groundbite

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GESTATING...

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Sicilians in Buffalo - fleeing vulnerability from no land rights, seeking out a land of one’s own. Making their mark on the local culinary landscape, itself reshaping and extracting from, yet turning away from indigenous foods. Smoothing out the edges of ‘ethnic’ food - being subsumed into the American canon and acceptable ‘foreign’ foods. Malleable foods. A hint of Mediterranea and its promises of pomodori. A hint of the hard working immigrant to which all bona fide Americans aspire. A softening of the edges, a simplifying of names. Ferdinandos become Freds, Giuseppes become Joes, Marias become Marys. A uniforming of flavour. A subsuming of culture into the mainstream, the new, the palatable.

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Buffalo, NY - Love love love this!!! At the Founding Fathers pub which is majestic and full of patina and smells like popcorn

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Buffalo, NY and its terracotta magic...

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The challenge: Injecting more meaning into place when the downtown has become a no-go area, a tawdry donut where all commercial activity takes place round the edges in big boxes, safely reachable by car, comprehensible, safe. Inside it is afflicted with ‘homelessness’, muggers and a big opioid problem. The troublemakers lurk in the covered carpark, taunting the locals and keeping them away. And yet -  this is a university town with big plans for expansion, big plans to attract more international students and to make the downtown a thriving areas for the 8000+ students who have picked Brantford as their school. And yet - there is a massive housing issue - in Ontario, along with almost everywhere, where housing has become affordable in Toronto. The next town along, Hamilton, despite appearances, is also now considered unaffordable, which means that Brantford with its good job prospects, proximity to Toronto and affordable housing is now being touted as ‘Canada’s best location’ How? The cool rationality of the 1960s shopping mall to be flipped into something with meaning whilst the old immigrant bakeries lay waiting to be pastichised for a younger population, frozen out of Toronto prices...

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Toronto, ON - a pandemic ravaged city, already on stolen land. Cross pollination is rife as the city surges on as an instrument of capital... ChippeWAR stuff...’multicultural’ Toronot (Tesla-esque), etc etc

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I took off down to the end of Louisiana - Plaquemines Parish, the bird’s foot, where skin is flaking off and tendons are frayed. Places that once were are no more - 31 place names out of action and consigned to the vaults since 2011. Gaze off into the water and there lies the mirage of fields full of watermelon, mustard greens, orange groves and cattle. Endless, mainly men, come down to work the land, hunt from it, shore it up. Fishermen, dredgers, trawlers, duck hunters, land folk. Sometimes for months on end. At the Lighthouse Inn men attempt to wash their catches in the tub until management puts a stop to it. The duck hunters who travel from Gonzalez grill their birds with bacon, jalapeños and cream cheese - only lightly or they get tough - from the back of their trucks. Mallards, mainly, but also Puldos.

I met Lamont and Nate in the reception area where I was busy having fun with Jawold, the punk receptionist with the 2 earrings and 4 gold teeth, tattoo’d neck and beautiful Louisiana syrrrrpy beeeebe accent. They are down here doing a job for the Venice Port Complex (nee Louisiana Fruit Company) - injecting water activated foam apoxy into a loose lipped barrier that keeps weeping out either side, defeating the purpose of the protection it is designed to offer. Squelchy. Can’t behave. Land is relaxing and submitting to the endless tugging...It’s losing integrity, just slopping out.

I head over to find them the next day on Coastguard Road where they sit mixing this vehement yellow gunk up with the power of a 4.5kva gennie, barking out across the alligator laden waters. Job’s almost a good’n. Clients seem happy. [put biz card pic in]. Much of their work these days is fixing up the land, shoring it up, creating new land, grabbing it back from its attempts to slip quietly away. Not on our watch, they tell me - we can recoup this...

