Over five days in early April 2023, we – visiting researchers Therese Keogh and Rebecca Macklin and Director Astrida Neimanis of the FEELed Lab – did a road trip. We were headed to Fort McMurray, Alberta, as a way to gain different kinds of insights into the engine of
petrocapitalism that is also known as the Tar Sands.
“FEELed work” might be one name for an embodied, place-based and multimodal kind of research inquiry that each of us is exploring, differently, in our respective projects. Preparation for the trip included archival and other desk-based research (photographs,
films, books, TV shows, documents, websites, reports) as well as practical matters (mapping, route-planning, contacting institutions and individuals, checking weather records and road conditions). The trip itself included observation of landscapes (by car, on foot, by air), conversation with a variety of knowledgeable people (from Keepers of the Water, Fort McMurray First Nation, Fort McMurray Heritage Society, Oil Sands Discovery Centre), participation in both touristic and everyday Fort McMurray life (museum visiting, grocery shopping, playing board games in a bar, walking around town), pit stops, timepassing and lots of snacks (hot springs, road trip games, more and less sour gummy worms) as well as a variety of situated, site-specific, arts-based experiments (cyanotype printing, photography, sound recording, freewriting, sketching with found materials).
We carried humour with us as a way of processing movements through spaces that were, at times, overwhelming, and where material play offered pathways into the intangible complexities of the place. There are so many ways that we move towards knowing. This can also mean moving away from knowing, or at least away from what we think we already know.
A short trip like ours can yield no sweeping conclusions, but the place feels more real, and more complicated, than it might have before.
read our full report here
The FEELed lab 