1 Sighting/Citing/Siting serves as an archival document of a oneday interdisciplinary site-specific event, entitled Crossfiring/ Mama Wetotan that took place at the Claybank Brick Plant National Historical Site in southwest Saskatchewan on 2 September 2006. The publication examines and theorizes the results of bringing together over fifty interdisciplinary artists from across Canada, who created work ranging from sound installations, multi-media, earthworks, and performances. The event and subsequent publication aims to bridge aboriginal and non-aboriginal cultural communities both of whom were and continue to be spiritually and geologically connected to the site and its surrounding landscape.

2 "How do we provoke a desire to remember something when there is no personal connection to it?" (96). In the producing of Crossfiring/Mama Wetotan the collaborating artists visited the site and used their reflective experience of the architecture of the Claybank Brick Factory and the surrounding topography known as Dirt Hills as inspiration for creating an original work. The aim of the original creation was to harness the spectators’ perceptual filter in recognizing "their physical and cultural connections to a location few could have accessed during its productive years as the brick plant." The Claybank Brick Factory opened in 1914 manufacturing face brick for such historical sites as the Chateau Frontenac Hotel in Quebec City and the Bessborough Hotel in Saskatoon; the labour was documented as "brutally manual." After World War II the need for brick manufacturing declined considerably, eventually resulting in the closure of the plant in 1989 due to global economic pressures. In 1994 the site was designated a Provincial Heritage Property and a National Historic Site. To this day the site displays its authenticity: most buildings are intact and the machinery is restored and functional. The surrounding landscape of the Dirt Hills, which more strongly evidences aboriginal history, provided another resource of inspiration and "cultural cross-purposes." The participating artists explored themes including "cultural exploitation, land expropriation and the displacement of aboriginal cultures" (6). These themes further highlighted the site’s aboriginal historical footprint juxtaposed against the factories’ economic gains and losses. The only restrictions placed on the artists were "to leave no lasting trace on the site," further illuminating the ephemeral quality of such a project.

3 The publication is divided into two components— "Practising Theory" and "Theorizing Practice." The practicing theory documentation includes an exquisite photo log with adjoining artists’ statements for each installation, an illustrative map of the site and its adjoining landscape, and an archival copy of the performance text. An enclosed DVD provides the reader with some visual insight into the look and feel of the daylong performance; it also includes interviews with a few of the collaborators and a slide show highlighting the site’s influences on the project as a whole. The theorizing practice component is made up of fourteen essays, divided into five sections and written by the various artists, producers, spectators, academics, historians, and members of the aboriginal and non-aboriginal communities who were either directly involved in the creation or research and curatorial elements. The essays inform the reader of how Crossfiring/Mama Wetotan evolved from its "starting points"; the text of Trevor Herriot’s poem Out of the Kiln and the myth of Prometheus, served as two of the many resources at the project’s outset. In the section "crossing cultures" three of the essays examine how the site’s landscape was investigated with respect to its archaeological significance, directly influencing the artists’ experiences and understanding of the historical resonance of the site and its two cultural identities—aboriginal and non-aboriginal. In the third section, "Siting Sound," three of the sound installation artists discuss their creative processes, highlighting how the Clay Bank Factory and Dirt Hills inspired the layering voices and industrial sounds from the past with soundscapes of those two environments. "Siting Memory," the fourth section, theorizes the role memory plays within the experiential component of those participating, whether as spectator or performer. The final section, "Siting Performance," theorizes and distills the "performative elements" of the artistic process. Many of the theatrical elements arose out of the artists’ historical research and their speculations about the plant’s times of prosperity and demise, and how that affected the emotional and physical mentality of the workers and their families. It became the performers’ role to imagine the ghosts of the past as a resource in illuminating the site’s collective memory.

4 Overall, I had a favourable impression of the book, but was nonetheless left with a number of questions, primarily with respect to editorial choices. There seemed to be a clear divide within both the written component and the DVD between the art installations themselves and the performative elements. Was it a conscious choice that the static art installations remain contained and separated from the performing component? Hence the interdisciplinary nature of the one-day event seemed to be divided between theatre/dance and visual/media/sound installations. Alternately, is this an impression created by the layout of the book? The editors comment that by creating distinct sections bound by titles, they may be jeopardizing their goal for the project, which was "to explore the site from multiple perspectives and to be open to what surfaced" (8). From a theoretical perspective it would have been interesting to record in the DVD some aspects of the project’s process to further illuminate how the themes evolved into the final product.

5 In some cases it can be difficult to translate the magnitude of a site-specific work into a book format, especially one that encompasses several different disciplines and occurs in different spaces, without the project coming across as disjointed and incomplete. However, this publication provides an exemplary overview utilizing multiple media in the form of photos, a DVD, and critical writings. Sighting/Citing/Siting provides a great resource for academics, artists, community-based projects, students, and anyone interested in interdisciplinary collaboration that revolves around the creation and unfolding of new work within a determined environment that lies beyond the walls of a traditional theatrical space.