Chantal Hassard
Hopping the Fence Podcast Transcript - #7, Chantal Hassard
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RC: Hello, I’m Rebecca Casalino, and this is Hopping the Fence, a podcast dedicated to talk to artists on the fringes on the Canadian art scene. Chantal Hassard is an artist and filmmaker interrogating the relationship between an artwork, the artist and its viewer which she views in parallel with law, policy and the body politic and often makes participatory paintings that embody this relationship.
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Her current body of work A(d)Just (the) City performs the experimental role of artistic research by delivering a translation and analysis of the collective cultural production carried out by a decentralised assemblage of individual artists and activists working within the squatting scene and other autonomous spaces around Amsterdam. The ongoing self-documentation through visual, musical, poetic and other forms of cultural production emerging from autonomous cultural space is interpreted as part of a collaborative activistic and artistic urban process which has struggled to produce alternative/autonomous/free spaces as a force of resistance against capitalist logic and gentrification of Amsterdam as a hyper tourist city.
This episode was recorded Summer 2020 as one of my first interviews so all mentions of COVID are super out of date and the sound quality is a bit off, but I hope you enjoy!
Our conversation is recorded in Tkaranto, on the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat, Anishinaabe, and Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nations.
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RC: Hello Chantal!
CH: Hey Rebecca what's goin' on?
RC: Nothing much, just sweating in my fan-filled apartment.
CH: Is it that hot there?
RC: It’s not that hot, I’m just on the second floor and I feel like it’s the sandwich apartment. Like I have an apartment above me and then the shop below. Yeah. [Laughs].
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CH: Yeah, I feel like it’s not that hot here. Here it’s been like 30 degrees and air conditioners are breaking.
RC: Uh huh.
CH: It’s kinda mild here in Amsterdam.
RC: Well that was gonna be my first question, where are you right now?
CH: I am in the charming city of Amsterdam where I am doing a… just wrapping up a research masters in artistic research at the University of Amsterdam.
RC: Yeah. And we met when you were in Toronto just as like a... you're not just a random person in Amsterdam.
CH: That you reached out to.
RC: Yeah.
CH: - across the sea to say "I'm really interested in your work." I'd be so flattered.
RC: Do you want to describe your practice a bit for anybody listening who wouldn't know what your work looks like?
CH: My practice is changing all the time. Initially I was really interested in participatory painting and interactive painting and trying to find ways of getting the viewer, the audience involved and making or touching the artwork, the painting, and having people lift paintings off the wall in a gallery just seemed like a revolutionary idea to me. So I made that happen. Well now I'm making films about [Both laugh]. I'm also still painting. I did fully make participatory painting which was like a long goal of mine, to make interactive events where people were also painting and then the paintings became, you know, completed works of art that were painted by like 300 people at a festival.
RC: Mhm.
CH: In the exquisite corpse form. I've been playing a lot with exquisite corpses and the collective of unconscious, surrealism.
RC: Do you want to talk about one of the installations of your exquisite corpse series?
CH: Should I start at the beginning or the middle?
RC: Uh, you can start at the beginning if you like.
CH: Oh well it started with an entire series based on Ovid's Fasti that is a book of poems describing the mythologies, the Pagan myths of the months of the year. And so Janus is the patron saint of January, and he's the god of transitions and he watches over you in passageways like hallways and doorways. And he looks forwards and backwards in time. And so I made this painting of a face, it was all interchangeable. It's really hard to convince people you can touch a painting on a wall because that is not a customarily thing that people should do. But that I figured out that if it was more of a game format it would work. It was more of a familiar game. The exquisite corpse, some people have seen this triad of feet and torso and heads. So then I was making those in Toronto and the problem with them was that I had painted them, so they weren't really participatory. Like, yeah you could go up and touch them, which seems like a big deal to me, but still, it was all my mind, so it wasn't really a collective subconscious. It was cool because there was nine portraits so when everything was mixed up there was the possibility to make over 500 different individuals, and it was called I am You as You are Me. And it was just this idea that you could, but you are shaped by all of your interactions with different people and that you take on different identities through interaction.
RC: Mhm. And the people that you painted where people that you came across right?
