.
Lehrer, E. & Milton, C. E. Introduction: Witnesses to witnessing. In Milton & Lehrer (Eds.), Curating Difficult Knowledge. Basintoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. 1-19.
