Couvrir l’encombrement — Workshop (collecting stories and impressions)

Aboard the Villa ― véhicule d’arts actuels et numériques, visual artists Sophie Castonguay and Mathieu Marcoux invite the public to think about the effects that consumerism has on both the social and ecological environment.

For the artist-duo, their public outings in Leonidas-Dufresne park, in the heart of Val-David, serve in part to ask citizens what they think about consumption in their everyday lives. Their stories and impressions are then assembled into a poetic sound montage designed to be retransmitted on-site during an active listening session that weaves the intimate into the public.

The artists’ 2018 project Déchets helped them deepen their thinking around their own consumption and its impacts on their lives. As part of this project, they resolved, with their two children, to make artworks using the garbage they produced and accumulated in their home over a year.

“In the face of major changes that show to what point living a successful life is no longer ethically viable, the renewal of a shared, political intimacy becomes paramount if we are to curb the full-scale destruction of the conditions that make this planet livable.”