Sans titre (circonférence 83 km)

Sans titre (circonférence 83 km) is the name of a performative research process led by artists Simon Brown and Maude Pilon, whose poetic findings will become the subject of an artist’s book.
The artist-duo will walk the 83-kilometre long edge of Île Jésus for days, following a very specific procedure: one will observe the contours of the island while the other will pay attention to the island’s urban, rural, or semi-wild interior.
Their slow stroll will attend to phenomena that often go unnoticed by the hurried gaze. Observation will be accompanied by constant note taking, because “language is nothing but a vehicle for memory; it creates memory too, and, better still, ultimately promotes its erasure.”
A map in progress will allow the public witness the events that catch the walkers’ attention. At every data-gathering point signalled on the map, the viewer will find a text fragment written by Simon Brown and another by Maude Pilon. By the end of the process the accumulated writings will read like a nonlinear and inevitably circular poem, with neither beginning nor end.
The artist’s book conveying the results of this linguistic exploration of Laval’s insularity will be distributed furtively in libraries and other public spaces around the perimeter of Île Jésus.

Intent

An island is an island is an island. It does’t matter if that island’s isolation is conveyed by sprawling beaches and inlets, or if its isolation seems to have been buried under many layers of human intervention. In other words, despite appearances, despite the phases of farming, settlement, urbanization, and asphalting, Île Jésus remains an island.
Our performative research will seek this restoration there where the most insular characteristic of Île Jésus persists: in its edges. We wish to approach Île Jésus through its edges in order to grasp it in its totality, and in order to restore connections between its past and its present, its forces discernible and indiscernible, its interior and its exterior. To restore connections that exist already and to build new ones, so that it may rediscover itself as an island, and again take its proper place in the Hochelaga archipelago. In doing this, we hope to close the loop in a poetic round trip in which geography and the imaginary can be connected to eachother again
– Simon Brown and Maude Pilon

Publication of Sphinx mon contour
An artist’s book by Simon Brown and Maude Pilon

Afterword (excerpt)

For a number of months this past summer, Simon Brown and Maude S. Pilon trekked around the edge of Île Jésus. Their four eyes peeled to the multiple dimensions of each place, their four hands gathered words, jotting down the perimeter dedicatedly, preparing the ground of a new landscape and shaping its interstices. We imagined them walking, brushing past fences, touching the water by the light of the sun, redefining the territory with the power of words.

Straddling literature and performance, the artists’ interdisciplinary practice and their pursuit of this project in several stages help give meaning to our organization. Verticale — centre d’artistes seeks to promote contemporary art as an expression of the diversity of Laval—a city of kaleidoscopic dimensions—just as it seeks to forge the city’s cultural identity. Verticale’s mandate has found a unique voice in the rumble of Sphinx mon contour.

—Charlotte Panaccio-Letendre, General and Artistic Director, Verticale

Two things cannot occupy the same place at the same time in physical space. Poetic space, on the other hand, allows spatial and temporal elements to intermingle and overlap. Here, in this poetic space, language gives rise to places that would otherwise be impossible.
The physical outline of Île Jésus is a liminal space, simultaneously outward and inward facing, public and private. It is this in-betweenness—rendered now in a poetic space—that runs across our text, which is itself somewhere between story and fragment, performative reporting and poetry.
At first we limited our experiencing of Île Jésus to its banks, its contour. Prompted only by elements that were there and observable, we made notes all along this contour, one of us paying attention to the island’s interior, the other to its peripheries. This descriptive textual gathering caused a deflation of reality, forcing us to make up an all new location.  To do this we brought our notes into a conversation, taking turns at reading our notebooks to each other out loud. The voice of the Sphinx, which we’d come across in our travels along the banks, resounded in these performative readings; we recorded these readings with a plan to transcribe them later on. Working from these transcriptions, we finally arrived at an border-place that can be explored only in its poetic space.

— Simon Brown and Maude Pilon