Review of the exhibition "Journeys" at CCA Montreal

About a year ago, in the eventful Montreal metropolis, an exhibition named, “Journeys: How traveling fruit, ideas and buildings rearrange our environment” took place at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA). This unpopular museum theme was looking at how travelling tangible things and people rearrange our environment from a perspective that takes diffusion as much as place making into account. The exhibit consisted of fifteen sections indicated by vignettes to demonstrate that place is “an objective location that has both uniqueness and interdependence with other places” as well as “a subjective social and cultural construct – somewhere that has personal meaning for individuals or groups”. (Knox, Paul L., Marston, Sallie A., Nash, Alan E.) Numerous journeys were presented such as the traveling coconut, the immigration of Senegalese workers into Italy, and many more intriguing wanderings.

A sub-section that struck me was that of the movement of houses in Newfoundland entitled, ”Configuration - The accumulation of buildings from other places rearranges an established urban grid”. This “journey” of somewhat 30,000 people relocating in order to follow fish populations in destinations such as Arnold’s Cove in Placentia Bay is painted in a sensorial manner. We are offered a map of Arnold’s Cove with its resettled communities, pictures of the houses, which were displaced, and snapshots taken during the internal migration. These static images tend to our desire to visualize in order to grasp such concept.

The public becomes aware after reading the first official statement describing the aims of the resettlement program by Newfoundland premier, Joey Smallwood, that the migration was voluntary and influenced by both push and pull factors. What attracted to move the migrants to a new location and to constitute and shape a new place was that they would find employment in the fishing industry. The impelling of these persons to abandon their community was caused by the government’s decision to only financially aid the families if the whole community agreed to relocate as an entity. Arnold’s Cove therefore doubled in size by 1970 as it was inhabited by hundreds of resettled families that socially constructed an entirely new place consisting of new arrangements.

Nelson Squires’ chiaroscuro short film “The Move” (1970) was additionally included in the “Configuration” sub-section, which walks one through the process of displacing a Newfoundland house to later establish a home. This audiovisual mediator tracks the Newfoundlanders’ mobility while catering to our appeal to cinema as a window of perspective. Conjointly, the exposition grants us a simplification of reality. A model depicting how a boat tugged the house across a river lies in the center of the room, however we are denied the privilege of pleasing our sense of touch.

Although it is quite difficult to re-express ideas in a museum setting, the CCA exquisitely epitomized the Newfoundlanders’ excursion in a vivid fashion. The ideas that are conveyed nonetheless are obviously transmitted subjectively. Parts of the Newfoundlanders’ journey are omitted. Letters of the moving communities to their loved ones aren’t presented to see how they were experiencing it from their perspective and not a legislative one. The archives provided are that of legal nature and the only personal tangible objects on display are a memory-map and a structural model made from memory of Barron’s Cove. It would have been beneficial to see local artwork, postcards, or any written document demonstrating the migrants’ feelings towards the move in furtherance of having an encompassed understanding. All things considered, the theme of traveling people reshaping their environment is one of common interest since it is inevitable and recurring everyday. From my speculation, all in all, the museum successfully got the message across to me and to the public.

References

Exhibition:

Journeys: How traveling fruit, ideas and buildings rearrange our environment

Knox, Paul L., Marston, Sallie A., Nash, Alan E. (2010) Human Geography Places and regions in Global Context (3^rd Canadian Edition) Pearson. Ontario: Toronto.