The Experimental Transit Sessions (AKA: ETS) (AKA: Edmonton Transit Service) started as a silly play on words born out of a lack of accessible and affordable all ages venues. Over the summer and more specifically through hindsight the silly and simple shows came to mean a lot more to me. If you missed it, The ETS was a series of 5 shows staged in the pedway of Churchill Station. They started out as legal busking operations and concluded with the cops finding issue with a permit-less experimental noise set. Throughout the summer I also developed a micro-gallery/library to accompany the bands & musicians. This mico-archive is meant to showcase and preserve (for as long as we can afford this website, buy a shirt pls ;)) the micro-gallery and the philosophy that backed the series.
The ETS shows were free to anyone who stumbled upon them, but any money donated went to the artists and also Boyle Street Community Services. The money donated totaled $410!Boyle Street is an organization that serves Edmonton's under-housed community members. Train stations and bus stops so often become substitutes for affordable housing & shelters and I wasn't about to gentrify a LRT station without giving back.
The local noise, photography, and writing were meant to push attendees and participants to find the value in quasi-public spaces. The ETS encouraged community members to change the way they explore, experience, and exist within spaces which are often seen as hostile, and to occupy them with intent and gratitude. The pro-transit / pro-public spaces / pro-community attitude that first backed the ETS is still with me, but has also spiraled into an obsession with public art and the DIY ethos, and apathy towards curation without a goal or purpose. Some of these ideas can be found in the micro-gallery & manifesto below.
Artists and writers are credited on their respective pieces, graphic design credit goes to HELTH Designs and curation credit goes to me.
13 musicians, 2 poets, 4 photographers, 2 authors, and many friends new and old.
Photography credit to the fantastic Andrew Murray.
Rebecca // @x.xxellers - 12/29/2019