Locations: Cambie/West 12th, Pender/Hamilton; East 41st/Windsor
The words in this letter to Vancouver were translated into soundwaves: you can see the shape of the sentences but must imagine the content.
What do you imagine this letter says?
Can you follow the peaks and valleys of the image and imagine what they might mean?
Does the shape or colour of the lines represent a particular emotion to you? What do you think the flat lines correspond to–how would you translate those? We’d love to see your “reading” of this visual piece!
Submit your translation of the letter here.
In the spirit of community support we prioritize submissions that engage with respect and care. Submissions may be considered for publication in a future community-sourced poem or a future artwork by the Poet Laureate and must include a name.
You can read and listen to the letter written by Elee Kraljii Gardiner in this painting by Emilia Bianca Pisani below.
About the piece:
Conversations can take many forms. Poets and artists have a long tradition of using asemic writing, writing that looks like writing but that doesn’t use easily legible letters. In pieces using asemic writing or typography in different ways, the combination of image and text remains open to interpretation.
The basis of this piece is a personal letter Elee wrote in English to the city of Vancouver. Thinking about the city as a whole rather than as a specific person, department, or neighbourhood, she addressed Vancouver with an impression and a memory. A conventional letter moves through many hands: those of the writer, the people at the postal service, the recipient, etc. So, too, with this letter.
Elee read the letter aloud and recorded it as a sound file with the help of sound artist Eduardo Abrantes. Next, they emailed the audio file to author and musician Gary Barwin, who captured the sound waves as an image. Gary formatted the phrases into the shape of a written letter. Elee then shared this visual representation of the sounds of the letter with Emilia Bianca Pisani who painted a representation in watercolour. Emilia Bianca, who is a translator, educator, and artist, did this freehand, keeping in mind the colours of the city.
In effect, the letter was “translated” several times. This chain of collaboration spread and dipped in and out of languages and cultural contexts, becoming a map of the collaborative process.
The visual image of the letter plays with the idea of how communication moves from the internal to the external, acquiring resonance as it moves through and into new forms. The piece provokes ideas about the digital mediation of human interaction, playfully bringing the technological representation of direct address back to the handwritten.
Click here to listen to the audio file of Elee reading the letter.
And you can read it here:
Dear Vancouver,
I was a seaport, an inlet, a false creek looking for a studio west of Denman. You were in the midst of reinvention, again. Your leaky condo crisis gave me the shivers even as your land prices soared. During these regrettable phases I kept my eye on the snowline, a crystalline rarity I tracked into the era of summer melt. Never has a city had such beautiful views and been so careless with them!
I think about how often I drove to the top floor of the garage on Broadway to watch the sunset. I was so lonely. I used to follow the spine of Hastings straight out to Burnaby every day, completely bored by your recto-linear planning. The majesty of the vista from the grotty gas station on the plateau at Boundary—so wasted!
You anaesthetize me with your beauty, and make it difficult to leave, even for short times. I have never seen so many different greens or held light so late in the day of my heart.
I am susceptible to your coastal flooding,
Elee