Every day, November 8 – 17, from 11 AM to 6 PM
In the Atrium of the McConnell Library Building, located in front of the Gallery.
1400, boul. de Maisonneuve O. Montréal (Québec) H3G 1M8
Initiated in London in 2007 by Jean-François Prost, Adaptive Actions explores alterations in the workplace, the home, and public spaces through actions and interventions involving the public. AA thrives on individual and collective contributions and initiatives and proceeds by an open call for collaboration. Participate in workshops, discussions, and presentations.
www.adaptiveactions.net
info@adaptiveactions.net
ADAPTIVE ACTIONS CAMP PROGRAM
Adaptive Actions (AA) is looking for new contributions to its website and its next publication, as well as contributions that will serve to stimulate reflection, discussions, and presentations at the AA Camp at Concordia University. Register as a participant through the website or at the Camp and submit existing or imagined actions created by you or by others.
MONDAY 8
Official opening
Camp open from 11 AM to 6 PM
TUESDAY 9
Camp open from 11 AM to 6 PM
WEDNESDAY 10 AND THURSDAY 11
WEB DÉRIVE
On the topic of adaptive actions
from 10 AM to 6 PM
Together we will surf the web to find engaging, relevant, atypical or just simply amusing examples about urban and spatial adaptations. Progressively and through this process with an unknown result, we will amass, print and present information and ideas (through images and words) at the AA Camp space, bringing together seemingly unrelated elements from the far reaches of internet.
Reservations required, places are limited.
You may reserve a morning, an afternoon or a whole day. Bring your own portable computer and WIFI access will be provided. Lunch provided to all participants.
Please reserve with Marina Polosa
LUNCHTIME TALKS
In conjunction with the Web Dérive
Wednesday 10, 12:30–1:30 PM
La Tour de la Bourse
by Aude Moreau
Thursday 11, 12:30–1:30 PM
Fragments of Actions for Creative Adaptation
by Marie-Pier Boucher and Jean-François Prost
FRIDAY 12
Camp open from 11 AM to 6 PM
5 à 7 at the camp
A space of production, presentation and actions
Launch of the publication Adaptive Actions – Madrid
with the participation of Aurélie Dubois (Experiment#3 : Les Nuées Ardentes, c’est “Destroy”) and Nuria Carton de Grammont Lara (actions in Mexico DF) and Adaptive Actions
Adaptive Actions – Madrid
Adaptive Actions – Madrid While the Adaptive Actions Camp was located in Madrid’s Atocha train station for a month during the Madrid Abierto 2010 biennial, a publication was in the works. Several individuals simultaneously edited existing and incoming content (locally and via the web) and produced this recently published book, a 148-page publication comprising two sections: one presenting selected adaptive actions, and the second specific to the Madrid Adaptive Actions programming. The publication includes 36 adaptive actions with images and comments, workshops, an interview with philosopher and theorist Brian Massumi, and a text by José Luis Corazón Ardura. In Spanish and English. Edited by: Marie-Pier Boucher, Gema Melgar, Frank Nobert, Jean-François Prost
AA Publications
Each Adaptive Actions project is revisited and extended by a publication. Submitted adaptive actions, commentaries and texts are gathered together in one book. New ideas for future actions result from this process.
SATURDAY 13
Camp open from 11 AM to 6 PM
12:30–1:30 PM
Lunch provided at camp
1:30 PM
Conversation
Based on actions submitted during the Web Dérive, online, and at the Camp
Moderated by Marie-Pier Boucher and Jean-François Prost
Adaptive Actions (AA) functions as an open source repository of actions. It suggests iterations and transversal operations, new forms of connections and relationalities. AA invites creative resistance through the activation of various forms of adaptation. In a round-table conversation, we will discuss submitted actions and discuss their adaptive potential, the ways in which they succeed in adapting a situation and resisting creatively. Participants will discuss both their own actions and those of others in order to highlight the main constraints they faced and the ways in which these constraints have been reconfigured to become engines of creation, points of captivation and micropolitical activation.
