DON RIVER RADIO

DON RIVER RADIO

A podcast series on the past, present, and future of the Don River, hosted by Mare Liberum members Dylan Gauthier and Sunita Prasad, with invited guests.

EPISODES

Published on Anchor/Spotify and available on Apple Podcasts / Google Podcasts / Amazon / RSS Link

EPISODE 10: River Craft (Maria Hupfield interviews Sylvia Plain, Chris Mendoza, Anong and Lux Beam and and John Hupfield )

In this, our final episode of the ten-part series, we present this epic and extra special piece which comprises a series of interviews recorded by Maria Hupfield, who worked with us in Tkaronto over the long duration of the "People's Map" project. Maria collected these interviews over the summer and fall of 2022 with Sylvia Plain, Chris Mendoza, Anong and Lux Beam, and her father, master boatbuilder John Hupfield, Sr.

An extra special thanks to Sonia Rivera, who edited the episode and wove together these very special in-the-field and on-the-water interviews which happen to take the form, together, of a meditation on craft, making, Indigenous knowledge, and ways of being in and with water.

Anong and Lux Beam, recorded July 28, 2022 over breakfast
Chris Mendoza, recorded July 17, 2022 in the Don Valley River
John Hupfield Sr., recorded July 16, 2022, at my kitchen table Toronto
Sylvia Plain, recorded July 13, 2022, outside on St. Clair, Toronto

Guest Bios

Anong Migwans Beam is a painter, mother, paint-maker, and curator, living and working in her home community of M’Chigeeng First Nation on Manitoulin Island. After studying art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, OCAD University, and the Institute of American Indian Arts, she returned home to be a studio assistant for her father, Carl Beam. Her painting practice is in large-format oil on canvas. She is the founder of Gimaa Radio, Ojibwe-language radio CHYF 88.9FM. She maintains an independent curating practice, and served as director of the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation before leaving to focus on her own practice and the art of paint-making. She is the founder of Beam Paints, where she combines an early education in Indigenous pigments from her parents Carl and Ann Beam, with a lifelong interest in art and colour. She has always loved the colours pink and green more than anyone should. She collects art, makes art, and is generally obsessed with all aspects therein. She recently showed her work at Campbell House Museum, in Toronto. Visit Anong Beam’s website here | Read about Anong Beam’s Indigenous Based Colour Research on CBC News here

Maria Hupfield is a transdisciplinary maker working with Industrial felt at the intersection of performance art, design and sculpture. She is a 2020-2022 inaugural Borderlands Fellow for her project Breaking Protocol at The Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School and the Center for the Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University, and was awarded the Hnatyshyn Mid-career Award for Outstanding Achievement in Canada 2018. She has exhibited and performed her work through her touring solo exhibition The One Who Keeps On Giving (organized by The Power Plant) 2017-2018, and solo Nine Years Towards the Sun, at the Heard Museum, Phoenix, 2019-2020. Amongst other places, she has also presented her work at the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, the NOMAM in Zurich, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Galerie de L’UQAM, the New York Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, the New York Museum of Art and Design, BRIC House Gallery, the Bronx Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Site Santa Fe, and the National Gallery of Canada. She is co-owner of Native Art Department International with her husband artist Jason Lujan, and a founding member of the Indigenous Kinship Collective NYC. Hupfield belongs to and is an off-rez Anishnaabek from Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario, Canada, and is a Canadian Research Chair in Transdisciplinary Indigenous Arts, with the Indigenous Creation Studio, Department of Visual Studies / English and Drama, at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

John Hupfield Sr. is a master boat builder, owner of Lost in the Woods Boatworks (1991 – currently retired), and Maria Hupfield’s father. He provided restoration and construction of small boat crafts in Carling Township, Ontario Canada. He is Anglophone Canadian born in Montreal Quebec from Southern Ontario and husband to the late Peggy Miller, Anishinaabe belonging to Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario Canada. He is a graduate of the Media Studies at Sheridan College, Oakville, in 1973, and worked security as a resident of Rochdale College, Toronto, 1969-70.

Chris Mendoza is an artist and educator whose work moves between performance, sculpture, image-based work, and writing as affective inquiries into belonging, inheritance, and embodied relations to place. Chris values presenting work and performing both in and outside of formal art spaces—the former of which include the FOFA gallery (Montreal); University of Toronto Art Museum; Craft Ontario; Crutch Gallery (Toronto); and the Icelandic Textile Center (Blönduós). Chris holds a BFA from Concordia University, a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto and currently resides in Tkaronto/Toronto.

