Frank Rogers Diversion dedicates a decommissioned roadway in honour of murdered Vancouver labour organizer Frank Rogers. FRD was sited alongside the new Thornton Street in Vancouver, Canada (named after Sir Henry Worth Thornton, a president of the Canadian National Railway). Frank Rogers Diversion seeks to counter-balance the historical focus on the industrialist hero figure as the primary force of urban development. By materializing the name of Frank Rogers within Vancouver’s urban geography, this project challenges local street naming conventions that laud figures of industrial development and project a particular ideology onto our public landscape.

Frank Rogers Diversion strikes up a dialogue between opposing ideologies of the working class and the hegemonic control of the state. Historically, and also today, streets are the site where the social and political order is enforced, challenged and negotiated. Stripped of its functional role as a transportation conduit for material and labour, Frank Rogers Diversion becomes available as a site for proposing a new spatial politics and envisioning new trajectories.

Project in collaboration with Alex Grünenfelder