Whereas the miniature represents closure, interiority, the domestic and the overly cultural, the gigantic represents infinity, exteriority, the public, and the overly natural.[1]
The areas we enter and that enter us — as inhabited, stolen, occupied, forgotten, abandoned, unplanned, transformed, dreamt up, configured, and (re)activated — should also be considered, in all of their complexity.
To live and create, citizens and artists move from one space to another, creating new points of reference, new habitable environments, and new stories. What drives these meandering trajectories? Flood zones, migrations, transfers, moves, housing crises, lack of studio space; mobility can be a privilege or an imposition. Within these multiple contexts, what does it mean to build, relocate, or centralize ourselves? To settle or refuse to do so?
The season is over and every box has been filled. The only thing left to do is to identify them. The piles of dust are being blown around by the breeze that comes through the poorly insulated studio walls. The room sounds different without the tools and materials that cluttered the shelves. The other people have already moved out. The only things left here are the stools and work tables above which a few ideas are still discernible. A careful look at a nearly empty space. You can feel the spirit of this place. A kind of diffused but specific feeling. Particular details come into focus. The genius loci has always lived here. Will it come with us or stay here, hidden in the floor’s stains and holes? What kind of spirit will we encounter over there? Will we know how to perceive it and cultivate it as much as we hope?
Present in various disciplinary fields and under different formulations, the concept of genius loci defines something that is felt within a place and whose presence imposes a certain kind of behaviour and respect. If the plethora of definitions is confusing, this ambiguity around the spirit of a place opens the door to on site investigation: can the spirit of a place be used to guide our actions? Can it help us understand how to be in this site? How can we learn to visualize it and feed off of it to create meaningful spaces? How can we preserve it while accepting its reality as something living, nebulous, and shifting? How do we deal with our failure to observe and respond to it? How can we embody its dynamic power and for what purposes?
[T]he spirit of place describes reality. To discover exactly what it is and to find the best ways of speaking about it means that we need to become sensitive investigators of places.[2]
For VCA, these desire lines point to the design and construction of a physical gallery, and prompt us to orchestrate a major transition. The project looms large and the change in scale will be big. The need to reflect on the paradoxes of this type of intention through art and with artists is necessary. Is it too early to consider this? How can we establish ourselves while remaining mobile and flexible? Why change at all, and into what, and how?
Les récits de mémoire mobilisant l’espace servent de point de repère : ils permettent aux groupes sociaux de se représenter dans le temps et de construire par leurs récits la temporalité des espaces, de la fondation à la disparition. [3]
Until this important move happens, VCA will continue to sup port art practices that take place outside the gallery space, and that resist homogenization and the overdetermination of urban spaces and art spaces. Mobility requires engagement; a keen awareness of an entry point (even if our presence and its trace are ephemeral); the momentum to create with the reality of the site and the material conditions of one’s practice. In the transition from the studio to public space, accommodations must always be made. Responding to a site means experiencing it; from there, the desire to constantly reconfigure things sometimes emerges.
These trajectories and arrangements, and the modifications and easing that result from them, have an impact both on societal transformation and individual metamorphosis. How do we pre pare for a move? What means do we devote to transitioning and establishing ourselves? What care do we put into making spaces more liveable? How much attention is needed to sense the genius loci? What configuration should we choose, and how do we think about it, experience it, and secure it? In view of these tremendous changes, let’s hope that the trajectory we choose will generate profound and gratifying change, and that the questions that currently consume and preoccupy us become the catalyst for our transformation!
To a child or an ardent adult, the leftover space can confer something of a sporadic, abrupt and unexpected opportunity to craft a moment of urban revelation.[4]
[1]Stewart, Susan. On Longing, Narrative of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Durham : Duke University Press Books, 1993, p. 70.
[2] Brook, « Can Spirit of Place be a guide to ethical building? », dans Fox, Warwick. Ethics and the Built Environment, London : Routledge, 2000, p. 139-151.
[3] Gravereau, Sophie et Caroline « Récits spatiaux : Se raconter socialement en racontent les espaces », Sociologie des espaces. Paris : Armand Colin, 2019, p. 190.
[4] Akerman, Abraham et Ariela Cornfield, « Greening As a Urbain Design Metaphor: Looking in the City’s Soul in Leftover Spaces », Structurist, 2009/2010, p. 30-35
Programmation 2023—25
Part 1
Natacha Clitandre
Alegría Gobeil
k.g. Guttman
Annie-Kim Rainville — Jean-François Prost, mentor invité
Part 2
Chris Boyne
Lynn Kodeih
Catherine Lavoie-Marcus
The clubs — 10th edition
To come
All past thematic programming