Saturday March 26th, 2022 at 2pm
In the case of bad weather, the event will be postponed to Sunday March 27th
In the structure located at 77 Bernard East, corner Casgrain
Free
Facebook event
To mark VIVA!’s progressive awakening from a restful and necessary pandemic slumber, we invite you to join us for an afternoon of actions presented outdoors. Free and open to everyone, the event will unfold in a vacant lot located in the Mile End. This site is best known for the structure that occupies it, the remnants of an abandoned industrial shed that burnt down in 2018. VIVA! recognizes that the lot has a vibrant history of independent and furtive cultural activity, which we hope to honour. In the context of our programming, four local artists have been invited to present actions that unfold in situ, in dialogue with the materials, life, and memories that inhabit the site.
Performances by Ileana Hernadez, Julie-Isabelle Laurin, Martìn Rodríguez and Sylvie Tourangeau.
This event is part of a series of micro-programming initiatives that seek to reinvigorate the local performance art community while we collectively await the next edition of the festival.
Ileana Hernandez Camacho
Website
Ileana Hernandez Camacho is a multidisciplinary artist (performance, installation, and media arts) who holds a BFA from Concordia University (2014). In her artistic practice, she explores themes of nature, camouflage, femininity, and the vulnerable and fragile nature of living things. Focusing on notions of feedback and collaboration, her creations emphasize the importance of reciprocal links between the living and the artificial to highlight the evocative potential of each. She is a founding member of the collective ¡A MANO! (2013). Her work has been presented in Cuba, Argentina, Finland, Mexico, and Canada. In addition to her artistic work, she occasionally gives workshops for children, which are accessible to the whole family. These workshops have been presented at Pointe-à-Callière Museum, Articule artist-run centre, Centre des arts actuels Skol, and Concordia University, among others. When she dies, she wants her body to nourish an avocado tree.
Photo : Maude Lauzière Dumas
Julie-Isabelle Laurin
Website
I maintain a nomadic artistic posture. I travel, explore, and live in the transient, the becoming, the interstice; a place of passage between temporal, geographic or imaginary points. My interdisciplinary work connects performance art and spatial practices (sculpture, installation) using varied experimental approaches such as becoming monument. From one place to another, I accumulate and carry – in my body, in my clothes, in my objects – an alternative form of knowledge that is gleaned from field experience, where the explored context gets added to a narrative framework that is under perpetual construction. I favour commemorative forms, which highlight memories of the places I travel through. In the work that I characterise as wandering, infiltrating, and relational, I am interested in what circulates between identity, territory, and object.
Image: Le monument-au-vent, still from video documentation by Jonathan Miron Roy
Martín Rodríguez
Website
As a multidisciplinary artist and independent curator, Rodríguez’s work emerges from his upbringing along the Arizona-Mexico border. After surgery to remove a brain tumour left him temporarily paralyzed, Rodríguez searched for new meaning. When radio signals trapped in his guitar began to sing, he seized on the phenomena and began exploring the cracks of the radio spectrum as a material for making art. His practice mixes performance with interventions and installations, investigating radio as a transformative medium. Notably, his work has been presented by the Musée d’art contemporain Montréal (CA), MUAC (MX), Darling Foundry (CA), Spektrum (DE), as well as various festivals and performance venues across Canada and the US.
Photo: Jose Garcia-Lozano
Sylvie Tourangeau
Active since 1978, Sylvie Tourangeau (artist, author, workshop facilitator, and curator) is considered a pioneer of performance art in Canada. In the context of her artistic practice, she invests herself in performance, relational art, and rituals of circumstance. She has published a number of artist books and more than sixty articles (Inter, Espace, Parachute, Vanguard, Vie des Arts, etc.) reflecting on the works of an important group of performers. Within the context of the TouVA collective, she also published The 7th Sense, a bilingual book about the “performative” that was launched in 2017. She is the founder of the interdisciplinary training space Espace Sylvie Tourangeau (Joliette 1995 – 2007), and an artist residency dedicated to the performing arts, La maison aux volets jaunes (2015-2017) and La nouvelle maison jaune (2018-). She is also a lecturer at the University of Sherbrooke.
Image: Temps libre, 3e impérial centre d’essai en art contemporain, photo by Yves Gendreau