Memory, Milestones, and Monuments: A Peripatetic Exploration of the West Side of UBC Campus

Abstract

Reflexive walking practices have gained increased attention as creative and analytic tools in recent years. This article documents a performative event in this vein that occurred in April 2016 at the University of British Columbia as part of the West Coast’s annual Tri-University Graduate Colloquium in Theatre and Performance Research. The hour-long Amble explored a portion of the host campus reflecting on the Colloquium theme, “Milestones and Commemoration.” Presenters staged interventions at select sites as provocations to consider how institutions such as universities focus and direct complex layers of cultural memory and amnesia, forms of diverse representation (or lack thereof), and eruptions of collegiate performance and performativity. The Tri-U Amble repeatedly unveiled shadows in the commemorative spaces it considered. Sites explored include two First Nations outdoor artworks, two portrait busts, the historic Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, the site of an intramural spectacle, and the War Memorial Gym. The article attempts to capture the dynamic flow of the Amble’s trek across campus, progressing gradually in mnemonic inquiry from the political and cultural, to the collegiate, and finally to the personal.