Sylvia Plain, from Aamjiwnaang First Nation, is a community ambassador, water walker, researcher, birch bark canoe building apprentice and founder of the Great Lakes Canoe Journey. Plain is the owner and operator of the Great Lakes Canoe Journey Education Program, which was founded in 2014. Sylvia has been a Research and Policy analyst in the environment sector for ten years working for First Nations communities and political organizations in Ontario. In 2022 and 2016 Sylvia represented the Anishinabek Nation at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues where she was elected to be a Co-Chair of the North American Indigenous Caucus. Sylvia is a member of the First Nations Advisory Council at the Ontario Clean Water Agency. She has an Honours Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of Toronto.

EPISODE 9: Overland (with Amish Morrell)

In this week's episode, Dylan Gauthier speaks with Toronto-based writer, educator, and curator Amish Morrell about learning wilderness, frozen rivers, thawing glaciers, gear, Cape Breton artists, and – naturally – the Don River.

Guest Bio

Amish Morrell is an educator, curator, editor and writer. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences & School of Interdisciplinary Studies at OCAD University in Toronto. He has graduate faculty appointments in the Visual & Critical Studies BA Programme, the Criticism & Curatorial Practice, Contemporary Art, Design and New Media Art Histories, and the Interdisciplinary Art and Material Design MFA and MA programmes. From 2008 to 2017 he was Editor and Director of Programs at C Magazine, one of North America’s foremost visual arts magazines. He received a PhD from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto in 2006, where he was a research fellow at the Centre for Media and Culture in Education, and a member of the Testimony and Historical Consciousness Project, led by Dr. Roger Simon. During his PhD he wrote a dissertation on historical re-enactment in contemporary photography. Between 2006 and 2016 he taught at York University, Ryerson University, and the University of Toronto. At C Magazine he developed numerous public programs, including lectures and workshops held in partnership with organizations including The Toronto International Art Fair, The Power Plant, Mercer Union, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Art Metropole and the Toronto Art Book Fair. He has also curated exhibitions for the Doris McCarthy Gallery, The Confederation Centre for the Arts and the Cape Breton University Art Gallery, and developed experiments in alternative forms of public engagement, including Nightwalks with Teenagers, with Mammalian Diving Reflex; The Sauna Symposium with Hart House at the University of Toronto; and Reading the Bruce Trail with Public Studio.

Along with artist Diane Borsato, he leads Outdoor School, an ongoing project that combines social practice-based art, outdoor education and critical land-based practices. Outdoor School includes a course taught each year at the University of Guelph, an exhibition at the Doris McCarthy Gallery in 2016, public projects including an annual mycological foray and other guided outdoor activities, and in the summer of 2018, a five-week artist residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Upcoming Outdoor School projects include a book in partnership with the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre for the Arts and The Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Other projects include research on the avant-garde and counterculture in Cape Breton since the 1960s. His most recent writing includes an essay about Indigenous philosophies of sustainability in the work of artist Ursula Johnson, published in C Magazine and an interview about art and survival on Cape Breton Island with video and installation artists Amanda Trager and Erik Moskowitz, published in Visual Arts News.

Episode 8: Slow Gathering (with Chris Mendoza and Parker Kay)

In this week's episode, Dylan Gauthier speaks with Toronto-based artist and educator Chris Mendoza and artist, curator and writer Parker Kay, who is also founder and director of the non-profit gallery space Pumice Raft. Incorporated in 2018, Pumice Raft's activities begin from an ecological activist approach to the display of visual art and the facilitation of related education. This means that the guiding principles of the organization are rooted in a conception of place that begins with the protection of people and the planet. Recorded in the fall of 2022, Gauthier spoke with Mendoza and Kay about their ongoing engagement with the Don River and the ravines, and their recent series of public events, field trips, and performances – Implicit Choreographies & Relational Topographies – a processional public program sited within the Don River Valley led by invited artists, researchers, and writers in the Summer and Fall of 2022.

(The episode begins with an excerpt of Chris walking up the Don River recorded by Maria Hupfield, referred to in Episode 7: upstreaming with Maria Hupfield and Charlene K. Lau which also feeds into Episode 9, comprising interviews conducted by Hupfield, to be released later in March).

Guest Bios

Parker Kay is an artist and writer. He is also sometimes known as Pumice Raft.

