Collage of photos from field recording walks at Biidaasige Park, Toronto.
As the mouth speaks tends to relations-in-process during the revitalization of former marshland today known as Biidaasige Park on Ookwemin Minising. Complicating colonial conceptualizations of Land as ‘resource’ and ‘sink’ that move through the past, present and future, this soundwalk weaves together histories, notes from the field and field recordings to compose a sonic collage. Presented through a singular voice recorded on site the soundwalk embraces the glitchy and disruptive interruptions from the field—such as wind and construction noise—to expose the performativity of listening and recording which are not universal, neutral or objective acts.
Geolocated ‘echoes’ overlap, tangling temporalities to disrupt a singular linear narrative of how the artificial island Ookwemin Minising came to be. The soundwalk conjures multiple temporalities of the park as marsh, infilled industrial site, dump, revitalized public space and its possible futures. Listeners are invited to oscillate between knowing to unknowing—what they are hearing, understanding and experiencing—to think critically about the spatial politics of urban change. Without a defined beginning or end As the mouth speaks invites multiple and differing approaches to listening in/to place.