Peter von tiesenhausen biography of barack

An Interview with Peter von Tiesenhausen
By Ruth Jones

There are more than 840,000 km of oil and gas pipeline in Canada, most of it originating in Alberta. The existence of this contentious part of the country’s resource and energy infrastructure has been fraught since the lines began to proliferate in the 1950s, with tensions flaring when companies’ insistence on right of way collides with the interests of those who live on the land they seek to cross.

Indigenous communities have mounted legal and material challenges to the unrestricted flow of oil and gas through their traditional territories. Organizations like the Farmers’ Advocacy Office offer information to rural landowners about their rights to restrict or enable the pipelines that crisscross the province.

In 1996, Alberta artist Peter von Tiesenhausen took an alternative approach: by categorizing his property as a work of art, he created a situation in which any attempt to alter it—by, for example, traversing it with a p