Don River Radio

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. 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.

Welcome to Season 2 of Don River Radio! 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 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. 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.

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/

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.

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. As a scholar, her interest in pop culture and designation as a proud blerd spurred the pursuit of

In this episode of Don River Radio, we speak with 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, re-rivering, and their work "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. 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/ About the Podcast Don River Radio is a ten-part podcast series and call-in hotline on the history, evolution, and future of the Don/Wonscotonach River, hosted by Mare Liberum co-founder Dylan Gauthier with invited guests. Host: Dylan Gauthier (https://dylangauthier.info/) Our collective is Mare Liberum (http://www.thefreeseas.org/) Our project is In Which We Draw A People's Map of the Don River 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 Project Curators: Charlene Lau, Chloe Catan, and Kari Cwynar Land Acknowledgement We respectfully acknowledge that the sacred lands through which the Don River flows are the traditional territories, homelands and nunangat of the respective First Nations, Métis Nations and Inuit who are the long-time stewards of these lands. We acknowledge that Toronto is built on occupied Indigenous territory – the traditional homelands of the Wendat (Wen-dat) and Petun (Pah-toon) First Nations, the Haudenosaunee (Ho-den-O-Show-nee), and the Mississaugas of the Credit River. The territory is governed by Treaty 13 and is subject of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Covenant, an agreement between the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabek Confederacies and allies to peaceably share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes.

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 the Funeral for a River, organized on July 13 by Shannon, 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.

Welcome to Don River Radio! 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. About the Podcast Don River Radio is a ten-part podcast series and call-in hotline on the history, evolution, and future of the Don/Wonscotonach River, hosted by Mare Liberum co-founder Dylan Gauthier with invited guests. Host: Dylan Gauthier (https://dylangauthier.info/) Our collective is Mare Liberum (http://www.thefreeseas.org/) Our project is In Which We Draw A People's Map of the Don River 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 Project Curators: Charlene Lau, Chloe Catan, and Kari Cwynar Land Acknowledgement We respectfully acknowledge that the sacred lands through which the Don River flows are the traditional territories, homelands and nunangat of the respective First Nations, Métis Nations and Inuit who are the long-time stewards of these lands. We acknowledge that Toronto is built on occupied Indigenous territory – the traditional homelands of the Wendat (Wen-dat) and Petun (Pah-toon) First Nations, the Haudenosaunee (Ho-den-O-Show-nee), and the Mississaugas of the Credit River. The territory is governed by Treaty 13 and is subject of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Covenant, an agreement between the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabek Confederacies and allies to peaceably share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes.

Welcome to Don River Radio! In Episode 1: Remembering the Don, DRR host Dylan Gauthier interviews environmental historian Jennifer Bonnell (author of "Reclaiming the Don: An Environmental History of Toronto's Don River Valley") about the past(s) and future(s) of the Don River as remembered, forgotten, and frequently (re)imagined through recent history.  Guest Bios 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. About the Podcast Don River Radio is a ten-part podcast series and call-in hotline on the history, evolution, and future of the Don/Wonscotonach River, hosted by Mare Liberum co-founder Dylan Gauthier with invited guests. Host: Dylan Gauthier (https://dylangauthier.info/) Our collective is Mare Liberum (http://www.thefreeseas.org/) Our project is In Which We Draw A People's Map of the Don River 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 Project Curators: Charlene Lau, Chloe Catan, and Kari Cwynar Land Acknowledgement We respectfully acknowledge that the sacred lands through which the Don River flows are the traditional territories, homelands and nunangat of the respective First Nations, Métis Nations and Inuit who are the long-time stewards of these lands. We acknowledge that Toronto is built on occupied Indigenous territory – the traditional homelands of the Wendat (Wen-dat) and Petun (Pah-toon) First Nations, the Haudenosaunee (Ho-den-O-Show-nee), and the Mississaugas of the Credit River. The territory is governed by Treaty 13 and is subject of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Covenant, an agreement between the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabek Confederacies and allies to peaceably share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes.

A teaser! Our first episode will be released on July 8, 2022. In it, we had the pleasure of speaking with Jennifer Bonnell about her book Reclaiming the Don, which won the Canadian Historical Association’s 2015 Clio Prize for best book in Ontario history.  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). Her current research includes an environmental history of beekeeping and environmental change in the Great Lakes Region; and a history of human relationships with wildlife in British Columbia. Our collective is Mare Liberum (www.thefreeseas.org) 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 Curators: Charlene Lau, Chloe Catan, and Kari Cwynar

Mare Liberum collaborators Elianne Mena, Brandon Latcham, and Shannon Gerard made this intro to the research lab they led this past summer at Evergreen Brickworks, part of Shannon's class at OCADU, PRESSING ISSUES. This short interview with the participants on their research project, "Mr. River," summed up a lot of what we'd been asking and thinking about the Don when we got started, so we thought to share this as a teaser to the podcast series. Don River Radio will start releasing weekly episodes in July 2022 so stay tuned, and visit the website, https://www.donriverradio.ca/ for updates, events (and merch!) Dylan - Mare Liberum http://www.thefreeseas.org/