Nov 11, 20212 min read

A Legacy Book Birth

The modern day super natural beings are corporations. Do we have the strength to resist them?

Robert Davidson. Haida Chief and Artist

From the documentary, Haida Modern by Charles Wilkinson

One of the messages we have shared with our community is about conscious relations with the material objects we buy. Where do we get from? Are they local hand made? Are those objects in alignment with our cultural and ancestral values? How much packaging is included? These are some of the questions we have posed for ourselves and others about transforming our relationship with consumerism.

As we walk our talk

One rainy afternoon we found ourselves wandering around a second hand store, we were looking for materials we could upcycle as part of our art making. We roam around the book section, a large spine took our attention, it was an old atlas. We randomly open a page, there was a neon pink bookmark, tones of blues covering that page, the ocean, the sea, the Caribbean Sea, and a big Island, Cuba, taken the whole space.

We fall in love with this book. The few first pages showing Mother Earth beauty at her most. Our hands trekked these pages as we were walking across Her. This Atlas, printed in 1969, with the handwriting of the name and phone number of his original owner, a testimony of wars, we, humans got involved in the first part of the XX century, the expansion of the neo-colonialism around the world.

We offered our gratitude to the trees who gave their lives so the old Atlas could be printed. At that moment, like a dream, a new book was born. One, we will create in community, one that will become a manifestation of a new dream, one that will bring a new life for something that already exited.

This reclaimed world atlas now holds the art we have created in community. It contains, art, plant knowledge, memories, recipes, writing, and more that we would like to share with future generations. Weaving a story and legacy of the many members of the community who contributed and showed up to collaborate, co-create, make new friends, dreaming, envisioning and scheming the building of a new web.

This book also mirrors the space we have co-created around the Hastings/Sunrise community, and in Zoom as well. We have held interactive workshops on plant identification, collaborative projects with other artists of various mediums, nature walks, plant medicine making. The new book allows us to remember who we truly are, it becomes a space to enhance curiosity and reciprocity, an object that re-connects us with other times and ways of existence.