EPISODE 7: Upstreaming (with Maria Hupfield and Charlene K. Lau)

In this week's episode, co-hosted by Mare Liberum's Dylan Gauthier and Sunita Prasad, we speak with Toronto-based transdisciplinary performance artist Maria Hupfield and Evergreen curator Charlene K. Lau about their work and research in the Don Valley. Recorded in the fall of 2022, Hupfield has just been named the Inaugural ArtworxTO Legacy Artist in Residence by the City of Toronto and an Artist-in-Residence at the Brickworks. She collaborated with us on our year long public art project "In Which We Draw A People’s Map of the Don River" hosted by Evergreen Brickworks and Waterfront Toronto. Lau's work with Mare Liberum in 2022 wrapped with a day-long public on-water performance and activation of a water route from Cherry Beach to the mouth of the Don River.

Guest Bios

Charlene K. Lau is an art historian, critic and Curator of Public Art at Evergreen Brick Works. She has held fellowships at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity; Parsons School of Design, The New School; and Performa Biennial. Charlene has also held teaching positions at Parsons School of Design, OCAD University, Toronto Metropolitan University, Western University and York University. Her writing has been published in Art in America, Artforum, TheAtlantic.com, The Brooklyn Rail, C Magazine, Canadian Art, frieze, Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty, Fashion Theory and Journal of Curatorial Studies, among others.

EPISODE 6: A River is a Public Space (with Daniel Rotsztain)

After a late-summer break, Don River Radio returns for the fall with a conversation between host Dylan Gauthier and Daniel Rotsztain about the latter's civic and socially engaged art practice as "The Urban Geographer," maps, visual arts as activism, and remaking our expectations for the built environment.

Guest Bio

Daniel Rotsztain is an artist, writer, and cartographer based in Toronto, Dish with One Spoon. His work examines our relationships to the places we inhabit. As an admirer of public libraries, malls, and strip malls, his projects also seek to understand and support the diverse settings of the city’s public life. As a geographer of European descent working in Turtle Island, Rotsztain am committed to understanding and sharing the treaties and Wampum Belts that outline our roles and responsibilities toward this land and its people. Rotsztain is the author and illustrator of All the Libraries Toronto, a colouring book featuring every branch of Toronto Public Library and A Colourful History Toronto, a collaboration with the City of Toronto featuring the city’s historic sites. His work has also been published in the Globe and Mail, Now Magazine, Toronto Life, New York Magazine, and Spacing Magazine, and his past clients include the City of Toronto, Heritage Toronto, ERA Architects, the Toronto Board of Trade, and the Canada Council of the Arts. I have a semi-regular column on CBC Radio One’s Here and Now about exploring the Greater Toronto Area. Rotsztain is the co-lead of plazaPOPS, a project to enhance strip mall parking lots to become vibrant public spaces, and he's a consultant with PROCESS, a planning and design firm in Toronto.

For more, see: https://theurbangeographer.ca/

EPISODE 5: Decolonial Waterways and Paths to Knowing (with Elder Catherine Taomesre Tàmmaro)

This week on Don River Radio, we speak with Wyandot multi-disciplinary artist and faith-keeper Catherine Taomesre Tàmmaro – Evergreen Brickworks's Elder-in-Residence – about her work bridging Indigenous and settler-colonial knoweldge-ways, the role of water in her own lifelong creative journey, and her exhibition Fire Over Water currently on view at the Spotted Turtle Clan longhouse at Crawford Lake. We begin the episode with Tàmmaro's reading of the last part of her chapter for the recently released Routledge book Sacred Civics: Building Seven Generation Cities, edited By Jayne Engle, Julian Agyeman, and Tanya Chung-Tiam-Fook (Routledge, 2022), which "argues that societal transformation requires that spirituality and sacred values are essential to reimagining patterns of how we live, organize and govern ourselves, determine and distribute wealth, inhabit and design cities, and construct relationships with others and with nature."

Guest Bio

Taomesre ~ People of the Little Turtle, Wyandot of Anderdon Nation; Wendat Confederacy
Catherine Tammaro is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practise spans decades.

Catherine is a seated Spotted Turtle Clan FaithKeeper and is active throughout the City of Toronto and beyond, in many organizations as Elder in Residence, Mentor, Teacher and Cultural Advisor. She is an alumna of the Ontario College of Art and has had a diverse career, multiple exhibits and installations, published written works and presentations and continues her creative practise.

Catherine actively supports the work and development of other artists on an ongoing basis. She served on the Board of the TAC, TAC’s Income Precarity Working Group and was the Chair of the Toronto Arts Council’s Indigenous Advisory Committee in 2020/21 and is the new Indigenous Arts Program Manager at Toronto Arts Council and continues teaching, learning and exploring her creativity and that of others.