CH: Yeah, they were friends, artist, activist... people in galleries. People doing interesting things and people that inspired me and young people and environmental activists or a theatre director, my musician roommate. Emily May Rose who is still running Northern Contemporary, which is the gallery where I was helping out. Yeah. My sister who was collecting trash on the beach. Yeah. People I love and people I know. I moved to Amsterdam and I wanted to make destroy paintings in festivals because I was also doing that in Toronto and in New York City on streets and in parks and Dufferin Grove and Governor's Island and all these different kind of interactive art festivals associated with Figment. And by street festival on Crawford in Toronto. It was just ideas of like how you could present paintings in different ways and they don't have to matter so much as art objects.
RC: Yeah. Do you want to talk about the Crawford one of it because I feel like the interaction with kids, especially when you talk about that installation that was really interesting to me.
CH: Yeah, I mean, it was basically just me putting paintings on a dirty road and these paintings are quite big and they look like really nice art things that you wouldn't put on the streets. But to me they're just toys, you know?
RC: It was interesting installing them with you and seeing how comfortable you are handling them as these beautiful canvas paintings, how quickly you assemble them and disassembled them.
CH: Yeah, I mean, now there's like ten of them sitting under my bed... well nine actually. 'Cause there's three bodies. There's a bunch under my bed right now because I made a bunch more here. So yeah, that was the whole point. I came to Amsterdam to study something totally different. Like some theoretical idea that's very Dutch, some metamodernism that's ten years old already. Then I got here and I wanted to make these interactive art pieces, destroy paintings. The immediate place that was available was this squatted ammunitions depot called The New and Near, and they were having a festival called Future Play, and it was all about interactive society and how you can engage physically with art, so I joined them and was living there for a little bit because I was unable to find a place to live. And then I was able to make participatory paintings because Europe, you know, Amsterdam has a big festival scene and the culture here, it's a bit more open and free for experimentation. Like really free. You can't expect really to make money at it, but you can do whatever you want, you know?
RC: Mhm. And was that where you did that show about futurism? In that space that you were talking about?
CH: Futurisms...
RC: You had a call for futuristic Landscapes out a while ago.
CH: Ohhh, yeah. I was curating a show in the Vondelbunker. No that was something else. It was also similar culture, like it's this autonomous free space culture they have here. A lot of cities around Europe have the sort of like cultural spaces that are coming out of the squatting movement that are really kind of...yeah. Unused, military government buildings from the war and stuff. So that was in a bomb shelter in the middle of Vondelpark, which is designed to house the rich people on the atomic bomb goes off. Yeah. So I just had a call, I wanted to make an exhibition there because it's really a free space. If you want to do something and you propose the idea, you can do it. So I just had a call for artists pretending it was the year 2345. And then it was the idea that we'd actually been in this bomb shelter the whole time. and what society would need or look like and how you would get out. And there was some really interesting stuff that came forward from that.
RC: Mmm.
CH: Like my friend Caroline made ceramic laundry soap bottles which I thought was so funny.
RC: Wow. Yeah you have a history with laundry soap bottles, very much.
CH: We have a shared history with laundry soap bottles. [Both laugh].
RC: Do you want to talk about your practice of using found materials and garbage? Your dumpster diving hobbies?
CH: I do love dumpster diving. Everything in my room is ethically sourced from the trash. But I've also heard that to use second-hand objects is to have survived... It's also a sign of entitlement that you survived the wreck and that you can, anyways, repurpose something.
RC: I like that.
CH: Which I never really considered.
RC: I like that a lot.
CH: But it also is making it like...
RC: Survivor's guilt?
CH: Yeah! A little bit.
RC: But also, why would I buy new shiny things from like other objects like exist within the world and hold people's histories?
CH: And they're more shiny and they're better quality and they're older and they're well-made not for Ikea, or maybe they are. [Both laugh].
RC: Oh my goodness. Do you want to introduce your documentary and how that's been tied to your research and your thesis?
CH: Yeah well the film goes into the participatory paintings because it's also participatory culture that I'm investigating.
RC: True. Okay.
