FIELDNOTES FROM THE GOWANUS

This blog is a collection of projects, documentation, writing and other ephemera from a visual research workshop led by The Canary Project and commissioned by Commissioned by the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center (SJDC) in conjunction with the exhibition U-n-f-o-l-d: A Cultural Response to Climate Change.
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• Sayler / Morris for The Canary Project, Postcards from the Gowanus

  

  Postcards from the Gowanus (2011)
  Sayler / Morris for The Canary Project
  Postcards and metal rack
  5’5” x 12” x 12”

  

  “The canal is tidal. If you didn’t paddle you would float one way and then another.    Thinking to yourself: ‘To imagine is a form of survival.’”
  Sayler / Morris for The Canary Project
  4” x 6”

  Most of what we might say about the Gowanus, is in the text to our video “Gouwane”. We were uncertain and puzzled enough about our experience to feel that we could only work out our thoughts by putting them into the voice of another person.  A further, more concrete note:  Throughout the project we found ourselves thinking about the HighLine park in relation to Gowanus.  By the 1980’s, the HighLine, once part of Manhattan’s industrial infrastructure,  was abandoned and left to return to a semi-wild state.  Then in recent years  it was redeveloped for recreational and commercial use.  Will the same happen to the Gowanus Canal once the Superfund clean up is complete? Something lost, something gained.  The margins move.