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SAND. It powers our entire civilisation. It is responsible for the creation of concrete, asphalt, glass, microchips. We need it for everything. We dig into the ground for it, mine it from ancient geological kinks, nick it from islands to artificially bulk up others. We build our roads with it, build our houses with it, build our cities with it. And we can’t get enough. We are THIRSTY for these grains which convert to all this hardwiring across our vast, human-powered networks. 

I don’t think I’d ever really considered it before. It has always felt kind of infinite - and a joke to hear of Arab countries having to import sand to build with. But they’ve got beaucoup grains in their backyard! Wrong grain type, apparently. Desert sand is soft edges, made spherical by the insistent winds barrelling it into dunes. You can’t build with ‘round’ sand - it’s like trying to stack marbles. No, you need the jaggedy kind you get in the ocean where water is gentler on its contours and leaves it crunchier and more bindable.

CONCRETE: (roughly 10% cement, 20% air and water, 30% sand, and 40% gravel) forms the skeleton of every city in the world at this point. Between 2011-2013 China used more concrete than the whole of the USA in the entire 20th century.

Christ. New York, Chicago, Houston, LA - small fry. China has not come to play. China is THIRSTY for those grains. But the grains are dipping. Literally running through our fingers and we don’t even notice...

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I want to walk the world. Pound the pavements. Mark out my territory wherever I go, checking the pulse, catching the spirit of place. Feeling those deep ripples and vibrations. I do not believe we are encouraged enough out of our heads and into connecting fully with our bodies and the ground beneath them.

It seems like the head is given precedence over all else in the west. That bodies are merely consigned to vehicular status, there to carry our overloaded, over-stressed heads around, whilst devolving into numbness under that weight and disconnection.

Bodies aren’t numb. They are there to collaborate with. To be listened to. To find the rhythm through. They are magical and powerful and it’s time to get back into them. 

I am on the prowl for those who are deep in this - musicians, dancers, growers, healers, gardeners, farmers, mycologists, earthworms...I wanna sink in. I wanna walk, connect to the ground, find the personality of place in this way and discover people who connect to it all in wild and unimagined ways.

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I’m Petra - meaning rock, stone. Earth sign - Capricorn. From a father who always had his hands in the soil. I am interested in hiraeth, interested in the land. Interested in its gravitational pull even when we have long left the land that we love. Interested in what effect the ground beneath us has on us when we’re above it. 

I am drawn to the trees that root into the land and the buildings that are rooted in with their own tendrils of steel. I am drawn to the power of place. The electric charge of the ground beneath us and the ways in which we play with it, whether knowingly or not.

In 2010 I began a Masters in Urban Studies, prompted by the discovery of Rem Koolhaus’ Delirious New York that posits New York “as the arena for the terminal stage of western civilisation”. Prompted by my intrigue at imagining what was held in the ground of what had been before. What pockets of information still resided in the sediment. In the patina, the residue. I was gripped by ‘deep topography’ but had no name for it yet.

In 2012 I started a business, KERB, that was all about the power of the concrete of the city to act as a platform, leveller and stage for the street food made and sold on it, and the street life that emerged from this.

In 2014 I spent 3 months in New Orleans, plunged into the city’s second line culture and was struck by the emphasis placed on footwork - on the feet’s connection and ease with the ground beneath, denoting connection to place and a currency that can only be felt. It denotes an ease with your body and the stomping out of your feelings, ownership, energy, joy on your own ground, making it sacred.

The ground is where it’s at. It’s where the energy transfers from underneath us , through our bodies, directing us, charging us, making us feel HOME. 

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Back to the terroir...

If you type #personalityofplace into Instagram you get one lone post. The image is of a door knocker for the studio of a jewellery designer and by an architectural photographer. Google turns up more and I am pouring over these - diving deeper into the idea of PLACE. How it feels, how it moves, how it attracts certain people to it and is shaped and formed by life on top of it as well as the bones of the land beneath it. The charge. The current. The ancient strata that emits its energy, generates growing conditions and propensity for certain activities to unfold on top of it...