A Short Story About Sidewalks

To say Halifax is home, and always will be, is an understatement. They say that we shape cities, and then cities shape us - they become a part of us, as we anchor our sense of self in them when we call them “home”. To be an artist in K’jipuktuk/Halifax is to take in the experiences the city gives us, to let it etch itself upon you, and then in turn you step on its stages, hang your drawings on its walls, scream your stories back through its old buzzing PAs, and sit under its cool night air, staring out at it when the show is over. To be an artist here is inseparable from what it means to be here, the legacies you hope to leave behind, and the legacy you take on when you call a place home.

But a place’s legacy changes, and we find the stories we tell about it changing too. A Short Story About Sidewalks contemplates how cities change, and what it means for the legacy of a place. How does it feel when a place who’s legacy became a part of your own starts to change, to displace, to gentrify, to erase? What happens to the stories, and experiences a place has built? So much about a place, its legacies, sounds, and stories can be experienced just in a walk through a neighbourhood - hearing the bass shaking the walls of a venue, or seeing the graffiti scribbled on a wall, like urban holy scripture. A Short Story About Sidewalks is a listening room, an album and a photo gallery, telling the story of what it means when home changes, and what happens to the legacies we’ve built and hope to build. Take a walk through the space, take in the photos of a place we call home, and the sounds of its legacies and stories, as we investigate the changes we feel walking down a sidewalk, expressing, shedding light on a sense of a loss of home, legacies left behind, and legacies being built. As we are faced with the consequences of the city’s rapid changes, we need to shine a light on the sense of loss and displacement that comes with them, the empathy needed to get through it all, and how art and the legacies it builds can provide a way to tell the story of what it means to be here, what we leave behind, and what we erase. In a changing city, our project is a short story on the heartache of walking down the sidewalk, and seeing home changing, displacing, and erasing, while we contemplate the legacies it built in us, and what it means to be here.