Speak City delivers a unique glimpse of a city that for much of the last century went unrecorded (filmmaking in Toronto only started in earnest in the sixties) or stood in for somewhere else. It's a crucial addition to the events and screenings at this year's Festival and afterwards that will celebrate Toronto's 175th anniversary, and it raises intriguing new issues about how the city has (and has not) been recorded.
Linked to a series of city portraits focusing on architecture rather than human presence, Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak's intriguing Speak City looks at Toronto through its most omnipresent yet most innocuous markers: street signs. Structured around the 140 official neighbourhoods designated by the City of Toronto, the video piece includes one intersection from each region. All of the shots concentrate nearly exclusively on a street sign, with the only indication of human activity restricted to the soundscape (traffic, voices).
By isolating and limiting the viewing perspective, Speak City forces us to consider what we would normally examine in the most perfunctory fashion. Each street corner has its own character, created in dialogue with the space immediately surrounding it. Nature intrudes on some corners either by occupying the foreground (branches completely cover some signs or briefly wave at the viewer) or the background (one corner is dominated entirely by a seemingly ancient tree trunk). In other locations, nature is scarily absent, with stark concrete edifices visible behind the scenes. The gloomiest, most desolate shot in the entire piece shows a jet roaring past the sign for Islington.
Probably the strangest aspect of the work, however, is its reassuring sense of familiarity. Toronto is a city where you won't see anything but concrete and foreboding late twentieth-century architecture in some areas, but walk for five minutes and you'll find yourself on a lush side street teeming with vegetation, unchanged in more than a century. The sense of time passing in the videos, communicated through the changes in the colours of the leaves only, is both elegiac and oddly comforting. The multifaceted character of Toronto seen in this piece suggests that one of the reasons the city hasn't been recorded (or took so long to be captured on film) is its widely varied nature.
Steve Gravestock
Curated by Steve Gravestock and Noah Cowan.
Presented by Future Projections in the TIFF Box Office at Nathan Phillips Square.
September 5 to 19, 7am to 7pm
FREE to the public
Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak have collaborated exclusively since 1983, producing videotapes, performances and photo-text pieces. Their work has been shown internationally and they have won numerous prizes, including the Bell Canada Award in Video Art. They are founders of Vtape, a Toronto media arts centre, and teach at the University of Toronto, where Steele is the associate chair of the visual studies programme. In 2005, they received a Governor General's Award for lifetime achievement in visual and media arts.