PARASTOO ANOUSHAHPOUR, FARAZ ANOUSHAHPOUR, and RYAN FERKO
St. Lawrence Burns, 2021
16mm to HD video
60 minutes
St. Lawrence Burns is a meditative durational work by Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, and Ryan Ferko that bears witness to simultaneous destruction, scientific experiment, and the beauty of a burning fire. This video is part of a larger collaborative project, Radiant Temperature of Openings, that examined modernisation of the landscape around the St. Lawrence River in Eastern Canada. In St. Lawrence Burns, the artists reframe archival footage of the Ontario government’s sanctioned burning of homes along the Saint Lawrence River in the 1950s to make way for a new hydroelectric dam. The video recalls a beautiful, yet chilling, moment of destruction driven by the rationale of transformation in the name of modernisation, with the force of fire evoking the all too familiar threat of wildfires in the Interior of BC and beyond.
In the mid 1950s the Ontario government announced its plans to build a hydroelectric dam near Cornwall, Ontario, on the Saint Lawrence River. When the engineering plans were released for the project, it became clear that the rural settler towns along the north shore of the river would need to be carefully relocated into a new suburban community, as that land was soon submerged under an artificial lake feeding the dam. Meanwhile, the forced alteration of this landscape was planned and executed with no communication or dialogue with the Mohawks of Akwesasne, whose territory was permanently flooded, polluted, and further divided by new Canadian border control policies. Indigenous peoples have long used this region for fishing, hunting, and trade. The Mohawks and other Onkwehón:we portaged the Long Sault Rapids, camped on the islands, and established enduring sacred relationships with the land and water.
Radiant Temperature of Openings was part of an ongoing series of exhibitions surrounding the unnatural disasters of flood and fire brought to this landscape. The project included materials drawn from community archives, government reporting, and oral testimony to address how the events of 1958 continue to exert control over the contemporary political landscape. The project reflects on how settler-colonial logic manipulates a river into both a piece of infrastructure and a political boundary while also setting the stage for an empirical study into how fire spreads through family homes. The artists prompt questions of whose future safety is being secured, and whose is ignored, along with broader questions of land and water rights.
Artists Biography
Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, and Ryan Ferko have worked in collaboration since 2013. Their shared practice explores the interplay of multiple subjectivities as a strategy to address the power inherent in narrative structures. Foregrounding the idea of place as a central focus, their work seeks to both decode their surroundings and trouble the production of images through speculative narration and dialectical imagery. Shifting between both gallery and cinema contexts, recent projects have been presented at Mercer Union (Toronto), MoMA, e_flux, Berlinale, Punto De Vista International Documentary Festival, Viennale, Media City Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, and others internationally.
St. Lawrence Burns, 2021
video still, 16mm to HD video
60 minutes
photo courtesy of the artist