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Artist Sasha Chapman offers us a glimpse into the network of land and water below our streets — and ourselves too.
If you are a human being — and I assume that you are probably human if you are reading this, unless you are a machine created by and now learning from us — you are now more likely to live in a city than not. This is a relatively new phenomena in human history, and one that will become increasingly common, according to the World Bank: while 56% of us live in cities today, 70% of us are projected to live in cities by 2050.
There are lots of good reasons for people to live in cities, but one of the great challenges is that it’s much harder to feel a strong connection to the natural world when most of your daily life is lived among concrete and asphalt. It seems to me that this is the most important task we have at hand: to find a way to connect human beings with the land and water that sustains them, if we are to navigate our way safely out of the climate emergency. Because how can we become better stewards of the natural world if we don’t feel connected to it?
Most cities do have parks and other manicured green spaces, but these are generally well-ordered and planned out by human design: trees are planted there, and grass is planted here, with mulch or asphalt paths in between designed to keep your shoes clean.
This is one of the truly special things about Toronto’s ravine system: while it is by no means untouched by human influence — what part of the world is not, at this point, where we can find bits of plastic all the way down in the deep sea’s Mariana Trench? — the ravine system is an unusually wild place set within the urban environment. When you look at a map of Toronto, you can see the ravines’ green fingers reaching all the way down through the city’s core. It’s for this reason that people call Toronto one of the world’s greenest metropolises.
For many years, Toronto’s ravines were dark, neglected places. They were full of the city’s cast offs: broken glass and needles and marginalized people. Gay men cruised in them for sex to avoid the harassment of police in the bathhouses on Church Street. The ravine I grew up on was the site of the city’s first dump, and as a kid I would conduct “archaeologic” digs there. Old brown Javex bottles and shards of pottery would appear in the soil each spring, as ice and snow melted and scoured the slopes. Organizations like the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority and Bring Back the Don have worked tirelessly to protect and restore and clean up these neglected areas to make them more livable for all species, two legged and otherwise. In 2020, the city’s first comprehensive, coordinated Toronto Ravine Strategy of 11,000 hectares of greenspace was adopted by City Council. This strategy has launched new stewardship projects involving a thousand volunteers.
While Toronto’s ravine system is by no means untouched by human influence it is an unusually wild place set within the urban environment. When you look at a map of Toronto, you can see the ravines’ green fingers reaching all the way down through the city’s core.
Today the ravines remain a refuge for unhoused people, and for many things our city wants to forget, but they no longer feel nearly as dangerous as they once did because many more people now spend far more time in them: walking, biking, exploring. There are more “eyes on the ravine,” to adapt a phrase from Jane Jacobs — which, as the great urban theorist pointed out, is often the best way to make a place safe. The pandemic also had something to do with this, and so did wayfinding campaigns about the city’s “lost rivers”; there are now many more signs on the streets to remind you of the hidden world that lies below it.
Even so, there are still plenty of people who rush about the conscious world that lies above the city without ever giving a thought to the unconscious world that lies below it — despite the fact that this shadow world below underpins and determines so much of what happens in the city above. Toronto, like most cities, would never exist if it weren’t for its watershed. Not only that, the city is also at its mercy, the watershed constantly threatening to erode what we build over it.
In 2022 I began to work on SHADOWLAND, a photography project, to try to evoke the power and mystery I felt whenever I found myself in the ravines: the mysterious, hidden power of a watershed that controls where and how we build our streets and bridges, which of our foundations are destined to falter, and where the stormwater from our sewers will next deposit our unwanted cast offs.
I wanted to make land and water my subjects, rather than prioritizing the people who live with them. In doing so, I hoped to challenge our instinctively human-centric point of view. But I also didn’t want to make idealized images of a “wild” place that showed no trace of human beings. Part of feeling connected to land and water means seeing ourselves in it — while also seeing the land and water as beings in their own right that are just as full of spirit and movement as we are, even if those movements happen on a different timescale. So I sought to make images that would imply the presence of human life.
When the Evergreen Brick Works offered me their City Builders Gallery in the kiln area of the old brick factory, I set to work creating a site-specific installation that would be very different from a traditional photography show that features prints in matching frames that are hung in rows on a white wall. I decided to print the images on rice paper scrolls that would hang in the middle of the space, so that viewers could walk around them and see how their movements would affect the way the scrolls billowed and eventually wear over time. I wanted to underscore the intimate connection between viewers and the things we view, between human beings and the living world we act on but cannot always control.
Because we see so little of the city from the ravines, and therefore in my images, I created a soundscape so that people could hear the city as they made their way through the installation. I arranged the images and three different soundtracks at three different heights in the space to create the feeling that viewers were descending into the ravines.
I love showing this work at the Evergreen Brick Works, not only because the site is a gateway and access point to the ravines but also because of its history as the quarry and factory that built some of our city’s major landmarks.
It seems to me that we must learn to understand the give and take of our actions in the land and water we depend on. This means understanding both the delicate nature of a watershed, and also its great power: we ignore this at our peril.
We are not apart from our city’s ravine system, we are part of it.
Sasha Chapman is a Toronto-based writer, photographer and artist working on a project about cities and their watersheds. The next installment, WHAT THE RIVER CARRIES, explores the Tiber River and what it means to live downstream from Rome’s imperial legacy. SHADOWLAND is on display at the Evergreen Brick Works from May 1 to December 31, 2024.
