Selected currents and waves programs that run on Blue Cabin Thursdays:​

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Harbour Symphony by Hildegard Westerkamp, 10min

Harbour Symphony is a musical composition created by Hildegard Westerkamp, and performed live by over 100 boat horns in the Vancouver Harbour on May 2, 1986. That day, nearly 150 boats of all sizes and shapes gathered in the harbour around Canada Place in downtown Vancouver, to perform the first-ever harbour symphony for boat horns. The piece was composed on commission from the Canada Pavilion for its Expo '86 opening. It is conceivably the largest environmental music event ever to be mounted in Vancouver. The piece was composed in memory of Westerkamp’s brother, Helmut Westerkamp, who, as a cadet sailor on the German training ship "Pamir," went down in a hurricane in the mid-Atlantic on September 21, 1957.

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Invasion Day 13min

Featuring Jeneen Frei Njootli, Christie Lee Charles, Senaqwila Wyss  andClaire G. Coleman

Invasion Day evolved out of past Other Sights’ Projects, The Foreshore and The Future is Floating. In an act of solidarity with Indigenous people and artists in Australia, Miss Christie Lee Charles, Jeneen Frei Njootli and Senaqwila Wyss performed at the Blue Cabin on January 25th, 2020. This coincided with Invasion Day in Australia on January 26th (Australia Day). A recorded performance by Claire G. Coleman was also rebroadcast as part of the event. Claire’s piece, entitled We Are Water, was originally performed on the water in Sydney as part of The Future is Floating exchange. Australia Day is intended to celebrate both Australia and the landing of Captain Cook, however many Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people know it as Invasion Day, the beginning of colonialism in Australia. Bringing together two harbours across the Pacific - False Creek in Vancouver and Sydney Harbour - this performance event was rooted in a desire to explore and confront the complex legacies of colonial presence through the lens of artistic practice. 

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Blue Cabin Artist in Residence Talk by Angela George  1hr 5min

Angela George was the second Blue Cabin Skeins: Weaving on the Foreshore artist. Angela George carries two ancestral names: sits’sáts’tenat and qʷənat. Her late mother is slatwx, Cookie Thomas (Cole/Discon/Billy family) from Swxwú7mesh and her father is from the Baker family from Swxwú7mesh and the Jones and Peter family on Vancouver Island. She was raised by her late Dad, wika, Alexander Paul of Sts’ailes in the Fraser Valley. Angela George is married to Gabriel George, grandson of late Chief Dan George and lives and works in the Tsleil-Waututh Nation in North Vancouver. She is humbled by the gift of traditional weaving, holding this connection to her late mother and Squamish ancestry dearly. She loves to learn and teach weaving and strives to carry this sacred practice with the utmost integrity.

 

Skeins: Weaving on the Foreshore is a celebration of Coast Salish weaving practices that have developed in these territories since time immemorial. As such, it is anchored by the participation of weavers from the three local nations: Debra Sparrow from Musqueam, Janice George and Buddy Joseph of Squamish, and Angela George from Squamish/ Tsleil-Waututh. Skeins also includes a residency with Australian Indigenous artist and activist Vicki Couzens (Gunditjmara) produced in partnership with the Australia Council for the Arts. Rooted in the local, and spanning the international, these artists bring a long history of cultural, ceremonial, and community involvement, organizing and reclaiming, aesthetics and activism. These four residencies form the very first series of artist residencies at the Blue Cabin Floating Artist Residency.

 

The Blue Cabin has always occupied a position on the landscape that highlighted the edges of the built environment – spaces on the foreshore that were, for many reasons, outside the realm of what was generally understood to be ‘the city’. A vision of the floating residency has always been to provide a space that circulates on the water, and encourages a vantage point that allows artists and the public to appreciate the many complex histories that make up this region. Blue Cabin’s first priority has been to acknowledge and pay respect to the Coast Salish peoples, and the thousands of years they have lived on and cared for the lands and waters that are now referred to as the Lower Mainland. It is important to begin as we mean to continue – in conversation with colleagues whose practices tell stories that come from a fundamental connection to this place. 

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