by PATRICK LEJTENYI

The Main’s past is arguably more colourful than its present. Before it was overrun with overpriced restaurants, bridge-and-tunnel drunks and mattress stores, St-Laurent was a bustling strip burbling with a host of languages—especially Yiddish, as the shmata industry boomed in the pre-war years, along with communists, nascent unions and the Duplessis-backed union-busters. It’s this eclectic past that Annie Roy and Pierre Allard, the two artists behind Action Terroriste Socialement Acceptable (ATSA), want to unearth with their second version of their FRAG installation/walking tour.

The FRAG 2006’s centrepiece will be a recreation of a shmata factory, plunked smack dab in the middle of next week’s St-Laurent street fest madness. It’s likely to be far more pleasant than the reality: back in the day, when Montreal supplied an estimated two-thirds of all Canadian-made clothes, factory conditions were as bad as your average Third World sweatshop today. Buildings like the Balfour, Cooper and Peck didn’t host swank dance troupes or engineering firms or video game development offices, but acres of toiling, sweating immigrants and francophones.

“The exhibit will examine the creation of the union movement, the growth of the Communist Party of Canada and anti-Semitism,” says Roy. “It’s so we can get to know the history of our St-Laurent. The city changes so fast, and St-Laurent has been designated an historical heritage site, so it’s interesting to look at the advances and the history and the people who built it up.”

The research led Roy and Allard to various libraries and archives, where they sifted through mountains of documents, books and newspapers. Along the way they dug up information about the 1937 strike, when 5,000 garment workers braved sub-zero temperatures for union recognition and a 44-hour workweek, Fred Rose, Canada’s only Communist MP and the only MP to be convicted of spying for a foreign government, early feminist and social justice activist (and constant thorn in Duplessis’s side) Lea Roback, and the then unheard-of stance by Steinberg’s grocery store to adhere willingly and with gusto to Bill 101’s French language requirements in the ’70s. Not to mention the Mile-End train station, which supplied Montreal’s milk needs from the Laurentian dairy farms, and the Villanova store on St-Laurent and Bellechasse, named after former mayor Léonidas Villeneuve.

“But what we really needed were nice, interesting visual archives,” says Roy. “We wanted the FRAG to be on the whole a visually pleasing work, so we wanted to do things like highlight the details of construction, things like that.”

Even though the exhibit focuses on the past, Roy and Allard do cast an eye to the future. Much of the exhibit is aimed at students who can benefit from school outings, and they’re hoping to publish a book and CD-ROM encompassing this and the previous installation, something Roy doesn’t think should be too hard, as most of the work is already done. And finally, new to this year’s edition, the curious will be able to download podcasts explaining the significance and background of the exhibit’s individual components, available next week on the ATSA Web site, www.atsa.qc.ca.