EPISODE 4: Art at the Confluence (with Queen Kukoyi, Nico Taylor, and Jay Havens)

In this week's episode, Mare Liberum member and filmmaker Sunita Prasad introduces two conversations with artists working at the confluence of history, identity, water, storytelling, speculative futures, and care. DRR host Dylan Gauthier interviews Nico Taylor & Queen Kukoyi (of Oddside Arts @oddsidearts) and Jay Havens. The guests reflect on their recently commissioned works produced for Waterfront Toronto's public art program, and on what we can learn from encounters with elemental forces. Call in intro this week by Freddie Ratkovsky!

Guest Bios

Jay Havens (he/him/they) is a multi-media 2Spirit artist, educator, and collaborator of Kanien’keha’ka and Scottish Canadian ancestry. Havens was born on Haudenosaunee Territory know as the Haldimand Tract and raised on Unceded Sto:lo and Musqueam lands close to Vancouver, Canada. He has created a wide array of projects working in collaboration with institutions, professional companies and educators from grade school to university level. He has facilitated workshops ranging from 5 to 500 participants geared to learners of all different ages. They have a history of producing large scale collaborative artworks and interdisciplinary projects throughout Turtle Island designing for site-specific installations, murals, projections and sculptural artworks for galleries and public spaces or he can also be found designing sets and costumes for professional stage companies. Over their 18year career project highlights include projection mapping animations on Stratford City Hall, a floating artwork in the Toronto harbour called The Peacemaker’s Canoe and a mural on the windows of the Vancouver Opera house. Several of Jays sculptural weavings can be found in the collections at the New York State Museum and most recently he and a team were shortlisted to propose two public artworks to Waterfront Toronto on the West Don Lands.

Queen Kukoyi (they/she) is a Black Bajan of Igbo and Lokono Ancestry, Queer, Femme presenting, Mother, Author, Educator, Activist, Curator, Award Winning Scholar and International Artist. Queen is currently one of the Neighborhood Arts Network/TAF Community Arts Award finalist; as well as the Executive Director of Operations for BSAM Canada.
As a creative, and her work explores spoken word poetry, digital collage, and animations along with installation work that touch on concepts surrounding the Afrofuturistic meditative space. Queen uses the lens of Afrofuturism 2.0 in her visual arts, mindfulness, and storytelling to facilitate discourse that decolonizes the Black identity and affirms all intersections of Blackness. She practices Afrofuturism 2.0 as an exploration and reclaiming of various black identities through multiple dimensions.Her work is a Meta-analytical Afrofuturistic convergence of meditation, music, art, and Noetic sciences through spoken word poetry, digital collage, animations, and installation work as performed and lived through intersectional Blackness. Her work allows her to speak about all intersections and amplify the voices of those who share similar experiences.

Nicole “Nico” Taylor is the Executive Director of Governance & Communications for the BSAM Canada Institute. Nicole is a writer, scholar, dancer, cosplayer and activist who uses feminism and critical race theory to dissect social constructions surrounding race and representation, especially as they pertain to how we make sense of the images that surround us. As a trained performer in Afro-Caribbean folk dance, Nicole has participated in many events showcasing the beauty and vibrancy of Caribbean culture, which included performing in the Opening Ceremony for the Pan Am Games Toronto in 2015.

EPISODE 3: Rivers Lost / Rivers Found (with Helen Mills and John Wilson)

In this episode of Don River Radio, we hear from Helen Mills and John Wilson of Lost Rivers Walks, proponents of Toronto's lost (& found) rivers, about revealing forgotten places in the city, ceremony, sensing, and their role in "bringing back the Don." [Intro features a hotline call in by Bridget Lu! If you have stories to share about the Don, call in to (416) 596-0249 and leave an audio message to be featured in a future episode of DRR.]

Guest Bios:

Helen Mills (born in Johannesburg, South Africa; lives in Toronto, ON, Canada) is the founder of Lost Rivers, a project of the Toronto Green Community. When she came to Toronto she noticed the sunken park near her house. Years later she learned that it was a remnant ravine and home to lost Mud Creek. Mesmerized, she wanted to paint blue lines on the street and over buildings, to name the creeks and bring them back to the surface of our awareness. Then the Lost River Walks began through the alchemy of the very first public meeting of the Toronto Green Community (1994). More than 33,000 people have walked on a Lost River since then.