Invited participants: Patrick Harrop, Luc Lévesque, Javiera Ovalle, Patrice Loubier
SUNDAY 14
Camp open from 11 AM to 6 PM
MONDAY 15
Camp open from 11 AM to 6 PM
12:30–1:30 PM
Lunch provided at Camp
1:30 PM
AA Workshop
Heteropolis
by Jean-François Prost
This workshop will address the current reality of cities like Montréal, whose populations consist of a multitude of minorities. The workshop will focus on the following paradox: while cities are increasingly heterogeneous, some homogeneous districts, or ghettos, persist. In Montréal, as in other cities, we can observe a very clear, even extreme, division between social classes and various ethnic and cultural communities. Some minority groups progressively distance themselves from the city centre and become invisible in the city’s outskirts and its dead-ends. This workshop will concentrate on the increasing invisibility of multiplicity in downtown areas (sites of power, exchange, and abundance) and in certain neighbourhoods. The goal for this workshop will be to identify and reveal specific patterns and locations of social and cultural homogenization in Montréal, and ultimately in other cities as well. Our findings will serve to develop, extend, and reconfigure an initial action that aims to hydridize what exists and enable exchange and diversity in imagining a divergent city of the future.
Invited participants: Cynthia Hammond, Shauna Janssen, Thomas Strickland
Reservation preferable. Contact Marina Polosa
TUESDAY 16
Camp open from 11 AM to 6 PM
WEDNESDAY 17
Camp open from 11 AM to 6 PM
12:30 PM
De/Program
Walk with l’atelier Syn-
This urban walking tour centres around the concept of de-programming: an idea initially tied to the progressive breakdown and “vampirization” of Montréal’s downtown area where Concordia’s main campus is located. This collapse became most visible with the closing of the Montreal Forum in 1996 and continued with the subsequent period of stagnation in real estate. Bypassing a more traditional interpretation of how we engage with architecture, this tour asks how de-programming can be explored through individual and collective actions that introduce difference and exception. Should we consider issues such as a lack of stability, high student mobility, critical population density and culturally-induced adaptations of the high rise to potentially act as ingredients for stimulating this reflection? The walk will highlight some spatial/marginalized realities and their interactions with visions of influence and profit currently being laid out for the neighborhood.
Departure point at the Camp, in the Atrium of the McConnell Library Building, located in front of the Gallery, 1400 boul. de Maisonneuve O.
In collaboration with DARE-DARE
Collaborators – Adaptive Actions Camp at Concordia University:
Marie-Pier Boucher, Aude Moreau, Gema Melgar et Jean-François Prost
More complete information to follow.
PARTICIPANTS BIOGRAPHIES
Marie-Pier Boucher is a Ph.D. student in the department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. She holds a B.Sc. and a M.Sc. in Communication Sciences from the University of Montreal. Her work draws upon complex systems theory, and bio- and neurosciences in addressing architectural and spatial practices. She has been collaborating on Adaptive Actions as a theorist and co-editor since 2009. She is also a guest editor of InfleXions, an open-access journal for research-creation. Her research residencies include: SymbioticA, Center for Excellence in Biological Arts, University of Western Australia, Perth (2006), and Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany (2010). She has presented her work in multiple venues across Canada, England, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Spain and Australia. Her research is supported by the Visual Studies Initiative (Duke University) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada).
Aurélie Dubois is a multidisciplinary artist who lives in Montréal. She is currently pursuing a bachelor degree in Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montréal. She obtained, in 2008, a Cégep diploma in arts plastiques of Cégep du Vieux-Montreal. In 2008, she realized her first solo exhibition, Aurélie, Peintures, at the Cégep du Vieux-Montreal. Furthermore, she participated in several group exhibitions, Place, a sculpture show in March 2010 and Consanguin. Fatal. Velu. in September 2010. She is also a member of the collective of interdisciplinary artists Internet is Dead.
