Lecture - Dr Cynthia Hammond and Dr Thomas Strickland: Biting Back!

Biting Back!" Conference presentation on art, activism, and public space at UAAC 2013 - Banff Centre, Banff, Alberta

On Saturday, October 19, 2013, Dr Cynthia Hammond and Dr Thomas Strickland will co-present a paper on their 2-year art/activist project to save a dog park in Montreal's South-West.

In 2010, pouf! art + architecture (Cynthia Hammond and Thomas Strickland) began a site-specific project titled dog parc gallery under the rubric of Urban Occupations Urbaines (curator Shauna Janssen). The site of pouf!'s intervention was a dog park, a green space in Griffintown, Montreal. This historic, post-industrial neighbourhood is presently the locus of rapid gentrification and debate over where and how public space is made.

At the Universities Art Association of Canada conference (to be held in Banff, Alberta, 18-19 October) pouf! will describe their community-based research, outreach, art exchange, and public exhibition in the park. The presentation will show how, with the help of Concordia students, pouf! disrupted the city's plans to develop this much-loved park into private condominiums. Their talk will also detail how developers plagiarized pouf!'s publications and press releases in order to recast their sales pitches for their condos.

The presentation will thus reflect upon what Ipek Türeli describes as "the free or near-free labour of the architect-artist" and how such labour can, despite intentions, "be used to generate capital." Using dog parc gallery as their case study, pouf!'s paper will engage with the contradictions, tensions, and rewards of interventionist spatial practice.

Dr Cynthia Hammond and Dr Thomas Strickland will co-present in the session, "Interventional Practices and Transgressive Spaces." Session chair: Dr Michelle Veitch.

pouf!'s blog, detailing the approach, research, collaborators, and outcomes of dog parc gallery

pouf! art + architecture, explaining pouf!'s mandate and giving an overview of their work

Shauna Janssen, PhD candidate in the Humanities Doctoral Program and curator of Urban Occupations Urbaines, created this website to document and archive the year-long series of events she directed and oversaw in Griffintown, 2009-2010.