{"id":2027,"date":"2014-02-01T21:17:59","date_gmt":"2014-02-01T21:17:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/?p=2027"},"modified":"2022-12-01T21:18:11","modified_gmt":"2022-12-01T21:18:11","slug":"fevrier-2014-into-the-midst-of-the-edge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/fevrier-2014-into-the-midst-of-the-edge\/","title":{"rendered":"F\u00e9vrier 2014 – Into the Midst of the Edge"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It may seem to be an oxymoron but, on the contrary, \u201cbeing in the midst of the edge\u201d has been the constant condition that made our project possible. Considering the centrality of the margin has been one of the threads, a red thread, leading all the discussions, experimentations and experiences of the event Into the Midst: Immersion <\/em>~<\/em> Emergent<\/em>. After months of preparation, the project took place in October 2012 in Montreal, where 26 people of the SenseLab (Concordia University) gathered for a week-long residency at the Society for Arts and Technology (SAT). This residency culminated with a final public event on the last day, October 22. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the entire process, questions of space, particularly in relation to the notions of margin, centre, interior and exterior space, emerged from our discussions. First, we met through online communication technologies, holding regular Skype meetings and exchanging information on a web collaboration platform. Readings and discussions were supposed to open up a collective process, or as discussed by Arakawa and Gins, a landing site. A site of landing, a point of contact, of folding and unfolding possibilities between us and the space we were working in, an \u201corganism-person-environment1<\/sup>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Parc de la Paix, Hannah Buck, 2012<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Context: a Central Marginal Site<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The last phase of the project, nourished by the speculative work done during almost ten months, brought us together in the space were the Society for Arts and Technology (SAT) is located. The SAT, with its immersive, impressive, dark, high-tech environment of the SATosph\u00e8re<\/em> (the Dome), is sited in the east of downtown Montr\u00e9al. As a part of the brand new Quartier des spectacles<\/em>, a sparkly entertainment-themed neighbourhood partly overlapping the former Red-Light district, the SAT participates in the revitalisation project of an urban area that is largely frequented by a marginalized population and considered as problematic for the city\u2019s image.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not far from the SAT you can bump into strip-tease clubs, erotic cinemas and all the vestiges of a by-gone era related to the Red-Light district, at its apogee in the first half of the twentieth century and by then threatened by various city\u2019s urban politics, such as the Quartier des spectacles project2<\/sup>. Moreover, the SAT overlooks the\u00a0boulevard Saint-Laurent<\/em>, known by Montrealers as\u00a0la Main.\u00a0<\/em>The main street of the city is the protagonist of Montr\u00e9al\u2019s collective imaginary through books, theatre plays, public inquiries, news stories and people\u2019s everyday life. The boulevard divides the city\u2019s urban fabric into East and West, a symbolic line separating the two founding communities of Montreal, francophone and anglophone, which historically and mythically settled on the two sides of the island. At the same time it has hosted the incoming immigrants for whom this singular combination of centrality and marginality with its peculiar cultural eclecticism provided an ideal location to access urban and social spaces of Montr\u00e9al.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Shoefiti. Parc de la Paix – rue Charlotte, Eleonora Diamanti, 2012<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Process: Blurring the Margin between Interior and Exterior<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The new high-tech environment of the SATosph\u00e8re<\/em>, as a synecdoche of the glittering Quartier des spectacles, clashes with its surroundings. Near the economic and financial downtown, the supposed cultural and artistic heart of Montr\u00e9al is located on a central margin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This clash is crucial in our collective reflection: how can we relate the exterior\u2019s controversial aspects to the tidy interiors of this innovative space? How do we activate the edges of a space that draws all attention to its centre?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We decide to take action not only in the Dome, but also outside.\u00a0
We pick up a colour: Red.\u00a0
Red as the Red Light District.\u00a0
Red as the logo of the Quartier des spectacles.\u00a0
Red as the colour of the student protests in Montr\u00e9al3<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We experience the surroundings in many ways: moving, dancing, crocheting, eating, talking, videotaping, taking photos, scanning, recording sounds. Through direct interpellation, we try to engage, unsuccessfully, with people in the street. We spend an entire day in the park right outside the SAT, the\u00a0place de la Paix<\/em>, where shoes hanging on trees or electric lines indicate some information that we cannot really decode, but we can guess4<\/sup>. The square is populated by a number of marginalized persons, including drug-dealers and consumers, sex workers, homeless people etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We share food, we crochet, we scan and simply make public our bodily presence; we sometimes feel unwelcome. We videotape our bodies in movement right in front of a strip-club; it is closed, too early in the day. It is truly an experience of being in the midst of an edge. The edge between daily and night activities, between what is considered as socially acceptable and what is not. Our techniques are at the margin, the edge between normative framed practices and marginal coded activities; we feel unwelcome or observed with suspicion and curiosity. We bring back to the Dome all these materials and our experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The environment of the SATosph\u00e8re<\/em> directs all efforts towards and concentrates all expectation in the middle. As a spectator, the upper centre of the Dome, at 13 metres high, relentlessly attracts you. You feel an inexorable urge to sit or lie down on the huge cushions and watch the centre of the spherical envelope right above you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How to change this spatial configuration by other means than projecting images on the surface of its envelope? How to engage with people to let them have an immersive experience, embodied<\/em> in the proper sense of the word?