Foreword:
In the spring of 2012, I co-organized with Martin Chramosta, a Swiss artist, a residency for artists looking to reflect on the themes of Canadian identity, the notion of a national art, and the relationship in Canada between national art and landscape imagery. My impetus for doing so sprung from a desire to collectively consider some things that seemed at the time to be relevant to me, and to artists and curators working in Canada (and, as it turned out, Switzerland). I was in part motivated by exhibitions like Kitty Scott’s À ciel ouvert : le nouveau pleinairisme at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Québec, and the success of Canadian artists such as Edward Burtynsky, Kent Monkman, and those affiliated with the so-called Vancouver School, as well as the ubiquity of the Group of Seven and Emily Carr as depictions of specifically Canadian art. I was also inspired by the fact that most people outside of Canada had never heard of some of these artists and, while their depictions of Canadian landscape(s) might be familiar enough, iconic to the point that, as Jacqueline Mabey points out in her essay for this volume, they represent Canada in a quick Google image search, their names are not.
Another driving force motivating the project was the energy behind the Printemps érable – the protests that occurred across Québec in late winter through to the fall of 2012. As the occasional student protests morphed into nightly marches through Montreal, Martin and I joined in, walking the streets for hours upon hours. For me, a Montreal “native” and politically invested person, these evening walks had a specific significance. They represented the struggles I had been feeling around national identity – Canadian, Quebecoise and Montréalaise – and the need to find a way of defining and understanding my identity and values within a larger socio-political framework.[1] For Martin, a Swiss citizen in town for less than a year (on a prestigious international residency), the protests were important, but for different reasons. He was able to see them within a more global context – as an anti-capitalist gesture unrelated to a national agenda.
That spring, Martin and I starting dreaming up a project that would somehow respond to all the questions we were concerned with at that moment – national identity, politics, social spaces, immaterial labour, artist residencies, landscape, revolution and anti-capitalist exchanges. We wrote the call on the back of a refusal letter from the Canada Council for the Arts and we made a list of artists we wanted to invite. In late June 2012, twelve artists and writers drove to a cabin in Lac Paquin. This project developed into The Wild Bush Residency, currently in its third year and fourth iteration. The Wild Bush Residency has run in Lac Paquin, Quebec and in Amden, Switzerland and has benefited from the input of over twenty-five artists and writers from around the world. The residency is entirely free of charge, though also without remuneration – and it is therefore divested from the benefits and difficulties of working with national and provincial funding bodies. Participants are not required to produce any (art) work, nor are they required to prepare before hand. In fact, participants’ only requirement has been to each cook and share one meal with the others over the days we come together.
The Canadian iterations of The Wild Bush Residency are held at my family home in Lac Paquin – a small community near Val David, Quebec with a longstanding and interesting history as an artist hub since the 1970s. Hosting a residency around identity and homeland in a place that is so intimately my own home has all sorts of consequences. When one brings outsiders into the home – when one invites colleagues en masse into one’s bedroom – the familiar becomes decidedly unheimlich. Home, homeland and connection to place is so subjective that convincing others of the value of your home can be a daunting task. What’s more, asking them to think about their own homes and homelands while inhabiting your own creates a feedback loop so loud it can drown out any sounds you wanted to make on the subject.
Lac Paquin is a lake owned by the Paquin family. In the 1950s they sold some land to a group of Eastern European Jews, who built summer homes. While the community around us was Francophone – pure laine, as they say – I don’t remember ever speaking French, but I often heard Yiddish and Hebrew amongst the people who came to the lake. Since the houses on our road are mostly summer homes, and the houses on the other side are mostly permanent homes, there is both a linguistic and geographic distinction between local and vacationer that is palpable . There is not a lot of interaction between the two, except people are friendly on the water. The official history of the town, published by the Société d’histoire et du patrimoine de Val-David, begins with the arrival of French colonists in the 1880s. Before that, I imagine that the area was Mohawk territory, though I am unsure how it became the assigned property of the French Quebecer families that founded Val David. Participants of The Wild Bush Residency are aware of the settler history of the town and the issue of colonization (of peoples, of land) and the role that art plays in that history. However, the luxury of our situation is incumbent on this reality – as it is at almost all arts residencies in Canada.
In Switzerland, the residency ran at the country home of Martin’s aunt, in a very small town with a history of working with artists, buried deep in the Alps. In the Swiss context, like the Quebecois and Canadian one, we were trying to get at the root of national and nationalist art. The issues at play are not the same in Switzerland as in Canada, specifically with regards to Indigenous spaces, but something we discussed recursively was immigration to Switzerland and the qualifications to be Swiss. You can carry a Swiss passport but if you are not natively Swiss, if you have immigrated for example, you are simply not regarded as Swiss. Xenophobia is a serious concern in Switzerland, and because land is scarce but quality of living is very high and many people try to immigrate, outsiders are regarded with trepidation. This plays out in some of the projects created during this edition of the residency, either while we were together or as prior work. For example, Martin Chramosta took us to see his project for a public art festival in an extremely rich small town – a bronze sculpture of Shorty, an Ibis bird that was part of a reintegration project of the species in Austria. Shorty had gotten lost on the migratory path to Morocco and ended up in Switzerland trying to make friends with the swans and geese. The poor bird was rejected as being “other”. While now embraced by the people of Switzerland (after becoming a national news story, no less), at first Shorty was not considered a local by the avian community. The story of Shorty is important. What does it mean to be from somewhere else? What makes you from there, a native? For me, The Wild Bush Residency is as much about homeland as it is about landscape.
For myself, the goal of the project was and is to open dialogue. The role of The Wild Bush Residency isn’t just to look at nature and wilderness, but ultimately to look deeply into the idea of emptiness in the wild. Canada is not, and has never been empty. It is and has always been big, and perhaps even sparsely populated. But never empty. Presented in this volume is the work (both visual and textual) of people concerned with the perceived emptiness of a nation seemingly obsessed by one’s nationality, as evidenced by current discussions in government related to immigration and status.
Why do I want to revisit these topics? I believe that discussions around nationalism can be radical. While the idea of national art can suggest both a right-wing agenda and a non-internationalist mentality currently unpopular in most contemporary art spheres, I believe that art, which is often used to address political and social issues, should look around and reflect the reality of one’s nation – a sort of less cheesy be the change you want to see in the world. Similarly, while images of local landscapes and actually being in nature (and away from the Internet) may not be cool (unless you mean going to Fogo, or Banff, other equally urbanized wilds) there is a profound benefit to be had from taking a few days to look at leaves and swim in lakes. And one does not need to go far, leave an environmental trace by way of a permanent new structure or have a grant to legitimize doing so. A radical act is as simple as taking a bus or biking a few dozen kilometers out of the city and hanging out with people you want to get to know more, whether or not they have state approval as professionals in their field.
Cool, young artists don’t seem like they would want to talk about the Group of Seven, but bring up the subject and be prepared to hear about their personal relationships to that body of artwork. Ask a group of people to go into the (albeit not-so) wild bush without internet access, and while a few might grumble at first, most will relish the chance to tune out the noise of their daily lives and dig into the dirt for a few days. And bring up nationalism, colonialism, immigration and current politics and be prepared to stay up talking until 4am – whether or not our actual practices reflect our interests in the subject. Presented here is the work of contemporary artists eager talk about these issues with me.
[1] As an Anglophone, third-generation Montrealer, I often feel uncomfortable aligning myself as Quebecoise, a title generally not allotted to me.