Tag Archives: identity

The Illuminated Crowd, 1985

April 20, 2016 Group10

The Illuminated Crowd is a sculpture located in downtown Montreal on rue McGill College created by Raymond Mason and erected in 1985. The statue is a bigoted piece that represents the ideology of western triumphalism and how those who don’t fall into that ideology are left behind and minimalized. The statue presents the literal light of the west as all powerful and that the farther away from the light you are the worse off you are, presenting those worse off as grotesque and the ones in the light as idealized westerners.

The intervention’s aims are to express silenced voices and combat ethnocentricity, engage and criticize the concepts of western culture and superiority. Additionally the hope is to remove focus from unsightly art.

The intervention consists of creating a series of photographs and written stories that represent people from all over Montreal, aiming to represent people all walks of life. These photographs are to be placed on columns along the perimeter of the area, facing the statue, with small plaques telling the photos’ stories. By gathering people and their stories, we hope to combat the ideology of the statue, additionally the placement would remove focus from the statue.

Home & Native Land?

Central Station Montreal: Images of Indigenous People in Modernist Spaces

March 22, 2016 DamienSmith

As befitting a young nation, where the romantic myth of a vast country united by railway and internationally connected through the port of Montreal, Charles Comfort’s bas-relief friezes [1] for Montreal’s Central Station (completed in 1942) were commissioned as an integrated artwork extolling the history, resources, technology and culture of Canada. Images of indigenous people figure within the context of a national narrative of Canada’s history and future, but in the case of Comfort’s mural they are not depicted as active participants in the cultural and technological imagery of a modern Canada. There are only three images of indigenous people in the two murals that are located at each end of the station’s concourse. They are depicted as historical and exotic figures. These are modernist images of “primitive people in civilized spaces,” [2] are not depicted in the segments of Comfort’s mural that depict industrial, technological, scientific or culture activities and achievements. These images of remain on the margins of the murals – and on the margins of a modern Canada.

Comfort’s mural is a cultural artifact of nation building, the act of a creation though integrating ideology, creation of an integrated society, and the creation of a functioning state apparatus. This cultural artifact (i.e. Central Stations mural) is one that reduces the images of the citizenry of Canada into a homogenized art deco universal style, a stylized visual mythology of nationhood. The images of indigenous people identify here as primitivism carved out in the streamlined surfaces and contours of white stone,

These images of mural people filtered through the stylistic tropes of modernism and Art Deco are images of ambivalence, as “ colonial signifiers of authority.” [3] The reductive and modernist image of the indigenous person within this culturally Euro-centric tableau is consigned to history, and is visually erased from the mural’s (and hence, the nation’s) “present” and future even

[1] Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture. (London: Routledge, 1994), 153.

In considering how to enact an intervention with Comfort’s mural, and the imagery of one Innu and one First Nations figure – or barely do, problematically – in the context of the murals “cultural work” as a public work of art of nation building, I plan to make a modest intervention which will take the form of a simple infographic distributed or surreptitiously inserted into the free newspapers, and left randomly found the benches and cafes in Central Station.

The station is essentially an ambivalent and interstitial site for commuters, the platform access situated in stairwells leading to the underground platforms of inter-city and suburban trains. The mural, if noticed at all due to its high location, is probably viewed in fragments. The opportunity of actually altering the mural itself is slim, if not illegal or would require a time consuming amount of gaining approval. My intervention will take place at concourse level, thus something tangible that will be experienced by the people who move through the station My intervention flyer incorporates a diagram of the murals with the scant images of aboriginally and highlight their minimal presence in the mural points out the lack of presence of indigenous people and of how our historical public artworks of nation building have neglected to represent all Canadians.

[1] Designed by Charles Comfort and executed by Montreal stone carver Sebastiano Aiello.

[2] James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997), 197.

Clifford here is quoting Coco Fusco, a Cuban-American artist and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a Chicano artist Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West. The performance was created in response to the quincentenary anniversary of Columbus “discovery” (quotation marks mine) of America. In their performance they dressed in improvised “primitive” clothing and performed a pastiche of what would be considered primitive activities and rituals.

[3] Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture. (London: Routledge, 1994), 153.

History Reimagined, Montreal Heritage

Retracing The Footsteps: Rethinking Montreal’s Creation Narrative

March 17, 2016 group4

Long before Europeans sailed to Canada and began to settle themselves in the new territory, First Nations tribes had already existed there. When Jacques Cartier sailed over to the New World and planted his famous cross on Mount Royal to mark French territory in Canada, Native villages were already in place and had been for a while.

