I’m Karen – Camille’s sister and Outerregion co-collaborator. Camille has given over the reigns to the blog for now. This is my first post & likely the shortest as I am suffering from a horrible case of jetlag. I promise you this – I will never fly into Kamloops on a tiny little propellor plan again! My heart (& stomach contents) nearly left my body several times throughout that ordeal…
Here I am in Kamloops. So far, a very interesting city. Beautiful surroundings – majestic mountains, clean, fresh air….and then the waft of smoke winding its way through the mountains from the Domtar Factory nestled amongst the trees.
Tonight (really this afternoon – not used to the 3 hour time difference as yet), we met with some of our film crew. I realize how difficult it is to explain what we do to people. We, The Final Frontier, have come to Kamloops to interact with people through interventions to heal the earth, themselves and ourselves. This is what we’ve done when we’ve ‘appeared’ in other sites. What is difficult to explain is the intervention itself. This is because we don’t know what the intervention should be. In Lethbridge, we celebrated the harvest, and communed with each other, giving each other gifts of grain. The townspeople eagerly joined in, bringing their children, and used the intervention to teach their children how to share and how to embrace and relate to people who look different from themselves.
For Kamloops, we have much to figure out. We’ve brainstormed ideas, such as looking at the relationship of paper to the people – the Domtar paper mill both hires people, and pollutes the town, and throughout this, people are not environmentally conscious and callously throw away paper items (such as cups) without thinking. The difficulty in our brainstorming is that our interventions are successful, not because we’ve planned them well, but because we’re willing to develop the intervention spontaneously with the people who are in effect our
clients. The process itself is what is most important. Often, we don’t know what we will do, but it comes together as it’s the relationship between our clients and us that is important. In addition to our physical actions, we want to know what people who are observing from
afar think and say about us. They are also an important part of the intervention. All of this is difficult to explain to a film crew. We can’t tell you where to go, what to say, who to focus on. It will all reveal itself.
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