concordia.ethnography@gmail.com

Montreal Waterways

As a critical metabolic component of all life, water has vital and symbolic significance that constitutes and delimits the public realm. In Montreal we are surrounded by water, the city itself is delineated by the presence of the St. Lawrence and Rivière des Prairies, artificial waterways such as the Lachine Canal and Aqueduc have shaped the city and the ways we move through the city, every spring various neighbourhoods deal with floods, and culverted rivers run beneath the streets and sidewalks throughout the city. As something that is life-sustaining and life-threatening, an element and a flow, a means of transport and an obstruction, a nuisance and a resource, something to be regulated and circulated, something to be controlled, something to be feared or enjoyed, water is part of our everyday lives and the ways we relate to place.

The Montreal Waterways research projects offer inquiry into the heterogeneous relations of our shared waterways, our “hydrocommons” (Chen 2013, 279). Through an ethnographic engagement with a number of ‘water objects’, researchers examine Montreal’s historical and present relationship with water and place. Past projects include an examination of the “The Big Flush” (a political event surrounding the dumping of raw sewage into the St-Lawrence river in 2015) and the history of the St-Pierre River, which was buried and turned into sewage and drainage infrastructure over the past 150 years. Current projects are engaged with the Lachine canal: “Industrial waters” examines the changing social and material landscape of the canal through an engagement with the condo development, VillaNova, and “Hybridized waters” considers the presence of the more-than-human of the canal.

The Ghost River Project presents the interactive map of one of Montreal’s lost rivers. The project pieces together the pasts, presents, and possible futures of Saint Pierre, a major waterway that cut across the West of the island for much of its history. Canalized and buried underground throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, the river now exists as a ghost, haunting the city’s landscape, infrastructure, and historical imagination. You can get a first look at the map here:

St. Pierre River

Stories of a river and the story of a collector and the river it swallowed

This research project is engaged in questioning how discourses and practices of modernity and development have led to the physical transformations of the Saint-Pierre River, and how these relate to the different material practices, representations and the symbolic nature of the river.

Using historical-geographical materialism methodologies, an ethnographic inquiry into human, non-human and infrastructure actors, and counter mapping we seek to develop a recursive (re)shaping of the water infrastructure that has absorbed and exhausted the Saint-Pierre River. Such methodologies will allow us to identify how infrastructure was used to colonize and lay claim to the area, as well as illustrate alternatives to “the incremental destruction of sustaining habitats” (Aberley, 1993:4). Through the creation of a counter map and ethnography of the river and water infrastructure, we will contest the homogenization of the space as it represented in zoning regulations, land-use maps and property regimes and offer new means of expressing hydro-social relationships in place.

In considering the material concerns that have come to bear on the construction of infrastructure in Montréal’s southwest area (i.e. the Lachine Canal, the railroads and yards, the Turcot Interchange, etc.), as well as public health and water quality issues we will work to “daylight” the historical policies, decisions and motivations that have resulted in the burying of the river. The flows of fresh water, sewage and storm water in urban spaces represent complex arrangements between human and non-human dimensions that challenge us to think about the ways in which policies and everyday practices intersect with the materiality of the world. As an actor within bio-cultural worlds, water infrastructure is in a dynamic interaction with the environment (Lea, 2017) while materializing ideologies and discourses of development, progress and modernity.

The Big Flush

A moment of infrastructural visibility and eventfulness

This research group takes a deep look at the event of The Big Flush, when in November, 2015 the Montreal Municipal government dumped 8 billion litres of raw sewage into the Saint Lawrence River in order to accomodate for the renovations of sewage lines. The dump was supposed to be a rather mundane event as sewage dumps like this one are common infrastructural practice. However, as news of the dump circulated and it became a matter of intense public contention, it turned into an event interesting for its infrastructural and environmental consequences, its display of “infrastructural visibility” and also as a moment of political theatre which pitted then mayor Denis Coderre against various political actors.

When it turned into such a highly contested event, The Big Flush made visible different and unequal relationships to water and sewage infrastructure in Montreal. In order to untangle the intricacies of the event, this group asks two main questions. First, how did The Big Flush become a matter of political concern? To answer this question we are exploring the media coverage of the event, both the way in which the story circulated and how the coverage made visible the functioning of the infrastructure.

To answer this question we will be conducting interviews with various (overlapping) groups including activists, bureaucrats/ civil servants, indigenous communities, politicians, and engineers/ experts. We hope to uncover what it was about this moment specifically that created such heated public debate. We will also explore any action (or nonaction) that has taken place in terms of sewage infrastructure in Montreal since the event, specifically what particular activists, politicians, etc. have pursued.

We explore various opposing narratives that surrounded the event, such as its position as either an infrastructural failure vs success and the conflicting claims made by experts and politicians in terms of the environmental impact the sewage would have on the river and surrounding ecosystem. Second, we ask what The Big Flush tells us about the potentials of infrastructural politics.

