Welcome to the world of the Berm
In the Summer of 2006, poet Catherine Owen moved to a house in Millwoods, a suburb in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. She thought it had a park at the back, but it turned out to be a berm – a hill designed to separate her neighbourhood from the sounds of the Whitemud Freeway. Both the word ‘berm’ and watching it, writing about it and eventually videotaping it became a daily obsession for her.
By late 2007, we began to collaborate on this project.
Archives of Absence is the result: a meditation on landscape, the environment, notions of home/alienation and the transformations wrought through art.
This project was launched as a feature event of the Edmonton Poetry Festival in 2011 and included found object installation, gel transfer print works, video, and two handmade chapbooks of poems released by rednettle press: Berm, morning eclogues & Berm: a miscellany.
Sydney and Catherine were joined at the Edmonton Poetry Festival for the launch of the first iteration of Archives of Absence by musician and composer Thom Golub.
There are also IMAGES from the Archives of Absence Project Launch.
A co-authored essay on this project is here, and this essay is also included in Catalysts, a collection of essays by Catherine, published by Wolsey & Wynn April 2012.
