WATER UNDERGROUND PROJECT, by Michael Cook

Toronto’s sewers are dark infrastructure: documented only in proprietary mapping, associated with grime and hazard, and physically devoid of light. It is too easy to imagine sewers as an entirely abstract network, as a magical black box that transmits sewage from one’s home to the treatment plant. Cook’s work has been an effort to physically shine a light on this unseen layer of the city, and to reveal the size of these spaces and their complexity.

Below the streets of our neighbourhoods, there are surprisingly large and legible tunnels that carry our stormwater and wastewater; these are spaces that residents and city officials alike need to be able to imagine in order to do a better job of managing pollution and living with this water. Toronto’s sewers enclose old waterways and follow their courses, they shape the built form and the possibilities of the city above, and they often mix rainwater and household sewage so that all of it must be intercepted and treated, denying water to the landscapes we value. Cook’s photographs are an effort to reclaim our sewers from obscurity, to allow us all to view, imagine and talk about them, and to gain a new measure for our relationship with the water that we have sent underground.

Michael Cook

Michael Cook has been delving into underground spaces since 2003. While focused on urban drainage and sewer systems, his inquiries have also included utility networks, abandoned hydroelectric infrastructure and base metals mines.

He has contributed writing and photographs to HTO: Toronto’s Water from Lake Iroquois to Lost Rivers to Low-flow Toilets(Coach House Books, 2008), The BLDGBLOG Book (Chronicle Books, 2009) and Water (Alphabet City, 2009). His work has also been exhibited at Fort York and at the Hamilton Museum of Steam and Technology. Cook is a graduate student at York University, where his current research considers the political geography of resource exploitation in remote regions.