Between 2003 and 2004, artist Sylvia Grace Borda spent a year traversing 380 square kilometres of Surrey, British Columbia, photographing every one of its 800-plus public transit bus stops. The resulting work is at once a documentary archive, a conceptual artwork, and an unconventional portrait of Canada’s second-largest city by land area.
Influenced by the New Topographics movement and artists such as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Ed Ruscha, and Alan Sekula, Borda framed the project as a study of civic infrastructure — systematic, exhaustive, and deliberately without human subjects. By photographing every stop without hierarchy, the work affirms the democratic reach of Surrey’s transit grid across districts of all socio-economic backgrounds.
The project was realised in three forms: a 38-minute DVD film loop, a large-scale gridded photographic composite, and a pioneering net artwork produced with Artengine (Ottawa) and Firebox Design. Launched in May 2004, the online work predated Google Street View by nearly two years.
All artists accumulate ideas and visual references from both direct physical and indirect experiences. Several weeks ago I was fortunate enough to see a set of small watercolour works by artist Paul Signac from the turn of the century. I was fascinated by Signac’s watercolours because from first glance they appeared nothing more the small pastoral watercolour scenes of various ports in France. However, upon closer inspection, I realised these picturesque watercolours offered something far greater. The images, collectively titled 100 Ports of France, were created by Signac over a three year period, during which the artist visited each port and painted two watercolours of each.
The series had close alignment to my own working methodology in documenting every bus stop in Surrey, BC. Signac’s work was described in the museum panel as being out of keeping with French aesthetic tastes during his timeframe. In effect Signac had painted a transportation system which was overlooked and was framed in the mind of his contemporary viewers as being part of a modernist resurgence. The images not only depicted the ports but also encompassed the surrounding geographic areas, illustrating cranes and other related heavy machinery and other adjacent areas, such as civic neighbourhoods. To today’s viewer these images would not enter the mind as historical documents bearing witness to change, but as the museum panel described the presence of cranes and other construction forms depicted in the images marked significant change and a tension between a traditional ideologies of market trade and new methods.
Seeing Signac’s work gave a new rationalization to my own endeavours. My working concept was not without historical precedent nor was it as absurd as some had suggested. I like Signac had selected a given transportation to document within a specific geography. With camera in hand, I would transverse 370 square kilometres and visit more than 1400 bus stops. Similarly to Signac, my project was documenting transportation systems in relationship to a ‘living grid’. Neighbourhoods, and rural and manmade landscapes were caught by the camera depicted in a given moment in time and place, becoming reflections of activities and persons that had passed through these zones. My ability to infer social interactions through remnant and discard things near the bus stops may place this project closer to documentary work; however, to this end, I also think the series may be running parallel to the photo work of Eugene Atget.
Like Atget I don’t fully envision myself as a commercial photographer; instead I like the term adopted by Atget, who preferred to be called an “author-producer.” To this extent I see my working strategy in the same mode, and may extend that my earlier undergraduate studies in anthropology may have assisted in this definition. I have also reflected on work by Atget and while it may seem too grand to even assume a comparison between him and my own endeavours, I am willing to assume this risk and explain my rationale.
Atget documented old Paris before and just after its announcement of re-urbanization under Hausman’s design to the new wide boulevards that define contemporary Paris today. In Atget’s documentation of old Paris before the deconstruction and removal of Old Paris, his images illustrate an absence of the human figures: human activities are inferred and represented by the artifices and placement of mobile goods and discarded products of people left behind in the streets. The desolate images foreshadow the plans for new rapid urbanization of these districts; however, Atget’s images still capture a human presence.
In the same way, I have seen my work as similar to Atget’s in that numerous areas that I have documented through the transit grid illustrate tensions between an agricultural Surrey which is in the process of giving way to a new urbanized city. The birth of any city is nothing new; however, its transition from an earlier state to another happens only once. In my work, numerous images depict the transit grid and bus stops present before the actual arrival of the community that will utilize that system; while, others illustrate bus stops in zones dominated by rural activities that would seem not to be best served by this system. A great portion of images, though, portray a balance rarely seen in civic images, the construction of dwellings amongst vistas and fields.
Again I need to re-iterate that when one enters a city it has already been predefined by construction, housing, neighbourhoods and history. This is what defines and opposes Surrey’s own definition. It claims to be a city of parks and can so accommodate this requisite as farming lands are converted to large open spaces for community use. However, by the same definition the number of building permits and parks arising illustrate a city in flux. The ceiling height of land use and definition has not been reached and is continually being redefined. Thus, the city is continually growing, morphing and changing and so is its bus stop system.
