To promote Ribbon to the Future, I'll be setting up a booth next Friday for the Valley Sustainability Showcase at the Wolfville Farmers Market from 2:30pm-5pm. 

This event brings together vendors from the Wolfville, Kentville and Windsor markets as well as a showcase supporting community resiliency and sustainable initiatives currently active in Nova Scotia. Local politicians, business persons and educational faculty from Acadia will be present at this exhibition of the Annapolis Valley’s dynamism. 

Sponsor Ribbon to the Future by pre-purchasing a framed 16x20 signed print and/or a hand-made concertina book.

Drop by the booth to find out more.

Hannah

At L'Acadie Vineyards I met Bruce Ewart whose focus, besides making delicious organic sparkling wines, is stewardship of the land for his children and many generations beyond.  With the house nestled at the edge of the vineyard, this is clearly a family enterprise.  Bruce's wife has deep roots in farming (400 years in the Musqudoboit region) and an exceptional 'nose' – she plays a key role in creating the signature taste of L'Acadie Vineyards wines.  

After our talk I walked up and down, up and down the neat rows of vines.  I experienced a similar feeling to that of walking a meditative labyrinth.  It was cold, really cold, and as I snuggled my chin down into my woolen scarf the vines left me with an impression of strength and interdependence with their arms interlaced on the wires. 

I'll be making a number of visits to L'Acadie Vineyards over the next twelve months: the degourgement of last fall's batch of sparkling wines (that means when they pop the tops off to allow the yeast to escape), to catch the first buds in spring, the full crop hanging in August, picking in late September and October, and most special of all the blend trials where I will witness the process of creating of new wines.

Hannah Minzloff

A couple of weeks ago I dropped in to TapRoot Farms to capture the landscape in the winter.  Some snow was on the ground, however it was rainy with ominous clouds promising to deliver more of the same. 

I was amazed by how much colour was still in the winter crops - curly purple kale, palm tree like green kale, a forgotten tomato still on the vine.

All was quiet on the farm but for one young man loading boxes into a van.

Hannah Minzloff

As we travel through the Valley we are finding more questions than answers in our quest to gain some understanding about its economic history. We photograph the mansions in the towns that were build with the wealth of the ship building, trade and agriculture in the 19th century, and we ask ourselves to what extent this wealth was distributed in terms of wages and taxes in the interest of creating savings  and public services in the community of workers? It is telling, we believe, that in group photographs of children in front of their one room school houses there are always several kids in bare feet and most are poorly dressed.  The record of conditions in the lumber camps and mills is even more distressing. When the wooden ship building finally closed at the end of the 19th century a textile mill (when it closed it was called Windsor Wear) was started in Windsor, similarly  in 1960 a mill was opened near Bridgetown (Britex). These were hopeful initiatives but they basically created single industry towns, were far from their suppliers and markets, high cost in energy and in the end incapable to withstand the forces of globalisation. Both mills closed in the first half of the first decade in the 21st century. We reflect a lot on the history and future of agriculture in the Valley and we wonder how we can ever compete under our climatic conditions that only allow one crop a year of just about anything we want to grow. We often hear about the superiority of the soil quality in the Valley. But when we photographed the Valley from the brim of North Mountain in an East to West direction it becomes clear that there is a lot more bush land than cultivated land. This raises questions about the soil capability for productive agriculture. We need to get a much better handle on the Valley economic history and its potential to help us decide what to photograph to communicate the realities as we find them. 

On the 3rd of November 2011 we visited Steve Raftery, community development coordinator of Bridgetown. When we had explained that the purpose of our visit was to explore links between the Ribbon project and activities and projects in his town he involved 2 others. Rachel Brighton, writer and editor, and Timothy Habinski, a luthier, that is a maker of stringed instruments. His principal creations are harps. All three of them are recent "come from aways" and passionate about Bridgetown.

After Rachel explained that recently the Historical Society completed a project that started in the 1980s,  to archive and make accessible records and photos of the buildings in Bridgetown and environs with the designation "historic" by the Town or Province. We all agreed that a link in the Ribbon website to this archive would contribute to its accessibility.  Then she remarked that the James House Museum is custodian of a large collection of photographs including about 600 glass negatives, possibly a precious historical record of the town but very difficult to access. 

We decided that we should investigate this source further and I made an appointment with Frances Lourie, director of the museum for 21 November. The museum is closed during winter but she graciously opened the place and even turned on the heat so we could have our conversation in comfort. She showed me samples of printed photography that was very interesting but when I asked about the glass negatives she told me a surprising story about Georgia Cunningham. At age 18 she opened a photographic studio in Bridgetown and continued working for almost 50 years documenting the town. Most of the glass negatives are hers. 

