This site-specific work consists of a sound composition featuring interviews with six individuals with important, if sometimes oblique, relationships to a series of parkettes in Toronto. These sites exist because of the hydro-electric infrastructure that cuts through them. I drew inspiration from the Canadian political economist, Harold Innis, who suggested that the history of land use and infrastructure in this nation is a sedimented band that runs along its border with the United States. Indigenous paths were appropriated by traders, and those routes later became conduits for the railway, roads, and electrical and telecommunications infrastructure that connect one end of Canada to the other. I interviewed Bonnie Devine, an Anishnaabe artist and historian; Joe Mihevic, the former city councillor for the area; Nancy Chater, a project manager for Toronto’s parks system; Jody Berland, a communications scholar focusing on Canadian media; and Anne Innis Dagg, Harold Innis’s daughter and a pioneering zoologist and feminist activist. Their complex, multi-layered reflections on land were broadcast throughout the area using FM transmitters.
Curatorial Text:
Channeling Toronto's overlapping infrastructures of trade, communications, and power, Mitchell Akiyama’s installation spans a series of small parkettes connected by giant electrical towers and high-voltage power lines. Within this context, his electronic assemblages may appear at first glance to represent yet another technological incursion upon our public spaces and lives. However, closer attention reveals them to be generators of a different kind, producing their own polyphonic corridor over the airwaves. Powered by the sun, and broadcasting accordingly at 88.3 FM and 101.1 FM for the duration of the exhibition, Akiyama's artwork seems to ask: where could these storied corridors lead us next, in a bid for more multivocal futures?
- Shani K. Parsons
Commissioned by ArtworxTO and Gallery TPW