Preface for Plus, a succession plan for Watershed+


We have always struggled with trying to define WATERSHED+ – it’s a plan, a program, an artwork. It is processed-based work, with temporary and permanent work. It is performance and collaborative. It is artist-lead, municipal, internally and externally focused; it is engaging, informing, educational. It is engineering. It is art. It is serious, critical, joyous, challenging, and celebratory.

As Lead Artists we were part of The City of Calgary with a studio in the Water Centre, a City email address, and a security pass, but were not employees.

It's all of these things, it's blurry.

For some, the inability to compartmentalise it was uncomfortable, disconcerting. For the people who made it together (engineers, strategists, public art administrators, planners, educators, communicators, and artists) it was anything but – it was logical.

Engineers, by and large, are not drawn to embellishment or frivolity; they like order, systems, certainties, solutions and efficiency. There is of course a pleasure and beauty in this; to take the world and, with ingenuity and science, shape it to allow us to live is one of humankind’s greatest achievements. Artists will tell you this is not the whole story of living, we like the edges, the accidents, the gaps and disruptions; we relish the “what ifs”, the risks, the unknown. Strange bedfellows it might seem.

We have been asked many times why/how does it work?

We think this difference is why it works. When two strangers come together to talk about one common subject, with intrigue, trust, respect, and appetite to know more about the other, it makes for the most interesting conversation. Our differences made us interested in each other, in the way we think, work, in our skills and contributions. By working together, we have achieved something that neither of us could have completed on our own. With the right approach we see both our hands in the outcome, we both have agency and authorship, and we can see it is better for it. (It allows place for egos but not arrogance or ignorance.)

This working model doesn’t fit current conventions, working in silos is easier to understand, organise, and plan. However, real life and the environment we live in doesn’t fit simply into individual silos.

WATERSHED+ was far from an attempt at extensive scope creep and anarchy. It was an optimistic gesture, embodying a different mode of operation, a different reality, complimentary, responsive, richer, beyond silos.

It works not because of one person. It works not because of one artist team, one extraordinary project manager, visionary leaders, or the hard work, passion and talent of countless City staff, and artists. (Whom we have been extraordinarily fortunate to work with each day.) It works because of the whole, and it works because there is shared appetite; it works because there is a need we all feel.

Beyond the works produced, the legacy is the effect it has had on all of those who have been involved (citizens, staff, artists) and the way we each think and feel, the connection we feel to one another's work, our watershed, our environment, our city.

WATERSHED+ is a philosophy that set out a way of working that was collaborative and responsive and then over five years shaped itself through collective experience.

Its ultimate conclusion (or in City speak, ‘what success looks like’) will be the day this philosophy is so normal it doesn’t need a name.

1. One and Three Chairs, http://www.moma.org/collection/works/81435