Watchers and Walk the Line
Collaborative project with artist Jay White, 2014-2015

This project involved two collective walks from the Fraser River under the Port Mann Bridge to the Burrard Inlet, following part of the proposed route of the upgraded Kinder-Morgan Pipeline that would carry crude oil from Alberta's tar sands to the coast. On December 14 2014 and May 20 2015, small groups of artists, activists, neighbours and concerned citizens walked the proposed route, along the salmon-bearing Brunette River and through unceded Kwikwetlem, Kwantlen and Tsleil-Waututh Territories. Through our bodily presence, the intention was to internalize the spaces that the pipeline would intersect and effect, to engage in the ecological implications of the pipeline expansion, and collectively consider the complicated nature of this contested landscape.

A series of six-week exposure pinhole camera photographs were taken along a portion of the proposed Kinder Morgan Pipeline route during the second walk. Participants mounted pinhole cameras along the route, which traverses salmon-bearing streams, public greenways, commercial and private property, and is a site of ongoing contestation. Local authorities have arrested citizens for taking photographs near the terminus route, at the Trans Mountain Tank Farm on Burnaby Mountain. The pinhole camera photographs are a response to industry-government collusion on the restriction of citizens agency and are a gesture towards resistance, counter-surveillance, and seeing through extended temporal perspectives.