Collection Reflection: Reconnecting to the Bow
Artist collective Broken City Lab reflects on revisiting a previous work through Bow River hotline
On July 2, 2024, nearly a month after a large feeder water main broke in Calgary, Mayor Jyoti Gondek announced that residents could start to return to their normal water use. Unfortunately, that turned out to be temporary, as the need for additional repairs led to more water restrictions starting on August 26, 2024. Of course, Calgary isn’t the only city having to navigate aging pipes and other infrastructure, but the realities of what can happen when things go wrong, when these critical pieces of our everyday life break down, are a reminder of the nature of our relationships with the infrastructures all around us.
Over a decade ago, we found ourselves witnessing another relationship at play. The Bow River flooded, causing evacuations across 26 communities, and impacting 110,000 people during the emergency and the recovery that followed. At the time, we were preparing to join The City of Calgary’s Watershed+ public art initiative, and while our trip was delayed, we eventually got to take part in one of the most novel artist residencies ever established in Canada. We had the unique opportunity to meet and work alongside the many, many staff who take care of the infrastructures that support and enable the water systems across the city. It also allowed us to dream up new ways of understanding those infrastructures that could highlight the poetics of the glacier, the rivers and the human-led interventions in the landscape that were core to the watershed.
From that experience, we crafted Bow River-flavoured candy, created 100 unique text-based artworks that appeared along the banks of the Bow and Elbow Rivers, and launched a Bow River hotline that allowed anyone to call in and listen to the river for a few moments. These artworks found their way into The City’s public art collection and remain as an archive of the project. In late 2023, we were invited to revisit our works in the collection, and specifically the Bow River hotline.
As collaborators, we found ourselves starting a process of time travel. What we had experienced a decade before was scattered across notebooks, photographs, emails and audio recordings. We knew right away that because of the time that had passed, we needed to not just revisit the artwork, but also to re-engage our creative process. Our conversations reminded us of how we had tried to understand the role of the Bow River as a part of everyday life during our first residency, and we knew we would need to think even more about how time had changed the ways we could understand the rich and complex relationships that individuals have with the river.
We decided that new recordings of the river were important, to hear the river anew, and to hear the river now. We also sensed that the original phone number for the hotline, 1-844-OUR-BOW-RIVER, no longer felt right. Instead of highlighting a sense of ownership over “our” river, we wanted to signal a different way of understanding the relationship between the river and the caller, so we decided on a new number that would invite a deeper listening: 1-855-BOW-LSTN. We also wanted to ensure that the river could be heard differently, so now when you call, you will hear part of one of the many new recordings that were created. Over the life of the new artwork, you may hear many different voices of the Bow. You’ll also be able to see some of our other text-based artworks on billboards and street level advertising spaces that invite you to call in and listen to the Bow again.
We feel very lucky to not just revisit one of our favourite artworks, but also to be able to reimagine it. We believe that the new recordings, the new phone number and the new text-based artworks that accompany it will allow people to experience something that is both eternally present and yet so fleeting that they may never hear the same thing twice. The relationships we have with the natural world around us, the built environment and the many invisible infrastructures that make our lives possible, are always changing — and perhaps now, more than ever, need our renewed attention. All we have to do is listen.
Learn more about Broken City Lab (Hiba Abdallah, Joshua Babcock and Justin Langlois) here.
