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PILGRIMAGE FOR CALGARY
Text by Mark Clintberg
There are [at least] two fragments here which seem initially disparate: the kitsch and industry of tourism, and the holy rites of pilgrimage. What is common between them is an exhaltation of the place.
Angela Dorrer’s Pilgrimage for Calgary digs into the strata of urban myth and anecdote. Responding to a survey model, her performative intervention reveals parts of the city that the New West might prefer suppressed. Her
project is no invective against the cheerleading attitude of the City of Calgary. It does not propose a ‘more true’ reading of the urban landscape. Instead it gives the viewer a glimpse of a particular subjectivity, a part of which is the viewer’s own.
On their surface, urban environments present an insider’s game. Any stranger attempting to navigate a large city is faced with the protracted task – or joyful mystery – of a space full of experiences, full of people, but empty of the familiar. The city might disclose its fables, or it might not. There are secret alliances, short cuts, and subtle codes stumbling on its boulevards.
But even familiars of a city cannot claim complete fluency in the rhetoric and submerged details of their home. There are objects, encounters and routes that remain untouched and dormant as collectible scraps waiting
indifferently to be discovered by hapless flaneurs. Beyond this there are also abstract impressions of the space located in memory, be they essentially ‘factual’ or based purely on fantasy.
There are tour guides for everything from the Uffizi to the Golpher Museum, each promising accurate, factual and informative edutainment for its readers. Such tours are also willfully mediated, full of omissions, full of outright lies that, like Napoleon too famously said, are agreed upon. As that of an ‘outsider’, Dorrer’s Pilgrimage is a sort of pastiche of anthropology. She takes on impartiality: a laboratory, field research. Her methodology draws from a blend of intuitive and positivist models, bringing together the rigour of the survey with an empathic and responsive technique near to talk therapy.
Her navigation is born from anecdote. Pilgrimage for Calgary might be seen as a kind of mark-making, to the extent that it responds to marks previously made on the memories of Calgarians.
Authoritative guidebooks make attempts to provide totalistic view of spaces, already understanding that such goals are flawed in their entirety. Dorrer dislocates her project from totalistic narratives and instead aims for a pilgrimage tracing a constellation across the urban environment, responding to traces collected through her survey and the tales of those surveyed.
Places, though, are really found in the formation of things. We recognize places according to landmarks. Bruno Latour reminds us that the Thing is a meeting point that humans gather around, an idea integral to Pilgrimage.
The artist’s inclusion of fetishistic ‘kitts’[sic] containing objects necessary for the completion of the tour also raises a host of associations to sacrament and our consideration of the Thing. Like the pathological event of ‘anchoring’ an event to a piece of music or a specific smell, the use of objects as markers of experience is a potent one – sometimes wrapped in mysticism.
Dorrer activates the urban environment as a tourist site, yes, but as a pilgrimage her project refers to an entire history of mystery cults, faiths, and transformations. Pilgrimages, historically, were sacred tours of sites meant to activate memory and inspire fidelity to a system of belief. In ancient Greece, pilgrims hoped to be healed at a sanctuary, or to seek the approval of a deity. In 16th Century England, the practice of making pilgrimages was proscribed violently by the Protestant Church as a practice of idolatry – “bestowing upon objects and places the veneration that is due to God alone.”
Dorrer’s endeavor might not be so distant from matters transcendental. One must bear in mind the ‘veneration’ of the place. Pilgrimage for Calgary is marked by the language of a specifically ideological mode that was not, and is not benign. It is a form meant to bend its subjects, just as we see Calgary and our experience of the city reconfigured through Dorrer’s piece.
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