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We decide to use the technological tools offered by the SAT (a spherical-moving 360\u00b0 wide screen; loudspeakers; a Ladybug camera; video, image and sound software, and programmers) but also our own artistic and technological skills and other \u201craw materials\u201d like bodies, crochets and yarn, paper, helium balloons. Our goal is to activate the edges: the lower parts of the screen, all around us; the floor often forgotten; the middle space in between the floor and the upper part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Mobile scanner image (Eleonora Diamanti), Photo (Nathaniel Stern), Dome-SAT, 2012<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The End (?): Following the Red Thread<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

October 22, 5p.m. The public event inexorably starts. We keep on repeating to ourselves: this is neither a show nor a performance. Many of us feel the pressure. This is the awkward moment of the process, the time to show something to people and to explain the meaning of the project, the time when occupying the space feels like taking a position. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We project images, scans and videos; we use our sound recordings through the 157 speakers. We disassemble the big cushions and create a messy maze, leaving the edges clear of any obstacle that could stop the experience, while serving tea and crocheting with people. We loose a helium balloon trying to occupy the middle space between the ground and the top roof. We play, we run, we sit and we talk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Red Thread, Leslie Plumb, 2012<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A few minutes before the public event starts, whilst crocheting, we decide to bring the red yarns from the interior space of the Dome to the outside, as we have been crocheting outdoors the entire week. Red threads now connect the SATosph\u00e8re<\/em> to the exterior, some of them lying on the sidewalk, some knotted to a bike and others climbing a tree. Bringing the yarn outside feels almost like liberation. Personally, I feel as if I do not want to go back to the Dome, this is the right place for me. The red threads seem to take away the pressure of the event, leading us right into a milieu<\/em> where the margins between interior and exterior are blurred.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the end, we hold a public discussion and we finally relax. A girl raises her hand and says: \u201cwhile I was coming here I found this red yarn on my path. After the first surprised glance, I see that it is bringing me right into the Dome, stopping with small knots on trees, hiking on brick walls and bikes. Arriving here I found a big net of knits, threads and bodies, right in the Dome. I found it poetic, the essence of this event.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we did not know where we were going, at that precise moment it became clear: the red thread was bringing us back into the midst of the edge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Notes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

[1] Arakawa and Madeleine Gins.\u00a0Architectural Body<\/em>. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2002, p. 6.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[2] The Quartier des spectacles project is a branding venture, launched by the city in 2007, aiming to create a themed district promoting the production and consumption of culture. The Red Light district has constituted one of the most important sexual business areas in North America. It started with the ratification of prohibitionist laws in the United States at the end of the 1910 and has been active until the fifties, when municipal politics led a campaign on morality with strong interventions and public inquiries. Today the sector is a strange and scattered mishmash of sexual businesses and cultural venues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[3] The symbol of the Qu\u00e9bec student protest that fights against the augmentation of tuition fees, and more widely the commodification of knowledge, is a red square. The red square refers to the French expression \u201ccarr\u00e9ment en rouge\u201d, pointing at the precarious economic situation of students. \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[4]\u00a0Flinging and hanging shoes on cables, power lines and tree branches (known also as\u00a0shoefiti<\/em>) has several and mythical explanations spanning from gang and drug-related activities, to bullying behaviours or social and art practices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It may seem to be an oxymoron but, on the contrary, \u201cbeing in the midst of the edge\u201d has been the constant condition that made our project possible. Considering the centrality of the margin has been one of the threads, a red thread, leading all the discussions, experimentations and experiences of the event Into the Midst: … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[65],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2027"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2027"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2027\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2033,"href":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2027\/revisions\/2033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}