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PILGRIMAGE FOR EDMONTON
Office Installation and public tours
Building upon the traditional, religious form of the Pilgrimage involving a journey with several stations, this one was combined with a guided art-tour. Angela Dorrer's Pilgrimage for Edmonton was the result of her interpretation of the responses to questionnaires on Edmontonians' relationship to their city. At the pilgrimage office Angela Dorrer gathered information through research and the questionnaires: stories, rumours, myths, phrases and images to create an 'unofficial' and intentionally subjective map of Edmonton, and a sense of its collective psychology as a city. On a big map of Edmonton, drawings and notes were accumulating over the wall. From this she had, in an intentionally subjective role, condensed the information into a series of symbolic gestures, to be performed in locations around Edmonton, in the framework of a 'pilgrimage'.
At the beginning of the tour everyone got a "pilgrim's-kit" (small packages with map, utensils and instructions) and was anointed on the forehead. The group then walked to various locations in Edmonton, including a parking lot, a streetcorner, the Starlight(a local bar, formelry the Salvation Army), a former Native burial ground that are now the Epcor grounds, the Legislature, and the High Level Bridge.
The gestures and locations functioned as 'touchstones' for the recurring themes and stories that came from the survey responses. Some of the symbolic gestures included: wearing an oversized coat, reading a poem by Novalis, eating peas, drinking Jagermeister, making a phone call to the helpline, turning your clothes inside-out, blowing gold dust, and meeting a person who was talking about a specific ghost.”The overall mood of the pilgrimage was one of celebration. Angela Dorrer was quite generous towards the participants, allowing them to participate as much or as little as she wished.
In some cases the stories Angela Dorrer found out were some that people in Edmonton were not familiar with. For example, one of the actions was what she called the purple city, where you stare into the yellow lights near the Legislature for a couple of minutes then look at the city lights, which look purple. One of the people I spoke to said that she had never done the purple city, even though she had lived in Edmonton her entire life. This reveals how partial and specialized local knowledge can be, or how we can be unaware of aspects of our own city, perhaps because they are so familiar.
Kirsten Forkert in: visualeyez05-Journal, latitude53, Edmonton, Canada 2005
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