The rail line remains a Sidetrack; a barrier to those who might enter and leave; and so it goes; the community remains inaccessible. Insular inhabitants tinker with imported customs and contraptions, entertaining and performing interventions and deviations in favor of accustomed local approaches to living. Luxuries and necessities co-mingle in the hands of eccentrics, cut-off from the rest of the world with its preference for development.
Through time the population increases, values shift and the air saturates with noise from machine and tool, an outcome inevitable as progress. Power relations change; the outside imposes. The ground fractures ahead of plows, dynamite, picks and shovels. Tea is drunk and music plays. Diverse dialects and customs from around the world infiltrate in the form of tourists seeking charm. The wilderness vision dissipates.
Tiki Mulvihill
The installation Side Track was initiated by my seven-week residency at the Banff Centre in the summer of 2007.
Imagine a remote community accessible only by rail. One rough track carved through wilderness links one mountain to the next, eventually leading to this place of little consequence. The track, a lifeline to an outside world, serves as a carrier of ideas and as an importer of new-fangled devices of curiosity, transforming every aspect of the rugged land and the lives of inhabitants. Presumed ‘dear’ because of distance traveled, residents use, re-use, and revise items long after improvements and up-grades render them redundant elsewhere.
Sidetrack
Details from Sidetrack: objects of intervention.
