Camping out

>>Dare-Dare celebrates the last months of
the Parc sans nom outdoors-style

LAST HURRAH UNDERNEATH THE STARS:
Marjolaine Samson (pink top, centre), Jean-Pierre Caissie
(green jacket, centre) and the Dare-Dare crew and artists

by CHRISTOPHER DeWOLF

Rooftop sleepovers aside, Mile-End isn’t normally known as a camping destination. That will soon change, at least for four days, with “Camping aux bons plaisirs fugaces,” a camping-themed arts event, hosted by the artist-run centre Dare-Dare, which will take place this weekend.

From tonight, Thursday, June 5 until Sunday, June 8, 13 artists will sleep under the stars at the Parc sans nom, the vacant-lot-cum-arts-space at the corner of St-Laurent and Van Horne. In a sense, the event will be a last hurrah for the park, which will be converted into a storage space for the Plateau Mont-Royal borough’s public works equipment when Dare-Dare leaves at the end of the month.

“We wanted to do something with the Parc sans nom and it came up that we could do some camping there,” says Marjolaine Samson, one of the event’s organizers. “The park will become a really dynamic place and we want all the neighbours to come participate. It’s going to be an artistic and community space—a lived-in space…. With what the city is doing there won’t be much left. It’s too bad. So this will really be an ephemeral event.”

Limited time only

The 13 artists participating will use their tents, the park and the neighbourhood around it as their artistic point of departure. The projects include an instruction video on urban survival, an experiment in underground camping and a sound-based walking tour from Rosemont metro to the Parc sans nom. One artist will recreate a night sky; another will serve a meal each night made entirely from food scavenged from Mile-End’s dumpsters.

Originally, the plan was for the public to be able to access the campground around the clock, but the organizers were forced to scale back when the borough refused them permission, allowing them only to open the site from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m.

“We thought we could really push the limits of what we can do in the theme of camping, because a campground here is not legal. We wanted to see if it was possible to create a real campground, but the borough said it wasn’t possible,” said Jean-Pierre Caissie, Dare-Dare’s creative director. “It could have been fun having people come to camp in their neighbourhood park.”

Not being able to camp in the park won’t be the neighbourhood’s only loss: within several months, the Parc sans nom will likely be paved over and sealed off to the public. Although Dare-Dare had always been planning to leave—an itinerant organization, it moves every two years—Caissie had hoped that the park would retain an artistic vocation even after it had left.

From neglect to art to parking

According to Michel Tanguay, spokesperson for the Plateau administration, borough officials have been eyeing the lot ever since condo construction began to hem in the existing public works lots near St-Grégoire.

“There’s no surplus of empty lots in the Plateau, and this is an essential project,” he says, adding that it’s possible that the loss of the Parc sans nom will be made up for by new green spaces that will be created in the nearby garment district around de Gaspé. “We’re very concerned about improving the environment but we have to work with what we’ve got. We don’t have a lot of space left over—we’re not Pointe-aux-Trembles. We’re lucky enough as it is to have great big parks like Jeanne-Mance and Lafontaine.”

That’s cold comfort for Caissie, who describes the Parc sans nom as a unique, creative and unstructured space that was fashioned from a neglected and long-abandoned lot. Since Dare-Dare moved there in 2006, dozens of artistic and community events have been staged in the park and it has become a popular place for people from the neighbourhood to gather.

“It would have been nice to organize something against this or to make people aware, but we only had a few months to find a new home and we’ve been too busy with that,” he says. “I don’t want to be pessimistic, but this might be the last chance people from the neighbourhood will have to come and enjoy the Parc sans nom.”