Gabriel Saloman The Woodsquat Commemorative Pool Party

In the Fall of 2011, in response to call for artworks that addressed the site-specificity of Simon Fraser University's new campus in the heart of Vancouver's impoverished and turbulent Downtown Eastside neighborhood, I began a dual process of engagement with the building management of the Woodward's development (within which the school is a component) and the living participants  involved in the Woodsquat action of Fall 2002. The latter group had occupied the then still abandoned former Woodward's Department Store for over 3 months in a radical demand for an end to homelessness, poverty, persecution of sex workers and drug users and an end to the ongoing violence of colonization. It was my stated intention to realize an event that would recognize the contribution that activists and community members involved in the Woodsquat had made to the widely celebrated Woodward's development. The hoped-for result would have been the WOODSQUAT COMMEMORATIVE POOL PARTY held at Club W, a recreational commons with a "W" shaped hot tub accessible only to owners and renters within the market housing component of the complex. I wrote a simple letter stating my intention, altered only in the terms of who I was addressing, which I sent to organizers involved in the Woodsquat and the persons responsible for the public relations and building management of the current property. It was understood that either party might be resistant or refuse to participate and that the WCPP quite possibly would never occur. 

As an artist, an anti-poverty activist and someone who has had more than enough experience with institutional mediation, I was already firmly set in my own critical reading of the project. My desire was not to force a situation which would redundantly prove my position, but rather to create a possibility that could surpass my expectations and evolve into a situation that no one party could possibly predetermine. I had chosen to act based completely on the narrative that the Woodward's project had itself presented in various public spheres (condo sales brochures; public didactics; civic websites; popular media) portraying itself as the inevitable result of directly responding to the actions of the Woodsquatters. It is a narrative which is only possible because a contested space was ultimately claimed by developers and their allies at the expense of the unsatisfied demands of anti-poverty activists and the homeless that occupied this ground in an all too brief communal experiment.

It is my belief that the students of SFU are in fact fulfilling their constructed role within the architecture of the Woodward's building and its relationship to the DTES. If we listen to the narrative of the market housing focused "Woodwards District" we see that they are literally an amenity to condo owners across the private plaza that separates their homes and the school. They are here to perform Life. Their creativity, activity, youth and sexuality is an animation that fulfills the inhabitants of the condo tower's desire to own an experience of the Street. They as students are not intended to address this unresolved antagonism, nor intervene in the positivist narrative that says that this site has addressed satisfactorily the conditions that led to occupation. My project was an attempt to explore the edges of this dynamic in the hope of revealing its limits - positively or negatively. In the end there was cautious curiosity from both parties but ultimately the event was deferred for the unforeseeable future.

Further context:

Aaron Vidaver (ed.) "Woodsquat", West Coast Line, Number 41/42, 37/2-3 Fall/Winter 2003/04

Robert Enright, Gregory Henriquez, Chris Macdonald, Alberto Perez-Gomez & Stan Douglas, Body Heat: The Story of the Woodward's Redevelopment,Vancouver: Blueprint, 2012

http://vancouver.ca/bps/realestate/woodwards/story.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodward%27s_Building