Thursday, January 10, 2002

Process: Mother tongue


The expression 'I lost my French' intrigues me as it suggests that the ability to say, speak french, is like an object that can be lost and recovered. This interests me as a francophone from Northern Ontario who has lived in the largely English-speaking Maritimes for several years. My move to Montreal was triggered in part by a wish to 'recover' the language that I have 'lost' somewhat through lack of use.

The notion of a lost language also refers to a parallel, dormant, mother tongue. While I was raised bi-culturally (my adoptive parents are French-Canadian and English-Scottish), my birth father was of Swedish and Austrian origin. These languages and cultures are alien to me. Can I have 'lost' a tongue that I never used? If mother tongue is related to one's maternal language, how do we speak of paternal language?

And so I would like to trace the history of the placenames back to their original names when possible. I will be particularly interested in the names people who live in the area give to places — names that are sometimes undocumented. As a name of a landmark can reflect local history the chronology of changes to this name can tell an even bigger story.

Lac Panache / Penage Lake, Whitefish, Ontario

An example: my paternal grandmother has a family cottage in Whitefish on Lac Panache. The word Panache — which means flair, elegance (fière allure) — refers in this case to a moose's antlers which branch out impressively. From the top of a mountain, on a map, or an aerial view, the Panache lake is seen to be full of bays and islands, spread out like antlers. The word Panache is the ideal metaphor.

Over the years the lake name has been changed to Penage which does not reflect the history of the original word Panache and carries no particular meaning in English. Because our cottage borders Whitefish First Nation (Atikameksheng Anishnawbik), my intuition is that Panache supplanted an Ojibwa word for the same lake. I would like to explore similar stories of shifting placenames, of hidden vernacular expressions with this project.

Process: Embedded stories


To embed/embroider stories in the ‘tongues’ of the Tongue Rug is not incidental. As I was researching Swedish arts & crafts, I came across the sladdakavring: a patchwork quilt made of ‘tongues’ often in the form of a rug.

"Small pieces were cut out in the shape of a tongue and stitched around the edges with beautiful thread. In the center, a figure would be embroidered, such as a glass, a house, or an animal." — Old Swedish Quilts, Asa Wettre, Interweave Press, 1995. p.20


Lake of the Woods Tongue Rug, 36'' x 44'' c. 1930, collection of Julie Lapalme
(Old suit material hemmed with red & tan fabric onto burlap bags from
Lake of the Woods Milling Company, Limited, Keewatin, Ontario.)

These rugs are not unique to Sweden. The Musée des arts et traditions populaires du Québec also has a few ‘tapis à langues’ using the appliqué technique. The verb ‘appliquer’ can take many forms: s’appliqué à (travail) means to apply oneself to a task and s’appliqué à faire means to take pains to do something. The tongue rug then seemed the ideal ‘archiving device’: the overlapping tongues acting as metaphor of oral traditions and capable of storing memories and tales. The tongues are also suggestive of a mother tongue and vernacular expressions.


Example of ‘tongue’ icon which will act as a hotspot to navigate to another space.

Marie-Christiane Mathieu wrote a text about Stéphanie Lagueux’s Corps social and my own Tongue Rug project entitled "Œuvres en processus pour publics en développement" [Works in progress for publics in development] for the Spring 2003 issue of Espace magazine. In describing the two projects, she describes the audience as a potential co-auteur – co-authors. Without the participation of the desired audiences, the Tongue-Rug — a latent virtual sculpture — does not become ‘real’.

One thing I learned from my last Web project, Orphan Train - Trained Tales, is that it is not enough to put up an on-line form for the public to feel compelled to interact. And so it is important that I develop ways to engage potential audiences to participate.

In response to this, the on-line Parlour Room acts as a place of exchange as the parlour was traditionally used for receiving people. In fact, the Tongue Rug was often placed in the room as a centerpiece for conversation.

Process: Mapmaking & slippage


Cartography is the art and science of making maps while topography means ‘to describe a place’. It is the art or practice of detailed graphic delineation, usually on maps or charts, of natural and man-made features of a place or region. I wanted to counter the scientific maps made using the GPS — which use exact coordinates — with illogical memories and hand-drawn ‘memory maps’ that may not refer to proper scale and distance as much as symbolism, metaphor and just plain superstition.