The pictures collected for this show illustrate Surrey through its current array of building and community forming. To this extent, I must comment that I have come to admire the Surrey transit system for its scale and what I will say is an equalitarian arrangement. All districts despite socio-economic class and location have a transportation grid near or through them and the possibility of accessing public transportation is not limited but affirmatively designated by the city through the placement of the stops.
In creating this artwork, I have also been influenced by Simon Patterson’s The Great Bear, Ed Ruscha’s photobooks, Bernd + Hilla Becher’s photo-typological grids and Alan Sekula’s critical documentary practice, I am interested in challenging audiences’ perceptions of how information is consumed, documented and interpreted. On a formal level my project’s documents explore ideas of image and colour, while also examining issues around archiving and information architecture.
For current viewers of Every Bus Stop in Surrey, BC, I hope each will come to reflect and contextualize their own community through these new relationships as illustrated in the work.
Sylvia Grace Borda
September 2004
The Surrey Art Gallery exhibition and accompanying publication was made possible with a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. The database of Every Bus Stop in Surrey, BC was made possible through sponsorship from Artengine, an Ottawa based artist-run internet site for visual and media artists. The interface for this database website was designed by Sean Beldon of Firebox Design in South Africa.
The artist invited the public to contribute photographs to the database, and would like to acknowledge the contributions received from: Sandy Bouchard, Lorraine Duclos, Holly Hart, Jim Hatch, Hilary Hay, Richard Knotts, Lorene Oikawa, Megan Rowan, Rusty Shirley. The artist would also like to acknowledge and thank the following for their assistance in the realization of this project: Reiner Derdau, Sabine Drzisga, KC, CJB and the Borda Family.
Artist’s Statement
I create artworks that draw upon art historical models, and document concepts according to methods a cultural anthropologist would implement. My practice is largely founded on recontextualizing frames of reference.
In earlier work, Capital Cities, I examined Tokyo and London’s transportation lines. I was curious how two different cities emulated each other’s architectural references, despite both being opposed culturally. These unlike areas shared cross-cultural histories that were visually undetectable but well documented in print.
During the Meiji period the Emperor commissioned English and German engineers to construct rail systems for Tokyo. Past and current rail systems within Japan are based on European transportation/architectural models, whereas, London Dockland’s light rail utilizes Asian technologies and aesthetics. Visitors to London’s new LRT feel transposed into Asian architectural space and visitors to Tokyo’s stations feel similarly transposed to into large European cities.
I was interested in documenting every bus stop in Surrey, BC over the last year since Surrey is the second largest city in BC (pop.400,000+), and is often overlooked in terms of its cultural potential. The city is extensively networked and defined by numbered roads and a light rapid transportation system. The city is geographically immense; 371 square kilometres with about 1100 residents per square kilometre.
My project is three fold. The first instalment of work, a DVD film loop, projects each bus stop in Surrey, BC for a duration of 2 seconds. Viewers are lead through sequences of unlabelled bus routes; thereby, attempting to create new visual systems of information for the audiences to negotiate, while shifting the audience’s understanding of geography, information mapping and architectural space within the familiar landscapes known to local commuters.
This projected photo archive of every public transit bus stop in Surrey consists of over 1800 images shot both by myself and by members of public under my loose direction. Local residents were invited to submit their own favourite commuter images. The resulting film (38 minutes) forms a large typology of overlooked locations for viewers to re-assess.
The second phase of the project will introduce a series of photographic images arranged in grids and cross-referenced through a numbering scheme to a Surrey street map. While the grids appear to form typological systems, viewers are left to examine minute details within the image plane to assist in identifying locations against the map. Signifiers are reduced to bus stop signage so locations becomes abstract and viewers consume images on a more immediate level, similar to the rapid scanning attention of someone on a daily commute. The gridded photo composite, thus, presents a blizzard of site-specific, but decontextualized “visual data” to visitors.
The third project component, an online archive of all the images documented, will enable users to select their own routes and see each bus route street as a self contained series. The visual database, designed by Firebox Design in South Africa, and Artengine in Ottawa, will be accessible using a computer station, and will allow visitors to create their own image paths. The interactive database will also be available to viewers with net access, to learn and explore Surrey’s geographic boundaries.
In all development phases, I am attempting for the project to question what type of information is pertinent to the creation of info-architecture, and each viewer consumes information with different preferences and relationships based on history, location, and experience. This project has employed a found, or “readymade” information scheme, the bus map, to a new visual scheme of information and mapping. This selection of images subvert ordinary information cues and questions the audience’s ability to process relevant information and understand new information schemes in the context of art and location (from perspectives of Surrey resident or visitor). For those unfamiliar with Surrey’s landscape, I may be offering new information about its social and economic diversity that reaches far beyond the stereotypical typecasting of Surrey by Lower Mainland audiences.
Sylvia Grace Borda
July 2004