CH: The film is called "Adjust City" or A(d)Just (the) City, depending on if you read brackets or not. Well it traces Constant's New Babylon. And Constant is an artist from COBRA and the Situationist movement. They had this whole New Babylon project that was imagining a future. He was using maquettes and architectural drawings and paintings to imagine a society where the man wasn't needed to do work because he'd been completely replaced by modern technology. People could be playful and they wouldn't need a stable home, they could be transient, they could go in between different living spaces because it was anti-capitalist and not tied to money.
RC: Mhm.
CH: But then this art piece it's a fun art piece, it's highly collective and accepted and institutions. There's a whole museum on exhibiting COBRA and post-war avant-garde arts and this kind of thing. But not the squatters movement at all. So what I'm really interested in, this other project that emerged out of these experiments in conceptual art, because the whole parallel society that sort of emerged from different protest actions and stuff in the 60s, in the 70s, and it had a high point in the 80s in Amsterdam and then continued and got criminalized in 2010, which is quite late actually for the criminalization of occupying abandoned buildings. If you did that in Toronto you would get kicked out and you would have no rights to a house there.
RC: Yeah. Well you were even, in one part in the film, you were looking at a map of Amsterdam and he was saying like we're the highway and we're all the gentrification was proposed.
CH: Aja Waalwijk man, he is like this incredible philosopher artist. Wow, this guy... He is a visionary. I was trying to document all of the art in the house which is also a squatted school. Yeah, maybe you have to cut in the clips from the documentary if you're really sound editing 'cause I can't do it justice.
RC: Oh no, for sure. Well if you let me, I can. [Laughs].
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AW: Some of the squatters stuff.
CH: What's the main focus?
AW: Well the main focus was the wild years in Amsterdam when they were planning to turn into this part of the city, to turn into the Manhattan of Amsterdam by tearing down everything and then that's why the Stopera got built. That's why the subway got put in. But after that, they wanted to build up the whole, this whole area with huge Manhattan-like glass and aluminum buildings, all the way to the central station. So this whole area was threatened with being torn down and rebuilt.
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CH: Yeah, so it's just an investigation of what the squatter movement is. I mean, there's a lot of studies done on political and activists work and social policies that are related to it, like the legal framework that it exists in, which is also like always changing the subject of different municipal agreements.
RC: Yeah.
CH: With different collectives depending on if they're providing cultural assets to the city or if they're just providing living or if they're actively degentrifying, you know? Different people are tolerated in different ways.
RC: Yeah. How would you define degentrifying? Because I find like artists movements are used as a gentrification Force, but the squatting movement wasn't a force of gentrification?
CH: In some ways it is, of course, because it brings culture and artistic expression to a community and may expand the exchange value by expanding the use value of the space. But it can also, you know, add a kind of punk rock quality that takes away or occupy a factory area that needs to be sold, or it's intended to be sold. This whole trend, like industrial zones...Aja Waalwijk talks a lot about how you should occupy transindustrial zones and create a kind of Utopia within spaces that are otherwise touched by domestic life. Because by doing that you can occupy and resist industrial development. I was listening to last podcast about the Port Lands and those dead animals that are just popping up there. What was her name that you were interviewing?
RC: Rachel Rozanski. She was at the warehouse too.
CH: Yeah. I find the conversation really interesting to translate to Canadian context in Toronto context because what happens to the port lands?
RC: Well they're being gentrified is what happens to the port lands.
CH: What say do the people get, and are there any people there to speak for it?
RC: No because it's not a housing zone. So I can say from when I lived down there, people were very surprised we lived down there because it's built as a residential/industrial zone. So there's another artist who lives down there who has his factory down there. And then there's all the homeless people who lived underneath us in these tiny little rooms with like a shared bathroom up at the top of the hall. So it's all like illegal housing and squatters essentially. And slumlords. So they have no say.
CH: Yeah. I mean, to be honest, neither do the squatters and Amsterdam anymore, you know? The high point of it was in the 80s and now it's like kind of like the different cultural ideas and there's this whole... There's two different social policies that have been coming out of the resistance against what squatters do which is just appropriate space. It's called a breeding ground, where different organizations have been given low-rent cultural space to produce a squatter-esque community except that usually on shorter terms, and the whole idea of a squatter is that it's not regulated.
RC: Yeah.