This is why the lake — the body of water — is an important concept in this project. To be able to define the exact coordinates of water is difficult due to its receding and growing edges, its fluid nature, its relationship to time and weather.

If several individuals were told to pinpoint a specific lake, to determine the latitude and longitude coordinates using a GPS, the coordinates would vary depending on the amount or rainfall that year, the season, their position in relation to the lake, etc. There would be slippage in the collection of data. With a tool like a GPS that is so incredibly complex and precise, I enjoy the fact that a lake or river can elude it somewhat. It can also escape from its simple classification as a physical object.

A lake is a symbolic marker, embedded with history, stories and memories of people living in the area. It is never simply a lake. And so, I will not be the objective surveyor, nor will I follow an empirical method when documenting these lakes.

I am interested in chance elements that lead me to the unexpected, the tall tale, the ordinary and the magical, the stories which not only describe bodies of water but the people living in the vicinity.

Process: Chance trajectories, placenames & memory


In an attempt to play with the tension between personal information and what I perceived as potentially ‘cold’ impersonal technologies, I inserted personal identifiers into on-line mapping and database software. In this manner, I found topographical markers throughout Quebec and Sweden, which bear my interwoven family names: my adoptive and birth names.

Though choosing placenames of my family names as a starting point was more of a formal device to map out my excursion, the project does call up genealogical practices in the tracing of a family tree. Landmarks instead of blood can be used to indicate a sort of lineage.

I chose bodies of water as the main topographical area to explore because their interconnected, meandering structures resemble family relationships. Like a lake forming from an undulating river, like a river running dry and cutting off from another body of water, family ties are never static and are constantly evolving.

I was also drawn to water because of the occasional discrepancy between official names of lakes and the names given to them by local residents. This half-hidden history is sometimes reflected in maps but more so through storytelling. As my family names share the same placenames, I would be interested in how these markers in nature are repositories for memory, carrying varied meanings and associations for different people.

Using my family names was then a conceptual device to set out a trajectory - a random sampling of Quebec and Sweden. In fact, the waypoints are widely spread out: in Quebec they range from the Abitibi region to the Gaspésie and in Sweden, they are dispersed from the Northern Laplands to the Southern provinces of Gävleborg and Södermanland. I was inspired by Duchamp's Réseaux des 3 stoppages étalons series worked on between 1913 and 1915.



Network of Stoppages/Réseaux des stoppages étalon.
Marcel Duchamp, Paris, 1914. Oil and pencil on canvas. 148.9 x 197.7 cm.
The Museum of Modern Arts, New York.

"The 3 stoppages étalons are one-meter-long straight wires that fall from a height of one meter and are deformed by landing on a horizontal plane. The three different forms are three of the possible forms infinite forms – not rectilinear but curvilinear – of the unit of measure determined by chance. The Résaux des 3 stoppages d’étalon is a canvas with nine itineraries each one-meter long, each laid out using its own individual geometry."
Hyper Architecture: Spaces in the Electronic Age, Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi, Birkhäuser: Basel, 1999. (p.34)

Duchamp transformed his units of measurements into a new geometry by using chance elements, factors he could not control. I too wanted to use chance elements to determine a physical itinerary. I let the Placenames results dictate my waypoints. Though I started off with specific criteria — my adoptive and birth names — I would venture that chance did play a role in the interaction of these two families.

The easiest path accessible by bike creates the path on a digital canvas — a sort of automatic tracing or mapping. The bicycle is a stand-in for the Rolling Studio: the artist studio on wheels.

I am now in the process of traveling to each of these placenames and gathering data on bodies of water, with the occasional bridge and land formation. As the use of the GPS allows me to find and map out the latitude and longitude coordinates of the geographic areas to be explored, it is an important tool cycling in areas that are foreign to me.