If one would go walking around Old Montreal today, they’d see very little reminders that First Nations peoples had lived on this land before the arrival of the European powers. Not much remains of the memory that indigenous peoples were once settled here a long time ago and laid part of the foundation of the Montreal we live in today.

OUR METHOD:

Our intervention consists of two main components: an augmented reality experience that can be accessed through a smartphone application combined with a walking tour. This augmented reality will fill in the blanks of Montreal’s creation story that have been overlooked: namely, the contribution of First Nations peoples. The sites we have chosen are the Pointe-A-Calliere Museum, Chateau Ramezay and the Lachine Canal. Upon arrival at these sites, members of the walking tour can hold up their phones and will be able to see the missing parts of the narrative.

OUR GOALS:

We seek to challenge the current narrative in place with our intervention. With the combined walking tour and augmented reality, we hope to raise questions concerning why the contributions of First Nations peoples are diminished compared to those of European settlers.

Home & Native Land?

Cabot[‘s] Square?

March 15, 2016 Group.7

In 1870, Cabot Square was opened upon land gifted to the city from the Sulpicians. Initially, the space’s central feature was a fountain, but in 1935 a statue of explorer John Cabot – donated by the Italian community – replaced it.

The portrayal of Cabot is problematic; using tropes of monumental sculpture, it perpetuates a narrative of European explorers discovering a “new world”. Cabot’s image is thus meant to remind the viewer of the official version of Canadian nation-building, while marginalizing alternative perspectives; most notably those of Indigenous peoples.

Ironically enough, in the decades that followed Cabot Square became a gathering site for urban Indigenous peoples from across the country; the space is especially important to many homeless Indigenous of Montreal, who often lack the ability to articulate their identity in the urban setting due to both economic and symbolic disenfranchisement.

Recently, the municipal government enacted an urban renewal plan that led to the renovation of Cabot Square. The project included a permanent use for the building in the park, better lighting, the addition of garbage bins, and the paving of pathways, among other details. Importantly, the plan also included a permanent police presence through the stationing of a liaison officer in the area.

To facilitate this process, the city also launched the Montreal Urban Aboriginal Community Strategy (RÉSEAU). The organizations’ objectives were to present a portrait of Cabot Square from the point of view of the Indigenous community located there, as well as the development of solutions to improve safety and wellbeing through a “collaborative and coordinated approach”.

In practice, once the Square re-opened after many months of renovations, there were a few significant additions to it. The Indigenous-operated Roundhouse Café was opened in the rotunda on the west side, and 2 outreach workers now have an office on site. The space also began to host events such as International Indigenous Day celebrations and weekly soapstone carving workshops.

Notably, there is a tension evidenced by all these interventions; the planning policy of city had on one hand sought to “clean up” the park and focused its objectives in security terminology, while on the other hand devoted its resources to promoting a sense of community in the space.

The fact that the Cabot Statue—a symbol of colonial authority—should remain the central focus of the Square even after the renovation seems inconsistent with RÉSEAU’s goal of empowering Montreal’s Urban Indigenous community. The problem of a colonial monument presiding over a gathering space for Montreal’s dispossessed Indigenous peoples remains unaddressed. The intervention we have imagined engages with this problem, and aims to situate itself within and contribute to the outreach already being done in the space by advancing a discussion of the historical narratives present in Cabot Square.

The first component of our proposed intervention is a community led planting of vines at the base of the Cabot monument. Over the course of a season, the vines would grow to form a living wall which would cover the statue entirely. Cabot’s figure would be obscured, but the form of the monument would remain in the landscape of the park, symbolizing a challenge to the authority of the historical narrative implicit in the statue. The aim of the living wall is to dispel the notion that any common or universal historical understanding is possible in a space as nuanced as Cabot Square, undoing the work of the State-sponsored colonial monument.

The second component of our intervention is a collection of oral testimonies, gathered from interviews with people who have lived and gathered in Cabot Square. The testimonies will be accessible online via smartphone, through a QR code that will be installed on a placard near the newly-covered monument. We will employ existing community networks such as RÉSEAU to seek participants. The audio component emphasizes the importance of oral tradition, suggesting a continued detachment from authoritative knowledge systems. A central theme of our intervention is the deference of historical authority to a living voice within the Montreal Indigenous community, and as such we will allow their testimony and narratives to shape our project, including whatever broader questions of colonial relations it might imply.