CH: And also you have to qualify as an artist to be part of this. So all of a sudden, this institutional, you have to have gone to art school, you have to have reported a salary based on art or some different quotas.
RC: That's ridiculous.
CH: Yeah.
RC: So only artists deserve fair housing?
CH: They're not even for housing, even just for studio spaces or workspaces.
RC: Oh, gotcha.
CH: And then the other solution, which is actually really interesting to me, it's called anti-crack. Crack is the Dutch word for squatting because it's the sound that a door makes when you crack it open. But it's called anti-crack, and basically it's giving students or artists or people that already don't have housing. It's not great because you don't get a lot of social rights that you would have in a house. Like if you have to move out in three months or one month you can do that, but it's occupying buildings that are otherwise empty. Old school, commercial buildings. And it might only be for six months or two years, but you don't necessarily know that when you move in. So you have to be flexible and it's not for everyone but it's low rent. They're essentially paid bodyguards or paying to be bodyguards so that the building doesn't get squatted.
RC: Huh.
CH: Which doesn't even happen in Canada, those buildings are just left empty.
RC: Yeah.
CH: You know? So even though here it's like some kind of reactionary policy against the thing that's cooler, since we don't have the thing that's cooler it's interesting to think of ways we can use unoccupied spaces.
RC: Mhm.
CH: And evolve.
RC: Yeah. And it was about I'm occupied spaces as well but the documentary that you made also talks about different populations of people moving throughout the city. So they talked about after the war how the Jewish sector was empty. And they weren't renting out the houses back to people right?
CH: Yeah well, I mean, that's what these protests of the Stopera, which is the former Jewish ghetto, the Stopera is a building but is a combined opera house and City Hall. And it was designed and high modern architecture of the 60s and 70s. And there was extreme protest against first the tearing down of the houses that had already been semi-demolished during the hunger winter so they already been occupied by desperate people and people taking the wood away that needed doors because after the war there was no heat, you know, resources in the city.
RC: And was that the housing units they took the roofs off to pressure people? Was that the same incident?
CH: Yeah. They would take the roofs off so that they wouldn't be squatted. Yeah that was the first thing they would do when they would gain access property. Yeah, just so that people couldn't live in them to make them as useless as possible.
RC: Wow.
CH: Yeah, it's a postwar country so already they were decrepit buildings, you know? Amsterdam hadn't been bombed but people also had ravaged the city trying to get what they could. Copper wires, I don't know. It was a war.
RC: Do you want to talk a bit about the paint bombs? 'Cause that was the first footage that you shot there and that was something that you've been talking about for a while.
CH: Yeah. Paint bombs are going to be really useful for people defacing colonial statues.
RC: Yeah, that's what I was thinking.
CH: I know. This whole division 52 protest I've been following it, and I just, I mean, on one hand it's important that activists are seen, doing the act. That's how sometimes it can work, you know, bike lock yourself to the power station that you've turned off or visibly get arrested for throwing the paint bomb, for putting paint on a statue.
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RC: This week’s podcast recommendation explains the events around the protest around Toronto’s 52 division police station. Listen to episode 110: Painted Statues and Union Apologies from Sandy and Nora’s Politics Podcast. Hear more details and subscribe to their podcast wherever you’re listening now.
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CH: Yeah, paint bombs at a lot of colour to a protest. I've never seen it an action, but all of the footage makes her beautiful signs of resistance I think against State Authority and against business as usual and the violent evictions or in...yeah. To express dissent, I think a paint bomb can be a really powerful tool that I'd never seen or heard of before.
RC: Yeah. The clips showing the archival paint bombs and showing how they're made, like there's such beautiful objects. And this kind of object based history is something that runs throughout your practice.
CH: Yeah this whole object-oriented ontology it's also why I'm getting quite... I don't know. I don't like the Anthropocene idea because it puts humans at the forefront and there's so many non-human agents that are also acting and responding in a landscape, you know?
RC: Yeah.
CH: I always say "object-based knowledge." But there's also like "OOO," like object-oriented ontologies as just a way of putting the primacy on non-human agents in a landscape so that you can think about different factors like environmental factors or... yeah. Timothy Morton has this whole really amazing thing about hyperobjects and how issues transcend the human experience of them and become Universal like climate change is not something that's only affecting humans, even if it is human-caused.