I did a little research and found that in that period about 8 photographers practiced in several towns in the Valley but they were all men and none as long as Cunningham. To think that today we can have a visual impression of life in Bridgetown as a result of this women's work is just amazing. We decided to leave Frances with an idea to first of all scan the glass negatives and then in 2013 have some form of retrospective of Cunningham's work in Bridgetown to celebrate her 125th birth year. We are looking forward to her reaction early in 2012. Obviously, reference to the digital photography produced from these glass negatives can be made through the Ribbon website thus increasing their accesibility. 

Hannah and I met with Wayne Reiger, a cartographer at the Geomatics Research Group (GRG) of the Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC) in Middleton to discuss ways to link Ribbon to the Future to geographic positioning and various methods to link a variety of information to the photographs we are taking. Here Hannah and Wayne are working out these technical issues. Many thanks to the GRG which is participating in the Ribbon to the Future project by providing technical and inspirational guidance to make the project a success.

I met with Glenn Ells last week for a conversation about the agricultural economy of the Valley that focussed more on the Kings County side than Annapolis County. Glenn, whose forebears came to the Valley in the late 18th century, has been a farmer for 50 years in the Sheffield Mills area.  He also earned his spurs as Minister of the Environment in the Gerald Regan cabinet in the 1970s. As well Glenn Ells has been prominent in a variety of local agricultural organizations, and he is the author of  a series of 3 historical novels of the region. The conversation made it clear that he provides very well-considered and authoritative information about the evolution of the farming economy in the valley.

Dick Groot
September 2011

The seed of the project “Ribbon to the Future” was planted in 1996-97 when I spent holidays with my family in the Annapolis Valley.  Driving the old routes from Annapolis Royal to Minas Basin I was struck by the architecture of the farms, villages and towns that betrayed both wealth and economic decline.  The landscape itself presented fields that had gone out of production and abandoned railroads overgrown with young forests of alders, birch and pine; sometimes cleared to start life anew as recreational trails.  I was also struck by a terrific example of late 19th century classic “Standard English Mill” industrial architecture: The Windsor Wear- Nova Scotia Textiles Mill.  It had gone out of business and some entrepreneurs had a vision to turn it into high-end condos and art centre including a brewery and restaurant.  I photographed the plant just after most of the old machinery had been moved.

As we summered in the Valley until 2001 we became more and more interested in the life and spirit of the valley towns and villages and more puzzled by the reasons for the decline in economic activity, the vitality of the artistic community.  At the same time we saw new enterprises that looked more like soloist craft or artisan type activities and old buildings that had found new uses, for example the railway station in Wolfvile which is now the Public Library.  

When in 2002 we moved permanently to Wolfville I became interested in creating a portrait documentary of artists of the Minas Basin area who had migrated here from the early 1970s onward.  I wanted to know what makes them tick, why did they come and given the precarious economic conditions in which many find themselves, why do they stay?  At the end of the project I concluded that these folks are passionate about their art and independence, and they measure their quality of life in those rather than economic terms.  I completed this documentary of 12 artists and artisans and showed the result at ViewPoint Gallery in Halifax in the Fall of 2003 and at ArtCan in Canning in February 2004.

From the first visits to the Valley I have made photographs of the tidal landscape of Fundy and Minas Basin.  A selection of 32 of those were shown in a multimedia installation in the Fall of 2010 at the Art Gallery of Acadia University.  This was a significant departure in my solitary photographic practice as it involved the collaborative effort of poets, a composer, a sound specialist, a recording specialist as well as actors and singers to read the poetry, in addition to myself.  The experience led to new personal insight into dealing with the place of photography in relation to other art media to achieve a specific purpose. 

Hannah had also arrived at a point in her photographic career where the traditional way of showing work in exhibits on walls was no longer the only satisfying one.  We began kicking around ideas as to how one could reflect the economic and social history of the Valley around a core of very good photography, to colaborate with artists in other media to complement our work.  To exploit not only conventional ways of presenting the work but also the new web media.  Taking this path would make the project much more broadly accessible and could even evolve into a community resource to which new information could be added.

Thus an art based project would become a stimulus for individuals to explore the history and better understand the potential of the Annapolis Valley as a great place to live, have families and start new enterprises that take full advantage of the opportunities of the growing IT technologies.

Dick Groot
August 2011

I'm very excited about Ribbon to the Future - and even more so now that I can share the website, blog, twitter, the google profile and a gorgeous promo piece with you, not to mention the photographs!

In this blog we will write about work-in-progress.  Trips made to the Valley, people we have met, photos we are working on.  We have already invited some fantastic people to contribute to Ribbon to the Future: Bob Maher, senior researcher in Geomatics at the Nova Scotia Community College and Meredith Dault, a very smart Canadian writer.

Do you live in the Annapolis Valley?  I'd like to hear from you - what are you doing that's innovative in the way of sustainable food production, transportation, energy, community and youth engagement?

Hannah