Exercice de conversation [Conversation exercise]
In partnership with the Carrefour d’Intercultures de Laval, Verticale invited artist Sandra Lachance to offer a creative workshop to French-language students. Through a community art process, the workshop aimed to validate the creative expressions of newly arrived immigrants through the creation of individual and collective art works.
Once a week for 8 weeks after their morning class, a dozen participants met to share a meal and practice their French. With pencils and notebooks in hand, the group explored the French language in an informal and creative learning context. Images of contemporary art works sparked conversations and inspirations, through exercises and techniques that used tracing as a gestural expression (drawing, photography, engraving, graffiti, etc.).
By combining photography and calligraphy, the initial intention was for the participants to reappropriate the genre of self-portraiture by layering text that describes them and their experience of learning French over their photographic portrait. Faced with the challenges of communicating, the group shifted the conversation and exercises toward other types of body-writing combinations. By translating and inventing expressions, images emerged to communicate ideas about the learning process itself and the uncertain forms that often sketch out personal experiences of communication: scribbles, confusion, obstacles, tricks, mistakes.
Throughout the artist’s involvement with the group, a collective exploration process began to take shape. The conclusion of the project was supposed to be a group installation at the Carrefour. Curated by the group, the exhibition would have allowed a kind of shared subjectivity to emerge. Unfortunately, the workshops had to be cancelled part-way through, and the complexities of the pandemic lockdown prevented the group from meeting any further to complete the project.
Nonetheless, to thank the participants and the project’s partnering organization for their belief and participation in the project, Lachance and the project team chose to leave a symbolic trace of the experience in the form of a triptych by Sandra Lachance.
It offers perspective on an encounter, on an exercise in suspended conversation that we must each pursue to become better persons.