RC: Oooh.
CH: So what is the role of a bumblebee in that or... A paint bomb. [Both laugh]. Yeah, this whole archive of objects, archive material, material substrate. Physically, yeah, I think this is what art has the power to do, you know? Hold on to and document expression of a time. That's why it's powerful.
RC: How did it feel looking at the footage of police with those big brown/ black shields storming the squatters? Just watching that in this moment of police brutality felt like a strong parallel.
RC: Yeah, right? That's this whole Provo movement is quite famous in Amsterdam or Netherlands and Europe for...yeah, they're provocative. Their entire point was just to provoke the police into acting brutally in order to show that the exertion of force is wrong, you know? That people shouldn't get beaten for planting trees or for... at that time I think it was illegal to yell in the streets or to gather in groups. Because it was after a war. They say the Netherlands in the 60s is the fastest revolutionizing country in Europe. Like yeah, in France there's May '68 and everything, but they were already really progressive whereas in the Netherlands I think they weren't and then they became because of this cultural context.
RC: Yeah. And it was the war that set it off?
CH: Not necessarily the war but like, proto hippies. People honestly... I put it to experimental art. There was a certain time in the [inaudible] where the municipal museum...and Hans Pomp describes it in my film about how they, and I found the books later that make sure that what he's saying is true because, you know? [Both laugh]. There was a curator and he was really excited about experimental art, and that's also where the COBRA movement got it's institutional support from.
RC: And institutional support, what do you mean by that?
CH: Like, they were exhibiting experimental art in major museums in the 50s. About really rugged, primitive painting stuff. I mean primitive painting, what do you say, but they just wanted to take away all of the knowledge. It's the same kind of stuff of Dada and Surrealism.
RC: Like the intellectualization of art, they were against it?
CH: Yeah.
RC: Mhm.
CH: And making collaborative works and the independent ego of the artist.
RC: Yeah. Rejection of the genius.
CH: They were COBRA like Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam. They were also former surrealist and situationists that were all in this milieu.
RC: Do your research, what did you learn about this kind of artist activist position? Because I find it something I haven't researched a lot but it's a position I find myself in.
CH: Yeah. It's a hard thing to explain. I and approaching it now through a lens of spatial Justice and different concepts of what space is. And Henri Lefevbre has some really interesting articulation of space, which is perceived conceived and lived. So there's like representational spaces, representant spaces, spaces of the imagination, space is where artists might fit is this conceptual space. But in doing that, they can also... I don't want to say like manifest destiny, but like preserve the idea of an alternative or present the idea of an alternative or imagine a Utopia. You know, these kinds of things that artists always do. But it just depends on the societal context of how well that's accepted.
RC: Yeah.
CH: What you were saying about how there's this archives of Black artists and Canada who have been expressing, you know, the same narrative for decades and we can only catch on to it now. But it's also like the tip of the iceberg that we finally see the records of, yeah, Indigenous resistance, everything, you know? These things... I don't want to say they take time but they shouldn't take that long.
RC: That's what I'm wondering. Like, it surprised me to hear that they were showing in institutions in the 50s because if they're against... if they're for squatter's rights you think they'd be kind of anti-institutional in structure.
CH: The whole thing is that squatting didn't really exist as a movement then. So it was sort of like parallel explosions, you know? And I think a lot of these experimental art groups, like there's this one called the Insektensekte, which is like the first environmental artists group in the Netherlands. And it's like the cult of the insects and making like a butterfly opera and doing things about impromptu performances in non-traditional spaces.
RC: Mhm.
CH: And so by bringing hundreds of people together to watch that performance in that space then something new can happen, you know, that's the whole happening idea.
RC: And that's the core of the situationist movement?
CH: Yeah. It's all hard to connect, I don't know. It's not linear.
RC: Yeah.
CH: That's another very weird thing about this film, like if you watch it, it's not a documentary. I don't know if I should call it a film essay or an artistic research project. 'Cause it's looping. It's for a gallery in my head so...
RC: Well I think you including clips of Butler and then these different transition really show the artist hand in it, and also the fact that we can hear your voice is something that I really like. But why did you choose to include so much of Butler and her work on performance?
