art

arbi, "you guys brought the fences", 2007.

By arbi
Briarpatch Magazine
July/August 2010

Aeolian: borne or produced by the wind. (Canadian Oxford Dictionary)

“At first glance, the landscape appeared so beautiful and pristine. With time, thin dark strings of colour began to appear. And with that came the memory of the warrior’s words – “you guys brought the fences.” Indeed, the dark lines were everywhere so that, in time, it became impossible to see anything else.”

- arbi environmental intervention documentation, you guys brought the fences, Stone House Artists’ Retreat, Lundbreck, Alberta, summer 2007.

Barbed wire fences are ubiquitous on the prairie landscape. They symbolize domination of the land, ownership, entitlement and control. Wire fences are a western settlement paradigm that was brought to North America by settlers and land surveyors who sought to tame the limitless territory with mathematical delineations of latitude and longitude and monetary measures of land value. Barriers were needed to keep in livestock and to keep out trespassers.

And so it is that the prairie horizon was reduced to lines of barbed wire and wooden posts fading into infinity.The Aeolian Recreational Boundary Institute (arbi), an artist collective headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, emerged in early 2009 to facilitate ongoing study into borders, boundaries and all forms of barriers that act as disruptive forces in the natural world. The institute works with organizations involved in the remediation of the negative impact that some forms of human intervention have had on existing ecosystems. As a neutral, non-aligned and apolitical entity, arbi has the freedom to collaborate with a wide variety of groups, often with competing interests, providing them with volunteer labour. Direct participation in the activities of these groups allows arbi’s members to gain an intimate, front-line perspective and serves to further their understanding of the effects that man-made barriers have on nature.

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