Public Access
Prefix Institute for Contemporary Art
401 Richmond St. West, Suite 124
Toronto
Friday March 5th 2010
10:30am – 6:30pm
As complement to the Leona Drive Project (www.leonadrive.ca) and in response to the reception, both critical and popular, of its suburban problematic, this symposium asks quite simply: how do we—how have we come to, why do we even want to—know ‘the suburb’? And why does it appear that, just as it has begun to wane as an historical form, the suburb has become a privileged object of knowledge, circulating at such a speed within a variety of discourses.
Rather than pose these queries of suburban knowledge under the traditional rubric of an academic symposium—considering that ‘the rubric’ derives, quite materially, from red clay, from the ground—we instead seek to orient ourselves according to the mood of Leona Drive itself. Where a series of post-WWII homes sit vacant, awaiting their development/destruction; a space simultaneously nostalgic and anxious, essentially on hold. Thus, we invite our participants to think about the suburb within the scenario of the wake. To enter a period of mourning for that, precisely, which is in the process of passing: the suburban as an integral whole, as a paradigmatic form of dwelling which, as the breath which flees the organs, may not survive passage into the register of objective knowledge. Here, at home (however temporarily) within the interim, we wish to dwell upon the historical transition of dwelling—as the productive techno-social relation between subjects and space—in an attempt to recognize our relationship, both real and imaginary, to the suburban legacy.
Dr. Janine Marchessault
