The Project
Reconnecting to the Bow is a new public artwork by the artist collective Broken City Lab (Hiba Abdallah, Joshua Babcock and Justin Langlois) that invites Calgarians to connect to the Bow River. Running until the beginning of January 2025, the public is invited to phone 1.855.BOW.LSTN (1.855.269.5786) to hear the Bow’s rushing, gurgling and babbling voice on the other end of the line.
Through a simple phone call, anyone can connect to the Bow, experiencing its wisdom, secrets and songs, creating a unique opportunity to access and explore our relationship with this important body of water. Several text-based artworks enticing people to listen to the Bow will appear throughout the city on billboards, at transit stations and on social media platforms. In addition to broadcasting the phone number, these artworks suggest different feelings or intentions the river may wish to share.
This project is a response to an earlier artwork in the City of Calgary Public Art Collection created by Broken City Lab in July 2014 during the collective’s residency in the City of Calgary’s Watershed+ public art program. The residency culminated in an exhibition at Stride Gallery, featuring several artworks based on the artists’ conversations and connections with city utility staff. One of these works was a phone number (1-844-OUR-BOW-RIVER) that encouraged visitors to call and listen to an audio recording of the river. Now, a decade later, Broken City Lab is responding to this work and considering the many changes that have taken place over the last decade regarding the significance of the river in our community. This new artwork, Reconnecting to the Bow, will also be part of the Public Art Collection.
Artist Statement
“Hello. One moment as I connect you to the Bow River.”
In 2014, we created an artwork that aimed to connect Calgarians to the Bow River. With a simple greeting, callers were transported to the river’s edge and experienced the Bow’s rushing, gurgling and babbling voice on the other end of the line. Anyone could call and connect to the Bow, experiencing its wisdom, its secrets, its songs, creating a unique opportunity to explore proximity and access as fundamental components of our relationship to the Bow River.
We want to capture this relationship once more, with added nuance and complexity in how we think about our relationship with the Bow a decade later. The Bow is not static, it is constantly in motion and shifting its flow, strength and sound depending on where you meet it. We highlight this characteristic with a multi-site re-recording of the Bow River by James Clemens-Seely, who is a sound specialist. These are long field recordings of the river that capture the variation of the Bow, changing throughout the six-month run of the project.
Another update is to the phone number. The original number highlighted a proprietary and commercial relationship with the river (‘our’). In this version of the work, we shift the context of the phone number to give the authority back to the Bow. For example, choosing a local number that centres the Bow River as a beacon of knowledge and understanding.
With eight newly designed advertisements that act as the relaunch frame for the artwork, we use billboard space and street level ads throughout the city, as well as online platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, as targeted ads for Calgarians to call in and reconnect to the Bow.