Locations: West Boulevard/43rd; Burrard/Dunsmuir; Nanaimo/Eton; East Broadway/Lillooet
Let your eyes drift over this map of land, ocean, and the hidden rivers of Vancouver made from words in the book Empty Spaces, written by Nisga’a author Jordan Abel.
Notice what words or lines surface.
Try reading only green words; those words become one poem.
Read words along a river line; those words become another poem.
How many different poems can you create by reading the map in different ways?
About the piece:
This visual poem and textual map was created by artist, author, and musician Gary Barwin and Elee Kraljii Gardiner. It invites the viewer to “read” location differently according to where the eye lands and to gather meaning from the words that surface.
Words Surface combines words from page 33 of Jordan Abel’s book Empty Spaces with an archival map of the hidden streams of Vancouver. Jordan’s book opens ideas about narrative history, nature, and urban change from an Indigenous perspective. This beautiful, rolling narrative uses James Fenimore Cooper’s nineteenth-century The Last of the Mohicans as a source text, adding an extra layer of complexity.
With Jordan’s permission, Gary moved his words into the shape of a map of Vancouver and then combined it with an historic map of the paths of springs and rivers, many of which are buried or disappeared. The practice of “daylighting” an underground stream is one of uncovering or restoring it, “creating a sense of place and connection,” according to the City of Vancouver. By superimposing the route of these waterways on a map of Jordan’s words, we propose a way of daylighting the existence of multiple currents and confluences flowing through conversations around the history of the city.
Excerpted from EMPTY SPACES by Jordan Abel. Copyright © 2023 Jordan Abel. Reprinted by permission of McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. All rights reserved.