Maintenance in Progress

2021

40 hours, clay, water

[Photos by Gemma Crowe]

In the summer of 2021, the City of Vancouver had just begun to excavate an enormous hole in the ground for the Broadway Subway Project. This is where the ECU parking lot used to be. Watching a fleet of yellow tractors rapidly dig and toss aside humus, soil and clay minerals, I decided to work on the ground within ECU.

But unlike the excavation outside governed by capitalist benchmarks of efficiency, I wanted to meditate on what maintenance is by performing with and learning from the properties of unfired clay: What does it mean to maintain something? The earth’s crust continually undergoes cycles of erosion and formation, absorbing the impact of our urban constructions, holding the ground that we exist on. How can I perform gestures that enact the maintenance work of geological time cycles?