Seeing Double, Biking Upstream
BY MJ THOMPSON & LIZ MILLER
[Photo at left by Liz Miller. Photo at right by Lisa Graves, © Concordia University]
1. Interceptor/TreeEvery bike tour needs a starting place, and ours is the interceptor. Our group is made up of university students drawn to the promise of an immersive experience, to the dilemma of waste [1], or perhaps just the challenge of spending a week on a bike. Best remembered for the 2015 shutdown that funneled eight billion litres of raw sewage into the St-Lawrence River, the Southeast interceptor sits deep in the public imaginary of Montreal. Part of a vast network of underground tunnels that make up the sewer system, traces of its labour are hard to see. We meet at an inspection shaft, one of 70 unmarked buildings and pumping stations that dot the city and mark the work going on below, part of what Brian Larkin refers to as the “ambient environment of everyday life” [2]. With no address, and distinguished only by graffiti, the building testifies to the logics of the everyday: you only notice it when it pokes you. Up close on bikes, you catch the stink and roar of sewage in motion. A city waste expert, when asked what keeps him up at night, describes the very real risk of overflow and flooding. Nearby, a stunning patch of Red Pine trees rims the bike path. Its network of roots is also managing water flows, filtering and diverting run-off for the city. The view from a bike is uncropped. You see the trees in dialogue with heavier infrastructure—and nearby, the tents and make-shift housing of people camping out. What view, we wonder, could hold housing, green space and waste infrastructures together so that we might build deeper public engagement and construct real solutions?
[Photos by Lisa Graves, © Concordia University]
2. Energy/SecurityLater, a quick scan through Stats Canada will tell us that Montreal East is 85% French-Canadian, with an average annual household income of $49,601 [3]. But following the bike path east along the St. Lawrence, now, what you notice first is the heavy smell of chemical waste: sulphur, mercaptans, hydrocarbons. Rotten eggs, garage floors, cabbage gone sour. The massive gas tanks that dot this part of Montreal’s waterfront follow later, perhaps unfamiliar to those from the city’s centre, where industry and its by-products remain away and out-of-sight. Lepawsky has observed that too often we focus on the afterlife of waste and overlook the related processes of extraction, design, manufacturing and distribution [4]. Here, there is no looking away. The wind is strong as we ride east, skirting the old 19th century transportation routes that made the city, and the dust and grit is thick on our skin. There’s a beauty to the route, lined with trees and tall grass and a steady flow of recreational cyclists explore the city’s shoreline. Beyond, though, on either side of this narrow concrete bike path, are fences, security cameras, barbed wire. Signage imposes the limit: Do not enter. Video surveillance. Danger-Explosives.
[Photo at left by Lisa Graves, © Concordia University. Photo at right by Liz Miller]
3. Park/GasSignage, at once, marks and normalizes the risk of leaks, contamination, disaster. Once registered, their meaning quickly slips from view. In Parc Hotel-de-Ville, a narrow perch by the St-Lawrence along the Route verte bike path, the signs mark the underground location of a network of pipelines that move gas to the Enbridge transfer station and ships waiting nearby. These pipelines shuttle fuel and chemicals from the refineries just north to the shipping routes in the port. Riding through, you see kids fishing, bare feet in the water, shouting at a good catch. Nearby, benches face the view, and seniors sit chatting in the sun. Biking into the park means riding past the retirement home, Résidence les Pléiades, not 10 metres from the transfer station, and we stop by the Rassemblement sign telling workers where to gather in the event of an unspecified emergency. For a newcomer, it’s a shock to the senses; a reminder of the gas industry’s volatility and the fragility of bodies at play nearby. Whose lives are valued under the sign of petro-capitalism?
[Photos by Liz Miller]
4. Refinery/Beach HouseJohn Durham Peters has argued for a broader understanding of media as “ensembles of natural life and human craft.” He writes, “The ozone layer, the arctic ice, and whale populations all are now what they are not only because of how they have been covered by reporters, but because of how their being is now altered by media, understood as infrastructure of data and control” [5]. Are bike paths media, then, akin to Innes’s understanding of the rivers and rails that connected the 19th century landscape? It seems to us the bike tour may offer a different view of the problem of waste production and waste streams. We leave the path to head north to the industrial heart of Montreal East and the massive petro-chemical infrastructure housed at Broadway and Marian Avenues. The route is scattered with glass and metal shards, the air thick with dust from the construction waste dump and ozone from the flare stacks, and trucks overtake us as we pause to document our findings with cell phones. Near the Valero plant, a deer jumps past, a visitor as unexpected in this landscape as perhaps we are. We take its lead, heading into side streets and into the surround, lined with neat houses and polished cars. For a brief moment, we feel the danger of lives lived in the high-stakes game of status-quo capitalism, with its attendant strategies of waste “management.” For further discussion with our students? The importance of being there, and how we might use cyling as a kind of embodied pedagogy, to shape our activism and alter public policy.
1. While waste is largely out of mind and site, the accumulation of waste is a looming public health crisis and a major contributor to climate change. We used discard studies as a framework to analyze the larger systems that shape waste and wasting. https://discardstudies.com/
2. Larkin, B. (2013). The politics and poetics of infrastructure, Annual Review of Anthropology, 42(1), 327-343.
3. Institut de la Statistique Québec (2000). https://www.stat.gouv.qc.ca/statistiques/recensement/2001/recens2001_06/revenu/revstrucfam06_an.htm
4. Lepawsky, J. (2018). Reassembling rubbish: Worlding electronic waste. MIT Press.
5. Peters, J.D. (2015). The marvelous clouds: Towards a philosophy of elemental media.
MJ Thompson (PhD., New York University 2008) is a writer and teacher working on performance and embodiment. Her articles have appeared in Ballettanz, Border Crossings, The Brooklyn Rail, Canadian Art, Dance Current, Dance Ink, Dance Magazine, The Drama Review, The Globe and Mail, Women and Performance, Theatre Journal and more. Her academic work is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in Canada; and her essays have appeared in several anthologies, including Performance Studies Canada (McGill-Queen’s Press, 2017). Most recently, she received the National Park Service Arts and Sciences Residency, Cape Cod National Seashore, August 2019, where she worked on a long-form essay about land privatization and the concept of the view as embodied (forthcoming, Departures 2020).
Elizabeth (Liz) Miller is a Professor in Communication Studies and a documentary maker with an expertise in environmental media. She uses collaboration and interactivity as a way to connect personal stories to larger timely social issues such as water privatization, climate migration, and gender & climate change. Her film and media projects such as The Shore Line, Hands-on: Women, Climate, Change, and SwampScapes, have won awards and been screened in climate forums, in classrooms, and at international festivals such as Hot Docs, Atlanta and RIDM. She is the co-author of Going Public: The Art of Participatory Practice (2017), that is accompanied by a website profiling the work of twenty-nine socially engaged practitioners exploring the political, aesthetic, and performative dimensions of their work.
Lisa Graves is a staff photographer at Concordia University and a collaborator on WasteScapes. Her passion for cycling has inspired visits to Vietnam, Latin America and more recently waste sites around Montreal. Her work explores the relationship between humans and nature. She uses photography to capture the beauty in the everyday as a means to inspire individuals to live new sensations.
