The
Brewery Creek sector in Hull-Gatineau (Quebec) presents a fragment of
urban territory filled with disparate elements leading us to question
the particular experience of this area. By extension, urban determinism
and control spaces breed their own residues, which, through a form of
entropy, eventually react to them: in the same manner these conditions
are inseparable from one another. This situation produces breaches and
contradictions, potentially becoming sites of renewed densities, conditions
for possible diversions. Recalling elements of psychogeography, what are
the components and material arrangements of the urban scene and how do
they influence the individual’s affective mapping ? In this regard,
the growing privatization of public space manifests itself by resorting
to technologies of perception (surveillance, conditioning, ‘muzak’)
and control (consumption, entertainment, generic spaces) affecting us
in a peculiar way: by inversion and structuring one’s will, emerges
the desire to shape our own territories and paths.
‘Surfaces de réparation’ proposes interventions appearing through various time-based mediums, involving elements of demarcation, impregnation and flexible signage. Investigating the surrounding environment and its peripheral conditions as an information-rich laden territory, shaped with noise of adjustable interference (fine-tuning). Sampling as probing, recuperating, recontextualising, recoding, toning, contaminating. Through recombining and mediating audiovisual sources sampled in the periphery of the artists’ center, can an intimate and intensified territorial experience be generated? Will this mediation of the territory become a field of relations, a network of possible migrations, of residual states or presences emerging consciously/physically in the perception of the territory ? How can the nature of the interventions reactivate dormant, potential elements in the area bordering AXENEO7 ? The term ‘Surfaces de réparation’ may technically evoke areas of improvised zone play, but derives towards ideas of scuffled limits, sites of microevents being continously disrupted and reactivated.
Jean-Maxime Dufresne - Virginie Laganière