CH: Because this idea performativity and the different types of actions...she talks about how a performance can yield a perlocutionary or an elocutionary response and those two determine the amount of language to do something. It goes back to this [inaudible] in performative language and if somebody, you know, says, like performing a marriage, right, if you say "I do," now we're married. But only in the context of that marriage does that occur. It's also like in the context of a protest, a man standing on the street mean something different and a man sitting on the street waiting for a red light to change, you know? So it's the theoretical aspects of what actions are that I included Judith Butler to explain.
RC: Yeah.
CH: I mean she applies it to gender theory and to queer theory, but I think it's obviously also for any activist or someone trying to subvert a norm.
RC: Mhm. Well it was interesting to see queer theory used as a subversion in like a housing argument. I thought that was really clever.
CH: It's just how you read it. That particular lecture, I think she gave it in Turkey and it was around the time of the standing man protest in Gezi Square. And I think it's always been this parallel in her studies as well.
RC: Yeah. How does it feel making this movie during a housing crisis that's happening in Toronto, and then obviously during COVID everyone's doing this crazy housing shuffle with like 14-day quarantines. Does it feel more relevant or how do you feel after?
CH: Yeah. I think especially the stuff about the police brutality right now is really relevant and it's fascinating to see that. I mean, police don't beat people in the streets publicly anymore but they kill people. And so, what? What? [Laughs], what? I don't know. That's been a parallel. The Netherlands is like not totally white but quite a white country that's also super responsible for the slave trade so this has been an interesting dynamic to hear unfold in all these different kind of spaces here. They still celebrate, you know, Sinterklaas with Zwarte Pete.
RC: Oh my gosh, yeah.
CH: That's another thing like in the footage, you have different performances by people are acting out Zwarte Pete things because Robert Jasper Grootveld is like anti-capitalist and anti-consumer and he has this whole spiel about Klaas, Klaas is coming. And like Santa Klaas is also this parallel for class. In the footage, you end up with him in blackface chanting incantations.
RC: Wow. As Zwarte Pete?
CH: Without context. Yeah as Zwarte Pete. But without the Dutch context, it doesn't...yeah.
RC: But also with the Dutch... I just listened to a podcast about Zwarte Pete.
CH: Yeah, Zwarte Pete, I can't believe it still exists.
RC: For context, Zwarte Pete is Santa Clause's helper?
CH: Well yeah, he's acted usually by white Dutch children. They want to become Zwarte Pete so they blackface. And that's like a socially acceptable way to go to school until three years ago.
RC: And also, it was a socially acceptable thing for teachers to do, as Justin Trudeau did as a grown ass man teaching at a private school in Vancouver, so... do you want to talk about your relationship to institutions? [Both laugh].
CH: What institutions?
RC: Well, talk about your relationships to institutions as in your educational institutions and any art institutions that you've been with. Also you've hung around lot of artists run centres, which are informal institutions in a way.
CH: Yeah, I mean, it's a weird position because I'm in a university and I'm documenting and translating the artistic practices of people who are very outside of the institution. But I don't think it's so black and white and I think there's a lot of people that are very open to working with, you know, for the purpose of documentation and for the purpose of recording, like accurately recording histories that want to engage in dialogue with institutional spaces. At one point, I asked, you know, when I go in with my camera, I usually ask the people in the room or in the space if it's okay if I film them, and one woman who's a resident of a recently evicted squat, and then, she kind of went on this wild rant about how she moved out, she became a squatter so that she wouldn't be a fish in a bowl and she could just have her independent society without being research by students and researchers, and then she looked at me and winks and is like, "But you can do whatever the fuck you want and you shouldn't ask for permission from people to do things because nobody has the right to grant you permission about anything over yourself."
RC: Wow.
CH: I wish I had recorded it because it was amazing.
RC: Did you say that to her?
CH: Yeah. We ended up becoming...she included me in an exhibition. Yeah. In a party.
RC: Awesome.
CH: Yeah, it was fine in the end but at first I was so intimidated and I was like, "Yeah, I'm doing this research project at the University of Amsterdam, do you mind if I film you?" I didn't know if I could or not, even after that, you know?
RC: Yeah, because you were questioned because you were coming from an institution?
