Prominent Nocturne piece explores development at HRM’s Wildland-Urban Interface

backlandsOne of the top five Media Arts Projects at Nocturne 2015 is a piece by Susan Tooke about choices that transform our landscapes in HRM.

3B:BACKLANDS, BADLANDS, BURBS explores the destruction of natural habitat by the encroaching development of our precious, wild Backlands on the Halifax south mainland.

3B will be shown in front of the Halifax Central Library on Spring Garden Road between 6 pm and midnight on Saturday Oct 17. The video will be rear screen projected form inside the library and the  audio track broadcast from a speaker by the entrance.

“The audience will experience through sound and images the natural landscape, the progression of the destruction of this rare environment and the building of the new neighbourhood. The fragile ecosystem is forever changed, with the very bedrock that supported it reshaped to provide for new housing. The lands once part of the Backlands wilderness area, found by hikers, bikers and finally developers is irrevocably lost, then re-purposed as human habitation remakes the landscape.”

3B bears a special connection to the recent Hike the Greenbelt events as the last and most poplar event explored the same transition in the vicinity of Colpitt Lake. The destruction of the Whopper Dropper behind Bayer’s Lake shopping area – similar terrain to the Backlands – shocked Haligonians in the spring of 2015. Elsewhere in HRM, we continue to make choices at the expense of  the natural world that forms so much of the character and culture of Halifax.

3B B:BACKLANDS, BADLANDS, BURBS stimulates us to think deeply about choices we make as we  move ahead with the Green Network plan for Halifax.

There will be much more to stimulate our senses and thoughts at Nocturne 2015 for which Curator Rose Zack asked artists “to explore history, memory, consciousness, and the changes wrought by time in Halifax’s unique cultural, historical and social spaces. We consider what takes place in the moments between past and present, the familiar and the unknown, and the potential for subversion and change as part of this year’s curatorial theme: Found and Lost and Found”

So please experience 3B on Saturday evening as part of your Nocturne 2015 evening.

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