Vitrine d'Été: Fragments of Montréal
2019 submission with M. Aubin-Salhi
Fragments of Montréal is a proposal for the Vitrine d’été 2019 which seeks to unpack memories and their relationship to the temporality of time.
Using the stories of five individuals from different backgrounds who all call Montréal their home, a mise-en-scène history is created in a collage of photos which are displayed in the storefront. Exploring how analogue photographs can be manipulated to engage with histories of cultural, social and political contexts, the window display will duplicate itself into what appears as stained glass projections. The proposal will look into how artists using a range of collage strategies refer to the past as points of reference for contemporary conditions. Stories thus intertwine, making way for intricate, sometimes paradoxical narratives to develop, materializing links between what is past and what is unknown. The display will bear witness to this unceasing process of reworking history, with stories often still in the making.
Time cannot be itemized into seconds, hours, and days, but rather, it should be expanded as the space of human action. Time is ruptured, the space of history is ruptured, so that we can ponder and perceive. Thoughts are in this way, outside of time itself, and yet born from it; they rest on a given tradition and history, a past, while being in a many ways projected into a future which recedes from is. In Le Temps Retrouvé, Proust recounts his understanding of this thickness of time and the present moment. In trying to explain how it is that a memory preserved in the space of forgetfulness could suddenly let him breathe, he writes “un air nouveau précisément parce que c’est un air qu’on a respiré autrefois.”
The archetypal stained glass window depicting biblical stories or memorials of loved ones are an unmistakable landmark of churches in Montreal and all over the world. The proposal loosely replicates this idea of the Poor Man’s Bible in the stories of Montreal residents and their own personal histories. According to statistics, Montreal is home to the third largest immigrant population in Canada - each with their own stories to tell, though not completely unlike each other. Using the photograph as a mnemonic device, the project reveals to the viewer the thickness of their own present moment.
