Meeting location: 6th and Fir Park, at entrance located at the northwest corner of West 6th Avenue and Fir Street [map]
End point: Hadden Park field house, 1015 Maple Street.
Duration: 90 minutes (includes short introduction, approximately one hour of walking time, and debrief/open discussion afterwards)
Vancouver continues to have a very complicated relationship with development and urbanization, and has faced multiple challenges arising from building booms that have shaken this city and tested our ears since the late 1880’s. The southern shores of False Creek have shaken, reverberated and been seemingly turned upside down from thunderclaps that mark this changing urban landscape: indigenous communities; colonization; industry; residential; commercial. This soundwalk invites participants to pause and linger over the sound of one’s presence, ripples of fleeting energies that nonetheless evoke past markers and lives. We will walk, listen and escape along evolving and eroding pathways that point to historical echoes of Vancouver’s past, traverse alongside the present, as well as invite sonic imaginings of what the future might have in store.
Note: this soundwalk will end at the Hadden Park field house in time for participants to take part in soundgarden – Hadden Park, presented by Vancouver New Music and Publik Secrets, which runs from 1–4pm.
Jorma Kujala’s academic and interdisciplinary art practice includes painting, mixed media, collage, drawing, as well as his soundwalking research as coordinator of the Vancouver Soundwalk Collective. His work is informed by the interchange between the social and the studio, and he researches networks of shared knowledge, identity, memory, and social interaction that emerge when culture, communication, and social forces intersect. His work also investigates perceptions of truth, repetition, re-creation and re-enactment, as well as the bodily interplay between the senses, the individual, and environments. He gratefully acknowledges he lives, works and plays on the unceded ancestral lands of the Coast Salish peoples: the Squamish (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh), the Tsleil-Waututh (Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh) and the Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) Nations.