How the Avoca Bridge connected older adults with curious teenagers

Content of the article

Guillaume Jabbour listens to Avoca Bridge like an old friend: he has heard its stories before, but wants to hear them again.

He was wearing professional headphones connected to a condenser microphone. He walks across the bridge holding the microphone from different angles, bangs the steel girders with the flat of his hand, or drops rocks on the bridge's grated floor. His guest does the same, following a few paces behind.

Content of the article

On one side of the bridge, the reverb of the River Rouge sounds like a freight train through headphones. A boom microphone is muted when placed between them. Across the still water, like a windless day, the currents seem so far away. All you hear is the wind. The sound of the wheels as the car passes is muffled, low and chesty. Gravel and stones vibrate differently as they fall on the bridge floor. Holding the microphone upright and rotating, the sound is smoothed, moved and smoothed.

Avoca Bridge has an sonic soul, says Jabbour.

Content of the article

Jabbour is an artist-researcher affiliated with Concordia University's Center for Oral History and Digital Narratives and the Aging + Communication + Technologies (ACT) Lab, and her story is filled with soundscapes and allegorical bridges. It includes teaching, art, music, community and academia.

“The bridge metaphor is always part of my life and part of who I am,” says Jabbour, 48, who was raised in nearby Lachout by a French Canadian mother and a Palestinian father.

“Specifically, I have children in middle age and I have aging parents. You get to that middle of your life where you realize, “Oh, I'm getting old. I will be there one day. I have to try to understand what it means.”

Content of the article

Although she has always worked with young people — she was a teacher at NDG for nine years — Jabbour found herself working with older people in the community and something clicked.

Stories belong to the people. The next step is to return them to children and newcomers.

Guillaume Jabbour

“The two groups are similar. They are not out of society, but out of the ordinary. They don't work. They are not part of the capitalist model: you finish school, you work. Older people and young people can feel isolated or unheard.

He had heard from community groups that it was difficult to get young people to participate… He had seen firsthand the difficulties young people faced when conducting school workshops through Quebec's ELAN ArtistInspire grant program.

“I was worried because they were saying something to a stranger in the school community. They called for help,” says Jabbur.

Nobody seemed to know what to do. His mind returned to bridges, and his experience as a musician led him to try listening as a bridge between generations.

Jabbour says she found a home at Concordia and with other artist-researchers working to connect with deeper social issues. He wondered, “Is there something we don't know yet about bringing together adults and children and teenagers who don't know each other?” Is there anything we can learn from this? For me, the medium is a bridge again, and that listening is something we all do, but we take for granted.”

Content of the article

Listening with professional sound equipment was a great equalizer between generations and communities, he says, because few people had that kind of studio experience, especially outdoors. The microphone goes to their ears. The setting was Avoca Bridge.

The World Soundscape Project was launched at Simon Fraser University in BC in the 1970s. It involved spatial exploration as participants listened to their surroundings and considered their place in the soundscape.

Last year, as part of his master's thesis, Jabbour developed a month-long research project at Laurentian Regional High School called “Sound Walks as a Tool for Building Bridges and Community,” which invited teenagers and older adults to meet and eventually travel after school. To the bridge 35 kilometers away, experiment with sound equipment and listen deliberately.

On the first day, five women and four teenagers came. Three of the students were drawn to a photography workshop that was taking place at the same time, led by Jabbour's wife, Tanis Saucier.

But 14-year-old Nathan is back. Something spoke to him.

The group ate and experimented with sound equipment. They did deep listening exercises and kept journals where they could write or draw. And they talked.

Content of the article

“We always start with a check-in and a chat,” says Jabbour. “We talked about breast cancer. We talked about STDs. We talked about drugs. We talked about alcohol. We talked about family. We talked about bullying. We talked about love and friendship. The women talked to Nathan and me about their husbands.

“Does this institution divide us by age?” A question arose.

Content of the article

For more than a century there has been a crossing of the Rouge River at Avoca. It was once a suspension ferry, later a suspension bridge and a toll bridge. The iron bridge standing there was built in 1955 and strengthened in 2019.

I couldn't believe how connected we all were in such a short amount of time. I've never interacted with people like that.

Donna Eastwood

Everyone who lives in and around Avoca, part of the Argenteuil County municipality near the Ontario border, has a story about the bridge. Most people know a man who worked on the bridge, rode horses to old Doherty's shop, fell in love there, and died there.

“Stories belong to people,” says Jabbour. “The next step is to bring them back to kids and newcomers.”

Soundwalk contributor Donna Eastwood grew up in Bell Falls, a 20-minute bike ride from the Avoca Bridge. He and his friends, many of whom will be in their 70s this year, see Eastwood's father driving logs on the Rouge, where it empties into the Ottawa River.

Content of the article

She remembers crossing the bridge often for things like square dances, weddings, and orange picnics where all generations gathered. Now mixed with those memories is the Soundwalk project.

When they experimented with the equipment, “it wasn't just the sound of water,” “but we'd bang sticks on the steel of the bridge and talk to each other about what we heard. I couldn't believe how connected we all were in such a short amount of time. I've never connected with people like this.” The group is going to have a summer picnic on the bridge.

Eastwood warns of Nathan's maturity and precocity. She told the women that when she visited the nursing home, she noticed that many people were hanging their heads: “She was full of these opinions and was very aware of her surroundings. He made it easy for us. She was just a young man's favorite.'

He was smart, she added. “It allowed him to participate and not be intimidated by adults. We talked to him like adults. I hope this is an experience he will always have with him. It happened by itself, no one did it on purpose.”

This is how bridges are built.

AT A GLANCE

Guillaume Jabbour presented his master's project thesis at symposia at Concordia and will present at the Canadian Communications Association conference and Canada's Science Writers and Communications in May in Saskatoon. She is a finalist in the 2024 SSHRC Storytellers Challenge.

Featuring the diverse voices of those living in and around Avoca, the seven-episode podcast will “live in the community” before being released to the public.

Sign up for our awesome parenting and advice newsletter at montrealgazette.com/newsletters.

[email protected]

Content of the article

#distro

Content of the article