(AR)umination, a workshop created for Summerworks revises and (re)considers buried histories, rivers and place names.

Invited workshop guests reconsider Tkaronto's historical Clarence Square Park, retracing the mouth of Garrison Creek, a treaty site, and revitalize the landscape using AR to overlay rivers across the urban landscape. 

Guests learn how to create scenes using the STYLY platform, AV equipment, 360 cameras, dynamic audio using site as a narrative strategy for shared learning.

Site-specific engagement encourages the rekindling of land-based knowledges, custodianship, returned memories, reinforcing stronger relationships to physical surroundings, plants, animals, and personal feelings towards heritage, identity and syncretism.

Clarence Square is revisited as a site of many pasts, including recent camp dwellings, world war military storage, museum, and mansions.

Through Summerworks Festival, workshop guests learned the iconographical and cultural significance of wampums and participated in meaning-making through glyph-making exercises, rendered into 3D objects placed into a virtual world via XR platform STYLY Global.

Sites of Indigenous historic significance are misunderstood, perceived as present only in spaces of untamed nature. A more recent stereotype is that these traits are found only on reserve territories.

Tkaronto is understood both by the Anishinaabek and Haudenosaunee peoples as a placename that refer to distinct traits of the land itself: “Fishing weirs/tall trees standing in water” or “meeting place“.

Toponymy, the study of placenames analyzes the origins of meaning held in a place, and Tkaronto is juxtaposed with two competing narratives: colonial narratives of naming places after conquest, discovery, doctrine, and events of history that favors these — and placenames prior to first contact that describe the nature of place, forged by the original custodians of the land.

Definition

Toponymy, toponymics, or toponomastics is the study of toponyms, their origins and meanings, use and typology. Toponym is the general term for a proper name of any geographical feature, and full scope of the term also includes proper names of all cosmographical features.Wikipedia

Indigenous placenames carry significant geographical and cosmological cues about the land, embedded in the very structure of Indigenous languages themselves. Indigenous naming is descriptive not prescriptive, verb-based in structure and holding relational connection to its environment.

For example, One who listens, one who cares, Where ___ (fish, water, spruce trees, berries) are, and also what may happen in the place:

to gather, to leave, to meet, to pray, to watch.

These are ecological noticings of place. 

Why might one watch in one place?

A plateau or hill serves as a vantage point, one can see boats coming in from the harbour.

Placenames are an ancestral oral archive of significant histories and survivals. Families share between each other where medicine grows, where game can be hunted. 

This reflects a time before global trade and commerce, these noticings carry archeological, ancestral and historical significance. 

When we share and name the resources held within a place, it comes with a set of instructions about how, when and why to harvest, conserve, offer others, tend and sow that are cosmological and epistemological in nature. A name comes with it a responsibility and calling, to consider the longevity and abundance of land.

An alteration of the conditions or the natural balance will change the happenings of the site.

Rivers since dammed, are forgotten or manipulated by manmade canals. These curves and contours of mother nature tell us more stories than we are aware, with tracings of early Tkaronto industrial developments and first buildings, factories and railways built close to these waterways and paths. The “Toronto Carrying Place” waxes a romanticized and nostalgic portaging route no longer in use, where many have mapped, created art or pilgrimage style re-enactments of navigating Tkaronto from waterline to waterline.

Tkaronto holds history of treaty purchases and their timelines, shaping now what we know the city to be. Wampums exchanged, yet agreements were not intended for purchase or usurpment. Much of written treaties do not reflect these unceded territories, or the oral agreements of shared custodianship.

If resources are extracted from a place, the name ceases to function as the verb structure. Environmental undoings, however drastic of consequence, are cyclical and in tandem with the interrelatedness of ecologies.

Human ecology influences deep psychic and ancestral footprints of the land, yet at the scale of the universe are but a mere ripple in the continuum and the cosmos.

Restoring balance to site and place involves returning plant and animal kind back into the site itself, to restore its interrelatedness. After devastation this can take many seasons.

You notice placenames wherever you go, Mississauga, Etobicoke, Spadina, often go unquestioned by a seasoned dweller of the GTA, who blend into the city experience. 

The naming of York, refers to the toponymy connecting to muddy rivers, paths and directions of the waterways, these have been named via observation of place, through combined portage and horse travel beginning from the North of Simcoe towards Lake Ontario. Lake Ontario, Simcoe, Huron. Muddy York, North York, York, New York, East York carry the memory of rivulets, estuaries, and standing bodies of water contouring the natural formations and elevations in Tkaronto.

The AR works created for Summerworks revise and reconsider buried histories, rivers and names.

The visual experience invites you to tread gently and not trample over what is there, beings and animacy unseen but present in the city.

Deities and helpers watch over Tkaronto. They are reminders of balance and kindness.

Let us rethink a construction site, untamed yards, wildflowers and roots. You will find something is very much “alive” here, rumbling beneath.

Nature will do what it will, constraining it may only temporarily delay its existence or naturally occurring cycles.

Land-based teachings express to you how to better coexist with the cycles and patterns and learn how to identify them.