Jean-Maxime Dufresne is an artist trained in architecture and multimedia. Delving into psychogeography and the critical field of spatial practices, his work investigates transformations that shape urban territories and often problematizes the use of technological mediation. Architectural process is considered both as an inquiry and as a material production permeated by temporary experiences that mix installation, video, sound and urban intervention. His latest proposal, Agency, brought together thought-provoking interviews with key actors in Montréal’s cultural field on space as contested, shared and reinvented matter. His individual and collective work with artist Virginie Laganière or SYN- has been presented in Canada (Skol, Biennale de Montréal) and abroad (Temporary Urban Interstices, aaa, Paris; Actions: What You Can Do With the City, CCA / Graham Foundation, Chicago, USA). Since 2007, he has been a board member of DARE-DARE — an artist-run centre operating in the public realm — and been involved with the Educational Programs team at the CCA, both located in Montréal.
Cynthia Imogen Hammond teaches architectural history in the Department of Art History, Concordia University. She completed her Ph.D. in 2002 through Concordia University’s interdisciplinary Humanities Doctoral Program. After teaching in several Canadian universities, she held a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council postdoctoral fellowship at the School of Architecture, McGill University (2004-2006). Her book on gender, public memory and the built environment of Bath, England will be published by Ashgate in 2011. In addition to research and publishing on architecture, cities and landscapes, Hammond maintains an interdisciplinary studio practice that includes public art, painting and drawing, sound and most recently, digital video. Her last group exhibition, feminist practices, traveled to nine locations, concluding its tour at the University of Melbourne. More details about her publications, research and art can be found at www.cynthiahammond.com and at www.pouf.ca.
Patrick Harrop is an architect and associate professor of Architecture at the University of Manitoba. He currently holds the CMRI Chair in Masonry Studies and is an active researcher with CAST (Centre for Architectural Structures and Technology). His research specialty is in Emerging technology and design with a particular emphasis in electromechanical hacking, digital fabrication and contemporary theory. He currently teaches graduate studios in time based architecture, daidala strategies, contemporary theory, and advanced computer / fabrication. Professor Harrop received his undergraduate architecture degree from Carleton University, and his post professional M.Arch degree from the History and Theory program at McGill University in Montreal. Patrick Harrop`s current work is in developing new approaches to embedded and interactive technology using abandoned infrastructures. He is currently developing work that seeks to embed interactivity into existing architectural structures. A good part of this work seeks a manifestation autopoietic systems, where immediacy and responsiveness is delayed and translated into autonomous complex behaviors and environments.
Shauna Janssen is a PhD candidate in Humanities, at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture, Concordia University. Her doctoral work focuses on documenting the reoccupation and adaptive reuse of abandoned post-industrial sites for cultural purposes. Her research works across and in between the disciplines of architectural history, performance studies and oral history, and, more broadly, draws from relations between ruin theory and contested urban spaces, ideas of the interstitial, fragmention and spatial theory. Through these fields she seeks to identify the ways in which the gesture of reoccupying the ruins of post-industrial sites and historic architecture – how their reuse and the re/appropriation of these spaces – contribute to the architectural and socio-historical narratives of a city. In addition to her studies, Shauna Janssen also recently founded Urban Occupations Urbaines (UOU), a platform for creative engagements with urban environments in transition and decay. The current site in question is Griffintown, Montreal’s historic industrial district. For more information about UOU visit www.urbanoccupationsurbaines.org.
Luc Lévesque is an architect, professor in History and Theory of Architecture at Université Laval (Quebec City), his recent body of research traces the potentialities of an interstitial approach to urban landscape and urbanism. In 2000, he is one of the co-founders of the urban exploration workshop SYN- with whom he has produced different research works and interventions [www.amarrages.com]. As a member of the editorial committee of Inter actual art magazine [www.inter-lelieu.org], he has edited many issues dealing with architecture, landscape and urban practices.
