930 is a collection of excerpts from an archive created in collaboration with fellow tenants in my former apartment building after it had been sold to developers and was slated for demolition.  Our eleven-unit residence was home to a diverse and eclectic community of renters, some of whom had lived in their units for close to thirty years.  At the time we received the news that we were being evicted, the vacancy rate in Victoria was the lowest in Canada at less than 0.5%, while rental costs had surged to the second highest in the country.  Although focusing on the disparity of the situation was unavoidable, so too was the recognition that the idiosyncratic community we had formed over the years was going to be missed. 

In the six weeks leading up to our eviction I began interviewing each tenant in the building, asking what they would remember most about living there.  These anecdotes became the basis for a body of work that began to take its form through a mediation of story and place:  zines featuring photos taken by tenants on disposable cameras were distributed within the community, objects of personal in/significance became collaborative still life portraits and the subjects of museum-style vitrines, and interviews and domestic field recordings were transformed into sound installations while providing inspiration for participatory performative responses, most notably a dinner party with a harpist and nude waiter influenced by a book in one of the tenant’s collections.  

After unsuccessfully attempting to donate this project to the City of Victoria Archives and Records Division, the work’s cumulation took the form of a simple performative action:  banal snapshots of each tenant’s unit were transformed into postcards and inconspicuously deposited onto gift card racks at local tourist shops.  While the building we lived in no longer remains, small hints of the varied layers of significance it once occupied can still be found around the city.  

Laura Gildner is a multidisciplinary artist living and working on the unceded territories Lekwungen and WSÁNEĆ peoples (Victoria, BC). Her work typically exists at the intersections of performance and lens-based media, investigating sites of shared and makeshift community through site-responsive or situationally reactive events and productions. Most recently she has exhibited at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, the Polygon, and at VIVO where her work Informer was a selected exhibition for this year’s Capture Photography Festival. Gildner is the 2020 recipient of the Lind Prize in Photography, Film, and Video Art, and is a graduate of the University of Victoria.

Curated and commissioned by PAVED Arts.