From "Introduction: Materializing the Social" by Joni Low:

"In 2018, What Are Our Supports?—a series of artist’s projects in public space—responded to the then-current conditions of social, biopolitical, environmental and economic precarity, now intensified by the instabilities of a global pandemic and a human-induced climate crisis. On an intimate register that responded to these wider global patterns within direct lived experience, five artist groups explored the support structures—material and relational, temporary and ongoing—that sustain contexts for artistic communities, space, and incidental encounters in our commons, in a downtown park on the unceded and ancestral territories of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm (Musqueam), Sḵwxw̱ ú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.

We began with these questions: what are the afterlives of material and conceptual structures that have outgrown intended “uses?”1 In a culture of planned obsolescence, what can we bring from the old and “outdated”—ideas, paradigms, technologies, ancient knowledges—to imagine different futures? How do we draw attention to the supports that allow for encounters with art and gift economy, that shift perceptions and ways of coming together? How do we sense the invisible webs of relations that support art and art communities—crucial mediation that creates relationship to context? Drawing inspiration from Céline Condorelli’s Support Structures project and publication (2003–2009; 2010/2012)—specifically, the need for greater discourse around the supports that facilitate the making and representation of space for art—the series looked to the frameworks artists create, and the energies that sustain yet often elude representation, in working together to build resilience and change.

These artists—Germaine Koh, Aron Louis Cohen, and Russell Gordon; Emily Neufeld and T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss; S F Ho and Elisa Ferrari and DRIL Art Collective, John Brennan, Elisa Ferrari, Michele Helen Mackenzie and Justin Patterson; Andrew Lee, Khan Lee and Francis Cruz—embody practices that are characterized and guided first and foremost by the quest of art: a journey through exploratory unknowns towards experiential knowledges, less so art’s commercial, capital and conspicuous rewards, neoliberal co-optations, and the constant pressures of productivity and striving. Responding in intermedial and sensorial ways, they approached art in public space as a form of research, provocation, experimentation, and collective learning with unexpected publics. Each group situated their project within Germaine Koh’s Home HMH Boothy, a platform that itself critiques space restrictions in our over-regulated city, and offers solutions for shelter. In many ways, Boothy is a microcosm of our world and an emblem of this moment, in its transformability and world-making potential.

From a currency exchange smelting electronic waste to coins, Indigenous ecosystems exploring life-in-common with ancient plant histories made present and tactile; surveillance portals alerting us to invisible networks and stratified systems of belonging, light boxes illuminating over-looked physical and sonic surfaces of the built environment, complimentary haircut services for the public as forms of care and trust, and intermedial sound and light performances—these artists made perceptible the textures of connection, self-organization, mutual aid, multi-directional time, and a collective critically-engaged pleasure activism."