Return to Annual Report 2023/24
Standing four stories tall and stretching 6.5km across Toronto’s downtown core, the Gardiner is an imposing piece of infrastructure. At first glance, you might notice the concrete, steel, and the traffic above, but what if you look closer… and listen deeper?
For Summer 2023, The Bentway invited the city to explore the overlooked nature of the Expressway through a constellation of free installations, performances, conversations and events. Visitors discovered a thriving urban ecosystem beneath the highway, where human-made infrastructure intertwines with resilient flora and fauna, growing in spite of, and because of, the concrete.
Waste and wildlife entangled
Balete Bulate Bituka by Leeroy New (Manila, Philippines)
Combining sci-fi and Philippine mythologies with organic and human-made materials, New’s first North American commission reflected on the history of discarded materials once used as landfill to create the ground underneath where The Bentway now sits, and the tangled relationship between nature and our waste that continues in Toronto and around the world. This installation – woven together with bamboo, living plants, and hundreds of locally-sourced discarded plastics – presented nature reasserting itself.
Falling forests
Choreographed by Clarice Lima with collaborating partners, and featuring 40 local residents as performers, the North American premiere of WOODS portrayed a forest of upside-down human bodies reminiscent of the trees which once graced Toronto’s shoreline. Set against the city’s high-rise horizon, performers’ bodies struggled to maintain their verticality, calling attention to the struggle faced by nature itself amidst deforestation in cities across the globe: How long can the body resist? How long can our forests survive?
Site as collaborator
Co-presented with Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, Báez co-created with the soil and stormwater below the Gardiner, burying film underground beneath the highway to absorb the surrounding landscape. The images were then developed and displayed at large-scale, revealing a fragmented landscape and the ever-changing, reciprocal nature of the Expressway and its ecology.
Multispecies lounge
Multispecies Lounge by Double Happiness (Austin & Buffalo, USA)
Architecture-duo Double Happiness created a set of public furniture that aimed to bring attention to urban wildlife in the CityPlace neighbourhood and promote interspecies-encounters. Through UV-painted details, the piece offered glimpses of how birds and insects see beyond the human eye and offered a more-than-human lens through which to experience the urban ecosystem.
Rave for climate grief
Earth Dreams: A Summer Party for Grief & Love by Nocturnal Medicine (Brooklyn, USA)
Artist studio Nocturnal Medicine, known for their recent “Rave For Eco Grief” in New York, presented an urban gathering for a city facing climate change that centred both joy and sorrow, celebration and meditation. Equal parts DJ dance party and urban ritual, Earth Dreams invited over 1,000 attendees to convene beneath the highway and confront their own eco-anxiety and work towards catharsis and optimism together.