Culture pour tous

THE ENCAMPMENT: AN ODYSSEY INSIDE A TENT

A participatory installation on the theme of mental disability

In 2006, at the invitation of Toronto’s Nuit Blanche all-night art event, Thom Sokoloski and Jenny McCowan organized a huge outdoor installation on the theme of mental health. The Encampment consisted of an assemblage of tents, each containing a mini-installation created with the participation of the public and presenting poignant testimonies or stories of intellectual disability and the lives of those affected by it.

Curator Clara Hargittay had originally approached Thom Sokoloski about creating a project inspired by the historic heritage of Toronto’s Queen Street West neighbourhood. Since that is where the city’s first hospital for psychiatric patients opened in 1850, the artists proposed exploring the stories of these people who had been excluded from society because of their intellectual or mental disability.

The project was inspired in part by a book written by Geoffrey Reaume, a former psychiatric patient who in 2000 had published Remembrance of Patients Past: Patient Life at the Toronto Hospital for the Insane, 1870-1940. Reading these stories gave the artists a glimpse into an unknown world. Over the years, many families had settled in the Queen Street neighbourhood to be close to a loved one confined in the institution. The artists thus proposed to explore their collective memory, like archaeologists unearthing artifacts.

Creative collaborators

Under the banner of Studio SM, which produces their artistic projects, Thom Sokoloski and Jenny McCowan began recruiting “creative collaborators” who would research a story, testimony or fact related to mental illness and use found objects to present this story inside a tent. For two weeks, they led workshops with groups of 5, 10 or 20 participants, a mix of artists and people with experience of disability.

After these preparatory sessions, all the creative collaborators gathered with their boxes of artifacts and found objects in order to mount their installations in the tents that had been set up in Trinity Bellwoods Park. Sixty-eight in number, an allusion to Bill 68, Ontario’s mental health reform legislation, the tents were aligned in neat rows like a military encampment, both for the aesthetic effect and as a metaphor for confinement. With all the collaborators convening at the site for the first time, there was a wonderful atmosphere of sharing, mutual assistance and cooperation.

The installation was initially titled Confinement of the Intellect, but this was later simplified to The Encampment. Each tent was an intimate installation inviting the public to enter and be exposed to different aspects of mental health and illness. The artists admit that they were surprised how touching it could be to rediscover what had been forgotten through neglect, fear, social policies and practices, and they believe that their installation served as a sort of “socio-historical catharsis.”

Studio SM moves camp

Enthused by the experience in Toronto, organizers of Open House New York asked the artists to create a new version of the installation for their event in October 2007. The location chosen was Roosevelt Island, an island on the Hudson River in the heart of New York, which for 150 years had housed the city’s outcasts in a penitentiary, workhouse, charity hospital, lunatic asylum and smallpox hospital. As the scene of these different types of institutionalization, the island was an eminently suitable site for The Encampment. The artists again led workshops, set up tents on the southern tip of the island and reminded the public about the hardships of exclusion.

Studio SM next collaborated with the Canadian Association for Community Living (CACL), a federation of over 400 Canadian associations that raises awareness for the inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities. Adapting their project to reflect the organization’s national mandate, the artists held workshops for creative collaborators across Canada – in Whitehorse, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Moncton, Toronto and Ottawa. The installation was presented in Ottawa in October 2008, in partnership with the National Capital Commission (NCC), as part of the CACL’s 50th anniversary initiatives. For this third version of The Encampment, 70 nineteenth-century expeditionary tents were erected in a geometric grid in Major’s Hill Park. The choice of 70 tents was based on the fact that 70 is the IQ “cut-off” below which many authorities define a person as intellectually disabled.

Large-scale participatory projects

Studio SM combines performance, visual and environmental arts, and social mediation. The artists are thinking of new projects, including Transmission, a great gathering combining light and symphonic music, and Ghost Net Project, about the environmental problem of lost fishing nets adrift in the world’s oceans. Though the economic situation is putting a damper on these plans, Studio SM is working hard to bring about what Thom Sokoloski insists will be “large-scale projects with a major participatory component.”