Project adaptation to Covid

In March, I began brainstorming ways to adapt my vision of this project in the face of a world-wide pandemic that appears to have no end in sight. The shelter-in-place order, the need to maintain distance from others, and to not gather in groups meant my vision for the project needed to adjust. The fact that it was to be installed outside was the one thing it had going for it.

Scope of project

While the vision of at least 9 individual units coming together into a large semi-circle expressed the level of community connectedness that I longed to express/facilitate, I knew that physical and social distancing measures would not allow for that proximity. I decided to reduce the number to four structures with more space in between. Four structures for the four family members who held this story silently through out their lives.

Structures

With sheltering-in-place orders in effect, I realized that I would need to be able to construct this project on my own in order to control the rate of progress and my efficiency to move through the project. If the parts for these four structures could be transported in our own vehicle, and built on site by two people, the project had a better chance of becoming a reality.

Additionally, I realized that the extreme-ephemeral nature to the project would need to be adapted. It made sense that the project could be up for a week or two at the most if the majority of people who were going to engage it attended the opening ceremony and knew to observe it’s unweaving for a short period of time. But now, I would need to rely on people visiting individually, and that would require the structures to be more durable and constructed to be up for two months instead of weeks.

So, I adapted the concept to a wooden structure that provides a more substantial system of supporting the tapestry and visitors. The warp of the weaving will be more secure, but the unweaving potential is still present.

Project site

The City of Duluth had approved Gichi-ode’ Akiing Park as the site for the project back in the Fall of 2019. Sister Cities Park had been my first choice but the size of the project made it a bad fit. With a reduced number of structures, I reconnected with the City’s Park’s Board in hopes that they would reconsider Sister Cities Park. The connection to Petrozavodsk, Russia is inextricably tied to the history of the Karelian Red Exodus.

Opening Ceremony

The large opening ceremony that I imagined also can not happen with the pandemic. It has been a much larger endeavor to bring much of that content online to this website.