Future and Ongoing
The Border Bookmobile’s collection is at the Eco House for the winter (372 California Ave. ). If you want to visit drop me a line: correspondence@borderbookmobile.net. We plan to get on the road again in late April or early May. Stay tuned for details.
Deterritorializing Paul Bunyan
A quick snapshot of Paul Bunyan in the 20th century has him changing from a worker’s hero to a kind of patron saint of big business, an earth moving giant that personifies the ideals of extraction in terms of economic and industrial interests. In 1954, Fortune magazine features a cartoon of him on their cover as the benign face of the logging industry. Our ongoing research with Broken City Lab and the Tug Collective seeks to read between the lines to unpack the changing representations of Mr. Bunyan and to propose other possibilities for the 21st century: could he be considered among the early architects of NAFTA ?; alternatively, as a subversive border crosser, tactically inhabiting the increasingly militarized territory between Canada and the US ?
Paul Bunyan, Fortune Magazine Cover, 1954
Offshored
Offshored is a short film loop/projection project based on the documentary footage of the construction of the Detroit-Windsor tunnel in 1929 as the auto industry expanded operations in Canada as a means to export tariff-free goods within the British Commonwealth in the first half of the 20th century. The documentation of these early industrial mega projects highlights the tremendous sense of pride and enthusiasm that surrounded the construction of the tunnel and its role as an important symbol of progress and international relations in an era when things like that mattered. The Bookmobile will act as a mobile projection unit that screens the film in sections as a series of drive by events in selected locations around Windsor.
Lunch break during the construction of the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, c. 1928
