Author Archives: Geneviève Gasse

Préface 40

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2017-2018 has been plentiful for LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE. In this bulletin, author Anne-Sophie Blanchet lets us discover the universe of the artists who passed through our centre. In September 2017, she met with Marco Casella who worked on the conception of a landscape destined to be heard, seen and imagined. While roaming the city, the artist translated the locations he visited into sounds in order to synthesize the urban space. For his part, Quelic Berga turned the gallery into a research laboratory. He worked to develop a rhizomatic film editing software from various real data. A similar interest for digital art data can be found in the work of Owen Chapman and Peter Sinclair. These two artists gathered their potential around the creation of a project focusing on mobility in urban areas. In collaboration with Seconde Nature’s Futur DiverCities project, a partnership between Europe and Quebec, they designed avatars inspired by the movement in the city of the various participants. During the Mois Multi, artist Pavitra Wickramasinghe has produced an installation reminiscent of the sea. She has crumpled, folded, and cut paper using various methods. The accumulation of paper objects in the gallery recalls the motion of the waves. The year ended with the installation of artist and activist Pan Wang during an exchange between Quebec and China. In LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE gallery, he exhibited the artefacts of a performance filmed on the Dufferin terrace. With his presence in such an emblematic and tourist sites of Quebec City, he wanted to underscore the inability to take such action in his own country.

Not Wild, But Still Life

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In the fall of 2014, artist Nancy Samara Guzmán Fernández, along with teammate Rodrigo Frías Becerra, initiated a research residency on the bureaucratic system of the city of Quebec. The Édifice Marie-Guyard on Grande Allée avenue, the highest office tower in the city, was the location of their prospecting. Housing various ministries (Ministry of Education, sustainable development, environment and the Fight against climate change) this huge skyscraper overlooking Parliament Hill is a place where every day, different political strata evolve.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

In her exhibition Not Wild, But Still Life, Samara invites the viewer to discover this administrative architecture through a personal interpretation of our diplomatic apparatus. Samara’s work questions the place of the individual in the political system. A work, which is based not only in Quebec City, place of production of her research residency at the chambre blanche, but also in her native City of Mexico. In her attempt to articulate a reflection on various countries bureaucracy and thus create a configuration, the result of her work in Quebec is imbued with a strange dreamlike atmosphere where remains a note of sadness. This impression of melancholy comes from the Samara’s desolation in the face something that happened in Mexico in September 2014: it casts in LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE gallery, the mourning and the grief she feels at the disappearance of 43 students of her country and of the Government’s carelessness towards the situation. The research she has undertaken in the Édifice Marie-Guyard during the night, takes the form of a performance in which she pays tribute to the missing students. She tells us, by the darkness in which she plunges us, the absenteeism of the judicial system and the lack of interest of the Government in the evolution of cases. At the same time, she captures different symbols and images presenting the course of her experience inside our own bureaucracy.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

Initially, what her immersion in our political reality reveals, is not only its rational organization, but also the way human life is ordered so as to make our institutions “habitable”. Samara reflects the weakening of the state mechanism by the integration of the “living” in its project: Not Wild, But Still Life. Bureaucracy, this inherent fraction of the Governmental apparatus, is a place of organization of society, a location of translation of existence into documents, numbers and words.

The “living” becomes apparent in this exhibition by the deployment of a particular ecosystem that comes alive in an offbeat atmosphere: representations of plants decorate the environment and give life to a functional workplace, the black and white photocopy of a clock seems to stop time like a suspended dream, vertical blinds reflect the neon lights at night and create shadows where we imagine beings locked in cubicles.

This wild state denatured by the context in which it exists, questions the place of the bureaucracy and the impact of its functionalism on existence. LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE’s gallery is remodeled into a reinvented office, the stereotype of the robotic civil servant turned into a disturbing vision by the duality between the wilderness represented, and the automation of a complex built system. Flaws, crumbling, interfere in the structure in place, questioning it, weakening it.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

The symbolization of the bureaucracy in the work of Samara leads us to reflect on the methods of governance and on the direction of the ministerial system dedicated to the edification of premises assigned to the organization of society. She furthers the reflection on the application of legislation to manage human existence (laws and standards) as well as on the operation of technological and media systems (television, radio, internet) which are now integrated to our private lives, our hobbies and our habitat. Michel Foucault names this exercise of power upon the citizen, the biopower. This sliding of the Government into reality settles in “bureaucratic” structures which are used to quantify, qualify, handle and capture the characterizations of a people in order to facilitate its governance, but also to keep it in the dark with the help of the administrative complexity. According to Samara, the political system appears to make the people feel secure, however it keeps it in a heavy regulatory world not easily accessible by the citizen. The Government apparatus consists of a system of justice, laws, standards, educational institutions, media, all kinds of ministries, disciplines and internal coding that complexify bureaucracy by cumbersome procedures.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