John Wilson (born in Youngstown, OH, USA; lives in Toronto, ON, Canada) is an independent community engagement specialist and waterfront advocate. Wilson leads public walks with the Lost Rivers project, a collaboration of the Toronto Green Community and Toronto Field Naturalists. He serves as co-chair of the West Don Lands Committee and board member of Waterfront for All. From 2000 to 2011, Wilson served as chair of the Task Force to Bring Back the Don, a citizens’ advisory committee of Toronto City Council with a mandate to restore a clean, green, accessible Don River.

http://lostrivers.ca/

Interlude 1: A Funeral/A Parade (with Shannon Gerard, Brandon Latcham, Freddie Ratkovsky, Leah Klingbyle, Elizabeth de Coste, Gabriel George, Marcella Moliner and Iris Adrienne Langlois-Smith)

While the ML crew is wrapping its time up in Toronto and traveling back to the US this week, we wanted to share a recording by Shannon Gerard of a performative Funeral for a River, organized on July 13 by Shannon and Brandon Latcham, with the participation of Freddie Ratkovsky, Leah Klingbyle, Elizabeth de Coste, Gabriel George, Marcella Moliner and Iris Adrienne Langlois-Smith, along with some of the ML crew, and others who joined in on the day-of. We end the episode with a seven minute field recording of the construction of ML's punt, the Shannon Gerard, a.k.a. the Waters of the Seas (thanks to Demitri for the name!), as a sonic sanding soundscape/drone piece.

EPISODE 2: River Cribs and Imported Bridges (with Netami Stuart, Waterfront Toronto)

In Episode 2: River Cribs & Imported Bridges, we interview landscape architect Netami Stuart, Senior Project Manager, Parks, for Waterfront Toronto, who is building parks for the Don Mouth Naturalization and Port Lands Flood Protection Project. The episode is introduced by a hotline call in from Brandon Latcham.

EPISODE 1: Remembering the Don (with Jennifer Bonnell)

In this first episode of Don River Radio, we chat with Jennifer Bonnell, author of Reclaiming the Don: An Environmental History of Toronto’s Don River Valley (University of Toronto Press, 2014). Bonnell’s book serves as touchstone and temporal-historical field guide for understanding how the river became what it is today, and what it might become tomorrow. It felt like a fitting beginning to the podcast to hear from Bonnell herself, as her book had given the collective many forms of inspiration and expectation over the past few years while we were planning this project.

Guest Bio

Jennifer Bonnell is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at York University, where she teaches courses in Canadian, environmental and public history. She is the author of Reclaiming the Don: An Environmental History of Toronto’s Don River Valley (University of Toronto Press, 2014) and the editor, with Marcel Fortin, of Historical GIS Research in Canada (University of Calgary Press, 2014).

Bonnell’s articles and essays have appeared in Environmental History, The Canadian Historical Review, The Journal of Canadian Studies, and Museum & Society, and as chapters in Sandberg, Bocking, and Cruikshank’s Urban Explorations: Environmental Histories of the Toronto Region (L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History, 2013) and Desfor and Laidley’s Reshaping Toronto’s Waterfront (University of Toronto Press, 2011), among others. She has also contributed to a variety of public history projects, including documentary film and television projects for the Evergreen Brick Works and Metal Dog Films, and research and public engagement work for LabSpace Studios and No9 Contemporary Art and the Environment. Her research has received support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Canadian Federation for University Women among other sources. She is currently working on a new book, Foragers of a Modern Countryside: Honeybees, Agricultural Modernization and Environmental Change in the Great Lakes Region.

CREDITS

Our collective is Mare Liberum

Our project is donriverradio.ca

We are hosted by Evergreen Brickworks and Waterfront Toronto and supported by ArtworxTO year of public art

Our audio engineer is Tom Upjohn

Special thanks to our collaborators Shannon Gerard and Maria Hupfield

Music by Jantar

Curators: Chloe Catan (WTO), Charlene K. Lau (EBW) and Kari Cwynar (EBW)

HOTLINE

CALL (416) 596-0249 and leave an audio message for inclusion in a future episode of Don River Radio. Messages are limited to 3 minutes in length. For inspiration, you can follow the prompts below:

If you are currently on, beside, or near the Don River, leave a field recording. Don’t talk. Walk through the site watching and listening. Allow your phone to record what you hear.
What do you remember of the Don? Do you have a favorite place or favorite memory of being on the Don River?
How do you get to/from the Don when you visit? Describe the route you take to find the Don.
Help us map your favorite or most meaningful places by describing them in your message.