- Spoken Word
- Informative
In late August 1973, artist and filmmaker Barbara Hammer, and her lover Terry Anderson, arrived on Hornby Island in the Southern Gulf Islands of the Salish Sea, part of traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the K'ómoks First Nation. They were only there for a few days, and whilst there, Barbara took three rolls of film that would, along with other photographs of her travels, friendships, and lovers from that time, become emblematic documentation of her early artistic years.
Barbara Hammer’s photographs on Hornby Island form ecstatic impressions of an initial encounter with a place and the intuitions given to interacting with it for the first time. But who, and what lives beyond their peripheries? In this chapter of New Friend, we explore the anthropological, ecological, geological, socio-cultural, and lesbian history of the island, through stories of arrival.
New Friend is a five-part radio documentary exploring the context behind a series of photographs taken by the artist and experimental filmmaker, Barbara Hammer. The photographs were taken over one weekend in August 1973, on Hornby Island Ja-Dai-Aich.
Thank you to all of those who shared their stories, memories, and voices for the purposes of this project.
In this chapter, you heard the following voices (in order of appearance):
April Shopland
John Cox
Nancy Turner
Scott Watson
Albert Savoie
Judith Lawrence
Jan Bevan
Annie Martin
Persimmon Blackbridge
Clair Cronia
Bonita Wexler
The rocks, plants, trees, wind, and water of Hornby Island Ja-Dai-Aich.
In this chapter, you also heard excerpts from a 1972 interview with Albert Savoie by Joanne Humphrey.
New Friend is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.
Mixing and Mastering by Robert Steenkamer.
Warmest thanks, in addition, for their help in the making of this project:
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
Barbara Hammer Estate
Hornby Island Community Archives
Cashmere Radio, Berlin
96.5 CHFR Hornby Island Community Radio
KOW, Berlin
Company Gallery, New York City
Rebecca Dunne
Emma Walter
Emily Harrison
All beings, human and more-than-human, of Hornby Island Ja-Dai-Aich, and its surrounding waters—where I am a part-time, uninvited guest on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded lands of the K'ómoks First Nation.
by Bitsy Knox (2024).
