Woodward’s Amateur Historical Society Archives

Description

Woodward’s Amateur Historical Society Archives collects the work of W.W.A.S., a provisional research collective assembled by Josh Gabert-Doyon as part of his Notes on Permanent Education (N.O.P.E.) fellowship with 221A. The collective (Brit Bachmann, Gabi Dao, Josh Gabert-Doyon, and Byron Peters) occupied Pollyanna 圖書館 Library to plan and carry out an investigation into Vancouver’s Woodward’s building as a historic theatre of class struggle.

W.W.A.S. charted the building’s varied articulations over the past century to grasp Woodward’s as a historical constellation; that is, as a tangle of intertwined narratives through which to comprehend the distinct co-development of urbanism and capitalism in Vancouver. The collective’s research traces the history of Woodward’s by drawing connections between fragments of civic archives, activist histories, commercial ephemera, redacted emails, and nostalgic Facebook groups. W.W.A.S. understands this ‘prehistory’ as a force that haunts Woodward’s controversial ‘present history’ of the last two decades: its acquisition, demolition, and reconstruction as a ‘social-mix’ condo-art megaplex by Westbank Corp, a model now archetypal of private-public redevelopment schemes.

The nature of the collective’s findings led its activity out of the Pollyanna 圖書館 Library stacks and into unfamiliar territories in purpose and method. In coming to understand present-day Woodward’s as an engine of ‘artwashing’, wherein the ongoing, brutal redevelopment of Vancouver’s ‘urban frontier’ is sold as a form of cultural production, the collective moved to refocus its energies to not only understand he politics of Woodward’s, but to intervene in it. W.W.A.S. took on a program of ‘action-research’, where knowledge production meets the political through tactics of insurgent publishing, journalistic provocation, and building living solidarities. The Woodward’s Amateur Historical Society Archives collects this work.