Yet, even ‘armed’ with a GPS, I still imagine an archive documenting my state of being lost. Will the newest orienting technologies necessarily make my path more certain? Getting lost is not necessarily a setback as I believe the state of being lost has the potential for opening people up to new experiences and encounters. And so I am not only drawing the ‘right path’ to each destination, but including the re-routes, the circling-back and the dead-ends as well. Unhinged from the map, they become drawings, embroidery, loose threads.

Process: Rolling Studio & Parlour Room


Two on-line environments act as portals: a Rolling Studio and a Parlour Room. Before I even visualized the Tongue Rug project, I envisioned a specific structure – a Rolling Studio – informed by a dream I had of a portable space: a small room on wheels with a window looking onto a changing vista. The room was big enough for a person to stand in with shelves and nooks to store artist supplies.


I was further inspired by Emily Carr's Elephant caravan: a portable studio in which she traveled and painted from. For my project, photos taken in 360 degree panoramas interpret the landscape rather than paintings. I wanted to update this travelling studio with today's communication technologies – mobile devices (bicycle, cellphone or GPS) and social media tools. The Rolling Studio is a sort of database of placenames, coordinates, maps, cycling logs, drawings & 360-degree panoramas.

The Parlour Room invites participation from visitors to the site. Much like a traditional parlour, it is a place that encourages discussion and gatherings. Since the tongue rug was traditionally displayed in the public space of the parlour, the different tongues can act as triggers to reveal the overlayed stories gathered over time in this domestic space.

Process: Tongue Rug Project


The work of art is therefore only a halt in the becoming and not a frozen aim on its own.El Lissitzky

With the Tongue Rug : Tapis à Langues project, I wanted to explore themes related to language, placenames and the act of naming, landscape and memory. Displacement, 'getting lost', being 'on the right track', finding waypoints and trailblazing, restlessness, wanderlust and the motivation to travel will come into play in this project.

The tongue rug has often been made out of felt in the past in Quebec and Sweden — it is like a patchwork quilt in the shape of overlapping tongues, often embroidered with symbolic icons. The sladdakavring will grow organically, piecemeal. I will not be able to predict its final shape.

The Tongue Rug is a visual archive of placenames of topographical elements mainly across Quebec with a few Swedish waypoints: lakes & rivers with the occasional bridge & land formation. As each waypoint is documented, a tongue is added and the Tongue Rug grows: its shape is not only determined through time and space but by interaction.

The very paths followed from Montreal to each waypoint create the Path Map. The tracing is aided by a GPS and Topographical maps. These paths – serving as navigational elements – refer both to threads & embroidery as well as to how interlinked bodies of water create networks.

The two main interactive components, a Tongue Rug and a Path Map, are fluid, mutable structures: navigation devices and archives that are prone to change through time and interaction. These growing archives bring an interactive element as ‘latent’ virtual sculptures, dependent on my movements in space and time and the participation of the public.

Wednesday, January 2, 2002

Progress: January - April, 2002



Rented a small storage space to make more room in the studio. Bought several topography maps of Quebec, a road atlas, compass and GPS. I spread out all the maps and pored over them, locating my waypoints using the coordinates from the online database. Also programmed all of the waypoints into the GPS to prepare for the bike trips.



Mapped out a trajectory of the placenames and developed a timeline based on my time availability and the distance to each waypoint by bike. It was clear that I would have to adopt a phased approach. Many waypoints were out of my reach.



I also decided to take an orientation course through La Cordée. A funny aside: I did well for the theoretical part of the course, but when it came time to do the practical part, I actually got lost. We were all supposed to meet at the Morgan Arboretum, a 245 hectare forested reserve, situated on the McGill University Macdonald Campus in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue. Since I knew the way via the cycling trail, I decided to head out early in search of the arboretum.



I got to Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue just fine. I had assumed that I would be able to find signs to the arboretum and did little preparation before leaving. My mistake was forgetting that most signs are geared for drivers, not cyclists. The GPS was not helpful and I did not have my road atlas with me. I got detoured at the highway and shied away from the overpasses and heavy traffic in search of a calmer route. Needless to say, I did not find the arboretum in time for the course. I eventually cycled back to Montreal feeling very sheepish. I did learn my lesson though. Always prepare for a trip no matter how simple it may seem.