Stan Douglas on his venture for the Canadian Pavilion
I’VE BEEN PREOCCUPIED with the bourgeois revolutions of 1848 for a very long time. It appeared like a tremendous factor, a spontaneous instinct Europeans had that issues are mistaken and that they’ve acquired to do one thing about it. When 2011 occurred, I assumed it was roughly the identical factor, solely that nothing would come of it. As a result of as a substitute of responding to those occasions—the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Road, the London riots—as protest or the desire of the folks, they’d be policed and forgotten. They’d be known as looters, hooligans, anarchists, versus people who find themselves merely responding to their situations.
Within the UK, it started with austerity measures, a consequence of the 2008 recession. College tuition went up by greater than 300 p.c between 1988 and 2010. They shut down the neighborhood facilities, and so folks had been on the streets. Then, in August 2011, police shot and killed Mark Duggan, which prompted a race riot in Tottenham that unfold, changing into one thing else, all through the UK. It’s not the identical because the Arab Spring, the place there have been particular grievances with every authorities. However there was nonetheless a standard trigger. They weren’t being represented; one thing was mistaken. With Occupy, you had a really self-conscious emulation of the Arab Spring in New York. For my functions, I’m placing the 2011 Stanley Cup riots in Vancouver into the identical bucket. It’s shared intuitions, not essentially articulated, in response to frequent situations.
Canada has a unusual pavilion, nevertheless it’s acquired nice mild. We’re making 4 partitions and placing one large {photograph} on every. Then there can be a video in an off-site area, an outdated sixteenth-century salt cellar in Dorsoduro. One of many images is from a pair I made in 2017 specializing in the 2011 riots in Hackney, London. I needed to take the strategies I used there—hiring a helicopter and stitching collectively these high-res plate pictures with aerial footage, movies of the particular police and rioters—however that was a nonstarter in North Africa, so I used the identical method I did for a sequence round New York’s Penn Station in 2020. It’s all very constructed, like a interval drama. However after Covid, isn’t all the things a interval drama?
—As advised to David Velasco