Back to the future
Biidaaban reimagines first peoples reclaiming what once was theirs
Biidaaban: will be shown during the Vancouver International Film Festival that runs Sept. 29 to Oct. 2. Slip on the VR headset and you find yourself in Osgoode Station on Toronto’s Bloor subway line. But the tiles are cracked and faded, and the rail bed has become a river. Down the platform, someone has pulled up a canoe. Further along, the ceiling is halfcollapsed; sunlight and greenery spill in from above. At your feet is a soggy copy of a newspaper. It bears today’s date.
Then the image changes; you’re downtown, in Nathan Phillips Square, which is in a similar state of disrepair. Reeds grow in the reflecting pool. A small tent sits on the weed-strewn concrete.
This is Biidaaban, the Anishinaabe word that means the first light of dawn. It is a melding of the words for past and future — literally, the collision of what was and what will be. Now.
The eight-minute virtual reality experience is the work of First Nations artist and filmmaker Lisa Jackson and designer — he uses the term “environmental artist” — Matthew Borrett. Jackson was at work on an installation that imagined Indigenous languages in the future when she came across a series of illustrations by Borrett called Hypnogogic City, which portray a dilapidated downtown. Something clicked.
“What does it mean when we ‘indigenize’ a city?” Jackson said. She noted that Natives and non-Natives alike tend to think of First Nations people being part of nature, but as with most groups, half now live in big cities.
And so Biidaaban imagines a future in which the First Peoples have reclaimed their territory. For the viewer, it’s an eerie view of the familiar re-imagined, accompanied by a First Nations’ thanksgiving address spoken in three languages — Wendat, Mohawk and Ojibway — that were once the only human tongues heard on these lands. Borrett says his work is often described as “post-apocalyptic,” but he doesn’t like the term. “It implies one disastrous event,” he says. “This is more about many small events over a long period of time.”
He’s a fan of The World Without Us, Alan Weisman’s 2007 non-fiction book that examines what would happen to nature and technology if people were suddenly removed from the equation. There’s a sense of sadness in the resultant decay, but also a frisson of excitement, as anyone who has ever explored an old building or visited a ghost town can attest.