Some view points just above the eastern south-eastern shore of Skwácháy̓s: the Columbus Monument (with a statue stolen on stolen land) & the East Van Cross

Both the Columbus Monument and the East Van Cross steal a panorama across Skwácháy̓s and the city. The 1986 Monument is dire: more evocative of a place for ceremonial sacrifice than the ethnic propagandizing of the Italian-Canadian organizations that built it. A generation later, Ken Lum’s ‘East Van Cross’ is another imposition already out of place and redundant: increasingly irrelevant. For inferring conquests and erasures of Skwácháy̓s, the sword and the cross today fall flat, are almost tacky. The heaviness of the Columbia Monument without the statue suggests failed kinds of domination. Whereas the Van East Cross has the odour of marketing of both real estate and stale religion. These cluttering anachronisms lean west towards a series of estuaries where creeks once met and flowed slowly into the sea.

Thanks to artist Oliver Kellhammer who showed me this place during some of our urban field studies on May 26, 2018. That day, Oliver Kellhammer stated that sees the side as the most important public art piece in False Creek especially as the actual statue was stolen and never replaced. He referred to the site as “the perfect non-space.”