Image :  The Manœuvres artists and team, 2026. Photo : Antonin Monmart

From March 15th to April 4th, four artists selected by VIVA! and Le Lieu travelled to the Îles-de-la-Madeleine to participate in a group residency supported by AdMare: Mila Figuet (Montréal), Ileana Hernández Camacho (Mexico/Montréal), Catherine Lalonde Massecar (Montréal), and Maxime Sauvage (Québec). 

During the residency, the artists had the opportunity to exchange with Alain-Martin Richard and explore, through their respective practices, his definition of the “manœuvre”, a performative gesture that is situated in reality. It is a performance that is prepared yet never fixed, a situation that adapts to the place, the people present, and the unexpected. 

To feed each artist’s process, the residency period was punctuated by informal encounters, public workshops, and artistic infiltrations that often invited the community and the land to take part. To conclude, a public event was organized that, in the spirit of an open studio, included shared moments that were anchored in the present as well as performative fragments that pointed towards the future. The opportunity to gain insight into each artist’s process via the active participation of the public made the experience all the richer. Finally, while this was the occasion to discover four distinct proposals, it also made the genuine camaraderie shared among the artists and the porosity between their working methodologies visible.

Thank you to our project partners, AdMare and Le Lieu. Thank you to the production team and the photographer, Antonin Monmart.

Artists

Mila Figuet is a performance artist based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Her practice uses art as a tool for action and awareness-raising, particularly in response to gender-based violence. Her projects include participatory performances, public interventions, and audiovisual installations. By mobilizing the body as a site of memory, listening, and transformation, she questions structures of domination and the silences surrounding violence, while exploring possibilities for healing, resistance, and reappropriation through art. A graduate of fine arts from Concordia University with a specialization in Intermedia (Video, Performance, and Electronic Arts), she has collaborated with cultural institutions and participated in residencies in Canada and internationally.

For Manoeuvres, Mila presents a project centered on anger, an emotion often stigmatized yet capable of bringing about individual and collective transformation. She explores how anger can become a political language, a material, a transformable energy, as well as a living archive and a sensory and oral memory of the injustices suffered and the struggles of victims.

Photos : Antonin Monmart

Ileana Hernandez Camacho is a Mexican artist who has been based in Montreal since her teenage years. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University (2014) and a Master’s degree in Art Production from UAEM (2024) in Cuernavaca. Her practice is rooted in relational performance and human camouflage, which she views as sensitive strategies for listening to and engaging in dialogue with the environment. Through clothing and everyday objects, she transforms her body into a surface for poetic contact, exploring the reciprocal relationships between the living, the inanimate, and aquatic environments. Her work has been presented in Canada, Mexico, and internationally.

For Manœuvres, Ileana proposes the body as a liminal territory, traversed by memories, affect, and environmental forces. Guided by repetition, intuition, and gozo—understood as a political and transformative joy—her performative actions focus on ways to connect to and protect the freshwater aquifer, a fragile balance between freshwater and saltwater that is essential to life on the archipelago.

Photos : Antonin Monmart

Catherine Lalonde Massecar has been working for over fifteen years as an interdisciplinary artist-researcher and initiator of projects rooted in reality, taking both tangible and intangible forms. Her practice oscillates between collaborative creations with communities in Montreal’s Centre-Sud neighborhood—where she founded Péristyle Nomade—and experimental infiltration projects carried out solo or with the Duo Massecar•d’Orion. Holding a master’s degree in theater from UQAM in artistic infiltration in urban settings, she completed a PhD in 2024 exploring “operatic manœuvre“, with the aim of intensifying the encounter between artistic gesture and the world.

For Manœuvres, Catherine’s research is part of a dynamic that focuses on ways of inhabiting spaces and inscribing sensitive and political gestures within them, in dialogue with the people who pass through. The exploration of the territory will begin with a graphic score guiding movements and observations, to test the porosity of boundaries and imagine embodied actions.

Photos : Antonin Monmart

Maxime Sauvage is a multidisciplinary artist working in performance art, installation, sculpture, and video. He develops “install’actions” as a method of storytelling and connection. In the fall of 2025, he presented Espérer faire tempête at Regart, his research-creation project for his Master’s degree in Visual Arts at Laval University. Holding a Bachelor of Fine Arts (sculpture) from Concordia University and a diploma in environmental design from UQAM, Maxime also studied architecture at Dalhousie. As a co-founder of Limina, he has completed residencies at the REDA Foundation and Engramme (LCSA) and will soon continues research at La Charpente des Fauves, Sagamie, and 3e Impérial.

In 2023, his research into his ambiguous relationship with winter led Maxime to explore Quebecers’ obsession with snow removal and the massive use of de-icing salt. To better understand its effects and underlying logic, Maxime undertook a series of interventions, collecting over 150 kg of urban salt, which he dried, sorted, and transformed. For Manœuvres, Maxime brings this salt back to the Magdalen Islands to create sensitive, collective gestures, exploring wandering, serendipity, and chance encounters with the territory and its inhabitants.

Photos : Antonin Monmart

AdMare promotes contemporary art in the Magdalen Islands. With a regular program of solo and group exhibitions, artist residencies, major artistic events, and publication projects, AdMare offers artists a space for renewal, exploration, exchange, and reflection in relation to the local area and the community in which it operates.