CH: Yeah. And just doing research and trying to understand a culture that I also contribute to and support and feel like is necessary to be documented because it's vital and it contains a lot of recipe books for something else. Like for alternative autonomous society in a way, which is on the threat of extinction, you know, it's not very prominent, let's say. It's not as prominent as it used to be and it's constant evicted and battling for space.
RC: So what's the view been like from Amsterdam watching everything happened in Canada? Art-wise, COVID-wise...
CH: I feel so far removed but so invested and involved. It's my home and I feel like I'll go back there to live and I was there in the summer working and I don't know with COVID, I feel like it's such specific lived experience, it's different for everyone in different places. Like, if you have roommates or not have roommates, your life is completely different now. And I'm very fortunate to have three really great roommates. They've made this time very enjoyable to be honest. With lots of dinners and games. But it's a weird day to be alive.
RC: It is, it really is. From the perspective of the housing crisis, do you think that you've learned anything in Holland that you would like to bring back as an organizing strategy or even as an art movement?
CH: Did you see in that film about the tunnels but they dug to protect the nature around a squatted village, Ruigoord, in the 90s? Because I've never seen tunneling ever, but it's so smart if you're preventing heavy machinery from entering a natural landscape. 'Cause they would dig tunnels and occupy them.
RC: Oh my gosh.
CH: If the bulldozers or things came to dig to cut the trees down, they would kill people, so the bet was that they wouldn't come. And it's kind of like the straight off of like, it's kind of like, what's it called, a chicken war.
RC: Yeah, yeah. Well same thing with people chaining themselves to the bulldozers, the tree is.
CH: Also great, but the whole digging tunnels underneath the path, I've never seen that and I've seen some force activism in west coast and I thought that was a really fascinating method.
RC: Mhm, mhm.
CH: And also the paint bombs on these colonial statues, I think that's a really interesting way of doing it.
RC: Yeah, do you want to tell our listeners how to make a paint bomb?
CH: Sure. What you need is a balloon. I'm excited, I'm going to make a paint bomb factory in two weeks.
RC: Are you actually? Wow.
CH: Yes, as sort of a workshop in the Vrij Paleis which is kind of another autonomous space here. And we found this visscar, it's like this wooden thing like a wagon that you pull. It's like antique looking for smoked fish style or something.
RC: Amazing.
CH: So we're gonna make a mobile paint bomb factory. But it's...okay. So you take the biggest balloon you can find because small balloons burst right away, that's not worth it. Melt a candle, a large candle, there's like super default emergency candles here that are red on the outside and then in the inside they're white beads, and that's when I realized it's the same wax that they're using 30 years ago to make the ones that were in the archive, because they're the same colour pink. And I was very surprised to find out that this red candle, when I melted it, became pink. Because the inside is... it's like an emergency candle, you know? So it's like really a scandium of paraffin wax. It's about 3 inches thick or something.
RC: Mhm.
CH: I don't know if they have them at home but really any candle will do. It's not that environmentally friendly because when you do throw the balloon, obviously wax goes everywhere.
RC: Yeah.
CH: But you're also on the street so [inaudible]. So you have the hot wax in a big bowl, and you can put hot water underneath it to keep it liquid. And then you're just dipping the balloon until it gets thick enough to be watertight. And then you let it harden, and you take the balloon out, and you can fill it with paint, and then you just seal it with a little bit of wax. And then you can throw it anywhere. To express dissent against state authorities.
RC: Against John A. Macdonald, against Ryerson.
CH: Yeah Ryerson. This was epic, go and do it. No, I haven't thrown paint bombs. I'm just really interested in the methods right now.
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RC: Thanks for listening to Hopping the Fence, a podcast dedicated to the fringes of the Canadian art scene. If you have an artist that you would like to hear interviewed, would like to correct / fact check a past episode, or would like to chat, feel free to send me a message on Instagram @hoppingthefence, or by email at rebeccaecasalino@gmail.com. If you would like to support this podcast and help me avoid burnout, please visit our Patreon to subscribe. Check out the show notes for more details. If you can’t donate, no worries, thanks for taking the time to listen. Original artwork for Hopping the Fence by Alex Gregory, original music by Jessica Price Eisner. Thank you so much, bye!
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