Waste as Energy in the Park: Sensorial Explorations through Disability as Method (forthcoming July 2023)

by Rachel Rozanski

In this probe, I plan to explore the sensory design of a naturalized park through creative practice, highlighting my own sensorial experience of the space as a chronically ill artist. My research-creation project will be based around the Frédéric Back parkrun, which exists within the larger Complexe environnemental de Saint-Michel (CESM). In this project, I hope to examine this waste landscape going through “revitalization” through decolonial forms of connection between person and place featuring sensory ethnography. In this, the work will question how making environmental damage (or chronic illness) visible can change how we interact with it.

This park is currently in transition, consisting of mixed-use space that was built up over landfills, quarries and industrial sites. The City of Montreal’s Department of Environment explains that the massive project to transform it into a park was initialized because of complaints by the neighborhood about the unpleasant sounds, smells and sights in this area. (Martin Héroux and Diane Martin, 2020). The space currently includes a snow depot, an existing landfill, and spaces under construction, all with pockets of park in between. The Frédéric Back parkrun is one completed section, featuring native grasses dotted with a series of large spheres connected to an underground network system that captures methane from the still decomposing landfill and redirects it to a biogas plant which converts it to energy.

Where naturalization projects often aim to hide damage, this one quite literally brings it to the surface. Visitors can see energy being produced out of waste, and I hope to explore the challenges of energy-related disability in the same space. Chronically ill bodies and contaminated lands neither get well nor die, unsettling the idealized visions of fixing and repair. Instead, they take an unpredictable life of their own, impacting each other. Environmental scholars argue that our view of nature is rooted in our expectations for how health should look (Soper, 1995; Betcher, 2015). What then is the relationship between the processes of reclaiming toxic land and healing human illness? How do dichotomies such as bad vs. good and sick vs well shape societal understanding of bodies and Lands?

It will explore how sick bodies and sick lands continue to instead live in a process that Michelle Murphy calls “alterlife” by which she refers to lives and histories that have been deeply altered (2017). In tracing these alterlives, I will explore how this energy-producing sites of ruin can be experienced through the lens of chronic illness, and especially M.E., which is in essence an energy deficiency disease with the primary symptom of post-exertion malaise (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2021).

Using “disability as method” as explained by Arseli Dokumaci (2018),  my process will be rooted in creative practices that are uniquely tied in with embodied disability experience. I will be doing this primarily through the process of intimate sensing (Howes, 2013), which takes an involved and hands-on approach to the material, focusing on a multi-sensory exploration of the subject.

This probe involves the creation of a series of sculptural objects with a process-based focus on sensory ethnography. My methods will include: 1) archival research on the Park and its buried histories; 2) formal tours of the site and audio recordings of the tours and the sounds present around the mixed-use spaces 3) the creation and documentation of sculptural objects that respond to those existing in the park. I will draw on the work of artists who use sensorial  and creative research to help audiences make sense of environmental concerns and disability (including Roni Horn and Sharona Franklin) to create a sensory window into damaged earth and bodies, reflective of the windows into the spheres of Frédéric Back parkrun. I will use found objects from the site to create a series of smaller “tactile spheres”, which both feature and obscure waste byproducts of the park’s landfill. I will be focusing on objects that many chronically ill people rely on. These will be extremely fragile and made out of a range of different materials to be determined by process.

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