Patrice Loubier is a professor of Art History at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He is interested in contemporary approaches to creation, with a particular interest in intervention art and furtive practices, and has published texts in numerous periodicals, anthologies, and exhibition catalogues. Loubier has participated in the activities of various artist-run centres in Québec and has served on the editorial boards of ESSE and Inter. In 2001, he co-edited, with Anne-Marie Ninacs and through the Centre des arts actuels Skol, Les commensaux: Quand l’art se fait circonstances / When Art Becomes Circumstance, a first in-depth look at relational practices in Canada. He has co-curated a number of exhibitions including the first edition of Orange with Mélanie Boucher and Marcel Blouin through Expression – Centre d’exposition de Saint-Hyacinthe (Saint-Hyacinthe, 2003), the MANIF D’ART 3 with André-Louis Paré (Québec, 2005), and Espace mobile with Marie-Josée Jean through VOX (Montréal, 2008).
Aude Moreau lives and works in Montreal. She exhibits her works in Quebec, France, the U.S. and Luxemburg. Among her most recent solo exhibitions are Faire le vide (Plein sud exhibition centre, 2010), Tirer le ciel (Luxemburg Casino Contemporary Art Forum, 2009), and Tapis de sucre 3 (Darling Foundry, 2008). She has also contributed to group exhibitions that include Art souterrain – Nuit blanche de Montréal (2010), La Biennale Nationale de Sculpture Contemporaine de Trois-Rivières (2010), and Orange événement d’art actuel de Saint-Hyacinthe (2006).
Jean-François Prost, artist-architect. His interest in new urban research territories — neglected, undetermined spaces, and those overcontrolled, with no apparent specificity — has brought him to question the city, architecture and urban material in a non-disciplinary way. An act of constructive resistance, state of mind, device to enunciate and exchange ideas, Prost’s work promotes social engagement, defends the presence of ‘art’ everywhere, at any time. His individual and collaborative work (l’atelier SYN-, AA…) has been shown by many galleries, and at international events: 3rd Montréal Biennale, Liverpool Biennial 06, and at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. His work on the collaborative research platform Adaptive Actions, which he initiated in 2007, will be the subject of a series of actions/exhibits (2010-11) in Montréal and in the city of Miami. Long-time member of DARE-DARE multidisciplinary art centre’s board of directors, he is working on the ongoing Dis/Location project and publication series promoting emerging urban practices and the mobile gallery. www.jean-francoisprost.blogspot.com
Javiera Ovalle Sazie works with different approaches to the notion of displacement of writing, performing an active way of writing in the city. Her work involves installation, photography, video and recycling. Traveling and wandering provide the surfaces on which her curiosity finds the essence of making. Ovalle completed an artist’s residency at the Darling Foundry that brought her to Montreal in 2006. She has since exhibited in the VI Biennial of the National Fine Arts Museum of Santiago, Chile, and presented her work in Boston, Barcelona, Berlin, New York, Paris, Valparaiso, Santiago de Chile, Montréal, Argentina, Brazil and Cuba. Born in Chile she completed an Associate of Arts degree in Universidad Católica de Valparaiso and then a BFA in Universidad de Playa Ancha. Now she lives and works in Montreal where she is completing a MFA program in Studio Arts at Concordia University.
Thomas Strickland is a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Architecture, McGill University. A specialist in Canadian healthcare architecture, his research examines the tension between narratives of amusement, flexibility and emancipation in late-modernist architecture and the urge for increased scientific rigor and innovation within the medical profession. In 2009 he was a fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and is an alumnus of the Health Care Technology and Place, CIHR Strategic Research Initiative at the University of Toronto. Actively involved in the design community, Strickland has worked with numerous award-winning architectural firms in Canada, is the past president of the Visual Arts Weeks Society, Calgary, and publishes regularly in contemporary art and architectural journals. He is a founding partner in the art and architecture research initiative Pouf! and has received grants from the Canada Council, the RAIC and the Calgary Foundation for his work as a curator.