Several journalists have compared the work of Samara to the literary works of Kafka. In his existentialist books, the author transports us to a world where realism and irony come together. The bureaucracy appears as a strange masquerade inside of which the main characters, often of ingenuous citizens facing the workings of power, experience absurd and hopeless situations in the face of a burlesque-like justice. Samara’s work transports us to a similar world, on the edge of absurdity, where there is a duality between the primitive and the predetermined aspect of living in society. We are immersed in a night without end with the impression of only see the part of the bureaucratic reality they want to show us. Samara invites us to question the aspect that justice can take just as Kafka in his book Le Procès (The Trial), that translate the deceptive power it holds over the citizen: “justice has a strange power of seduction, don’t you think?.”1

    Kafka, Franz. 2009, The Trial. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 256 p.

Préface 36

In this 36th issue of the Bulletin, the four selected artists have transformed LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE’s environment through various landscapes and ambiance. The season kicks off with artist Camporesi who’s interested by the nature crisscrossing Quebec City. The landscapes that she presents take various shapes which juxtapose nature to digital technology.

The temporality of the employed mediums (the set time as well as the time of the filmed sequence) reveals panoramas complexified by the transformation imposed by the artist.

The notion of temporality is also present in Pablo Rasgado’s work, the second artist presented here. He explains in a short video the research he has undertaken to ‘’extract the ghosts from the past’’, the archives and the artist centre’s walls. Author Dominique Lepage transports us into a reflection on the artist’s experience within the walls of the gallery. Her thinking addresses the way in which the artist uses the walls that become the artifacts of old exhibitions, thus revealing the past through recovered traces. It speaks of a temporal presence, linked to the history and memory of the place.

Takao Minami meanwhile invites us inside a road movie staging his own reality of the walker roaming Christophe-Colomb’s street along LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE. He takes us walking on this street, thus forcing the video to embrace his gait, his rhythm like music.

Through various film referents, author Guillaume Lafleur questions us on the relationship sustain with the territory we cross, conjuring up the superpositions of the route travelled by the artist.

To conclude this bulletin, the interview of Marc Dulude by Pascale Bédard allows us to glimpse the mind space of the artist. We meet his vision of art and creation.

We enter a state of mind where the production and reflection time gather in a single location; the experimental workshop put in place by the artist during his residency.

Préface 34

Food for Thoughts

Materiality in its essence and its sense are at the centre of the concerns of the three artists presented in this bulletin, who use it for purposes of symbolization. It is apparent in the effects of subtraction and transformation of the wood of John Cornu’s installation, who’s work at LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE took place in the carpentry workshop before taking form in the gallery. His works occupied two different spaces, in one of them a sculpture which conveys the contemporary idea of ruin and destruction and in the other, a tribute to sculptor Pierre Paquin who became blind and with whom he discusses and exchanges regularly. Author Emma-Charlotte Gobry-Laurencin broaches the work entitled Je tuerai le pianiste by posing the question, is the work: “an expression of the present, an answer to reality, a sample-document witnessing this showbiz society, or an indexed structure specific to our time?” The disappearance of the matter is also perceptible in the work of Sarla Voyer, the second artist in residency this fall. She reproduced her hometown, Quebec City, using glass objects picked in various locations. The exhibition photographs give the impression that there is almost no matter or a blurred matter blending in the context and that reveals the interior of a transparent world, creating an atmosphere of intimacy and fragility. In her text about this artist’s work, author Marie-Hélène Leblanc names ‘’Maison-mère’’ (Mother house) this impression of the mother impulse that is part of the artist’s quest and reflection. To complete this bulletin, we can see the emerging artist Stefane Perraud’s dreamlike universe that pores over the idea of human frailty. Eli Commins’s text expresses well the ambience in which the artist plunges us. He draws inspiration from Didi-Huberman’s book La survivance des lucioles. The artist invites us to observe a nocturnal world by unfolding in space a light sculpture representing a swarm of fireflies, whose illuminations conjure up for him an entire social group with its hopes, its fragility.