Cultured Waters

Cultured Waters, a web-based series of short documentaries, takes the complex system of Montreal waterways as a starting point for addressing narratives of environmental destruction, human and nonhuman habitation in the greater Montreal area.

Our documentary series is focused on visualizing multiple scales of life, their impact on, and the way they are impacted by, water infrastructures in Montreal. We will capture unique visualization of nonhuman life and environmental impact on particular waterways by culturing water, shooting underwater, and offering micro and macro views of the intimate networks present in urban water sites. Pointing to the multiple scales and temporalities of life for nonhuman creatures, our visualizations of symbiosis (Margulis 1998) across species, will allow us to weave together ecological narratives for productive storytelling and fabulation (Guattari 2008).

We consider nonhuman temporal and spatial scales often invisible or unconsidered by humans. This project will look to visual and aesthetic representations of waterways in Montreal to actively reshape our contemporary context, questioning how we can reimagine (by way of documentary film, sculpture and ethnographic research) our relations to ecologies of loss and precarity, and point to new futures through care and empathy. Cultured Waters will encourage the acknowledgment of our deep, bodily connection with microbial life, and by extension our environment. It is our hope that, through these films, we may foster a stronger, more sustainable and empathetic relationship with our Montreal ecosystem as a whole.

Industrial Waters

Industrial Waters: the changing social and material landscape of the Lachine Canal

In the Southwest of Montreal flows the beginnings of the Lachine Canal. Acting as the boundary between the burrows of Lachine and Lasalle, its locks also regulate movement between the Saint-Lawrence, Lake Saint-Louis and the canal itself, creating at this point an odd space of intersection and convergence. At the westernmost tip of the canal, municipal and federal parks, museums, a college, a sleepy community, and upcoming townhouses cluster around the waterway, enacting it in multiple legal and material ways — as an historical artifact, a space of leisure, and a natural oasis. Directly to the east, the canal’s old industrial ruins haunt (and contaminate) the grounds of new businesses, like the decade-in-the-making city-sized condo development VillaNova now under construction on the north side of the Saint-Joseph boulevard. Inside the canal itself, early October renovation work has begun and the water has been drained, stranding a dock on land. Soon, construction workers will begin the second stage of Parks Canada’s conservation and reinvigoration plans for the historical heritage site. In our research, we follow the nostalgic attachments, utopian aspirations, and stubborn materials that weave themselves into the shifting waterscape of the Lachine Canal to ask the question: What happens when repurposed water infrastructure, industrial heritage, soil contaminants, layered forms of inhabitation, and overlapping frameworks of ownership and authority converge in the planning, regulation, and development of an urban landscape?

Hybridized Waters

Hybridized waters: the temporalities and more-than-human of the Lachine Canal

For more than 130 years, the Lachine canal offered marine traffic a means of bypassing the treacherous three miles of the Lachine Rapids. As a chokepoint between the Atlantic Ocean and the Great Lakes Waterway, the canal allowed for the more fluid movement of people, goods and capital through the financial, legal, and social infrastructure and institutions of the burgeoning industrial capital of Canada, Montreal. It also marked the beginning of a unique hybrid-ecology, a engineered waterway that has brought into relation a range of materialities and entities, toxicities and life forms that are both indigenous and foreign. The canal testifies to the confluence of western science and technology with a particular geography and hydrosphere, industrial dumping and sewage overflows, discarded and abandoned things, migratory flows of fish and birds, and living organisms that inhabit the canal. As a landscape of things and site of encounters between human and more-than-human, the canal is, in a sense, a living ecological archive, witness and actant in the histories of Montreal’s southwest and asks that we consider the possible pasts and futures of this hybrid-ecosystem. It generates questions around the duration and toxicity of materials, the transformation and remaindering of materials, and the material practices and ecologies that emerge in this assemblage. As a place of historical, political, economic, conceptual and ecological transformations, the canal is delineated by its walls and locks, but it’s boundaries are leaky, and experience inputs and flexes from water and pollutants, migratory species and humans. Engaged with a multi species ethnographic approach, we ask: what record of techno-natural relations can be found in the canal, and how might those speak of the shifting relations between human and non-human actants? What kinds of informal and unofficial practices gather around the canal, and how might they complicate our understanding of the spatial and temporal dynamism of the ecosystem?

Faculty

Kregg Hetherington

Project Coordinator

Alejandra Melian-Morse

Members

Marie-Eve Drouin-Gagne,

Adam Van Sertima

Tristan Biehn

Mozdeh Babagoli

Élie Jalbert

Kassandra Spooner-Lockyer

Juan Pablo Neri

Tricia Toso

Alix Johnson

Rosaline Lambert

Sami Zenderoudi

Mona Luxion

Bengi Akbulut

Treva Michelle Pullen

Orit Halpern

WhiteFeather Hunter

Marion Carrier

Sara Breitkreutz

Mathieu Guerin

Liz White

Alejandro Camargo

Alejandra Melian-Morse