Tumulus
Collaboration with James Nizam
Texts: Dion Kliner, Ludwig Seyfarth
Design: Stine Westergaard
Publisher: Peperoni Books, 2011
(...) On a cold morning Eberhard, Nizam and I turned off Route 7B and continued driving East on a single lane. Somewhere ahead of us was the site of an abandoned holiday resort, the site of Tumulus. We'd left the main highway some time before and the city had soon dropped away, replaced by lowlands that were planted with blueberries on both sides through which we now traveled. The fan of the heater whirred and the voice of Khaals, the Great Transformer, told the story of the great chiefs Oe'lecten and Swaneset and how they'd made this region abundant. Without realizing it we'd crossed over onto their traditional territory, the territory that had been granted by the Creator to their descendants - the Katzie people. That was long in the past, but in 1846 when the British asserted sovereignty, the Katzie reasserted their own and continue to do so. Arriving at the shore of Pitt Lake we met a one-legged fisherman who pointed out the direction where we could find the boatman to ferry us across the short expanse of Grant Narrows to our destination.
Stepping out of the small boat on the other side we left our footprints next to countless others in the emerald green and rust colored moss that shrouded the bank of Siwash Island like the mist that was coming off the lake. In the mid-1970s, the Katzie had leased their lands here at the mouth of the Pitt River to a developer who dreamed of creating a lakeside holiday resort. Sixty-six small lots were created. A-frame cabins brought in. A restaurant was built. When that dream vanished the Katzie offered the plots individually. Many of the new "owners" expanded the cabins, adding decks and gardens, rooms and water collection systems. Some had spent over two decades of weekends and vacations there with their families. For some it was a place to retire. Recently those leases had ended and the Katzie decided not to renew them, deciding instead to reabsorb the land into the Band and give it a new use. In the wake of this decision the owners were given the choice of removing the cabins and their contents or having them removed by the Katzie. Some chose to burn their cabins in anger, some were abandoned. The others had been knocked down and left in heaps. These are what we'd come to see. In imagination they were the original home, the archetypal hut of Adam in Paradise and of the hermit, and the little house in the woods of fairy tales and mythology distantly reflected in the suburban idyll of a cottage by a lake, and reduced to ruins. In such abandoned sites normal rules no longer seem to apply, and there is a certain sense of abandon, a wanton freedom. (...)
Standing in front of the large prints of Tumulus I am drawn in and enveloped by their lush greenness. I can almost feel the cool dampness of a British Columbian forest. The mounds are in the process of simultaneously deteriorating and becoming. The squat rectangles of the photographs reinforce the pull of horizontal and vertical - an almost equal balance of forces. In their ruins we see the residue of our dreams and aspirations - to verticality, to conquest, to grandeur, to a way back home, to a cottage on a lake. We also see the possibilities inherent in them - where disuse falls into pools of opportunity. The materials are already beginning to rot and compress. Soil will blow and eventually sift into the cracks, smoothing out the contours. Moss and ferns will take root as will blackberry and alder, cedar and fir. The mounds will be slowly swallowed by the forest and disappear. You can already see that starting to happen in some. In these moist forests, as in the boundlessness called time, nothing will last. All will eventually be swamped and disappear under successive mounds of debris. For now we're on top, but some day we'll find ourselves six feet under, then a mile. All of our accomplishments will be compressed by time and pressure into an anomalous stratum as unusual and characteristic as the K/T boundary. Quarries of the future will excavate slabs of concrete, blocks of asphalt. This is the future for future builders. It's not a nostalgic lament for the past that Tumulus evokes, but also not a utopian yearning for the future. It's a clear gazing at the present. But one that incorporates both the depths of time, and the future extinction of life as the rundown of energy is finally complete and our sandbox is turned a uniform gray.
Dion Kliner