Opening delayed

Edith Brunette and François Lemieux

This project was made possible by the support of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Program in Support of Artistic Production.

This project by Edith Brunette and François Lemieux seeks to outline, collectively, and through a series of exploratory gestures, a few proposals on the question of inhabiting as put forward from their multiple and tenuous attachments to the land. How does one reconnect with the earth, with the powers that lie dormant between it and us, and with this territory that has been damaged by our colonialist and capitalist ways of living and dying? How can we pay better attention to what binds us together in order to thwart our economy’s undesirable practices, temporalities, and ways of being?

Together with a small group of collaborators, Brunette and Lemieux will investigate the material conditions of our existence—what are these territories we live on and how do they organize us?—through direct bodily and material experience. This is the experience of boundaries, of that which is taken from us, denied us, that which crumbles in an orchestrated devaluation, and which we must re-appropriate with outstretched, uncertain hands.

Brunette and Lemieux have developed an interventional installation that includes artefacts, collected organic and industrial objects, fabricated structures, videos, sound recordings, and conversations. Here, nuclear energy meets herbalism, border administration meets gestures of collective care, a golf course becomes a refinery’s ecological façade, and oceans are crossed on the surface of waves.

In conjunction with the gallery exhibition, three events—mainly online but possibly on site—will be held: a performance by researcher and choreographer Catherine Lavoie-Marcus on the semi-abandoned grounds of the Royal Victoria Hospital; a panel on environmental racism and population displacements with Suzy Basile, Nayla Naoufal and Rémy Paulin Twahirwa, and a discussion with Marisa Berry-Méndez, Suzanne Beth, Erik Bordeleau, Dalie Giroux, Amélie-Anne Mailhot, and Diane Roberts, the authors of the exhibition’s publication.