A (counter)archive of a line laid across prairie land, where a border begins to hold // Between 1872 and 1874, a survey crew of roughly sixty men including astronomers, engineers, photographers, and labourers, travelled over 1900-kilometres west from Lake of the Woods in Manitoba to the Rocky Mountains in Alberta to demarcate the border as a straight line between Canada and the United States. This project works to unsettle the archives of the Boundary Commission, questioning how that line, cut along the 49th parallel, has organized the prairie borderlands and how those lands might be reimagined.
Hannah Whitlaw (Thu,) studied this question.