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Panique in the streets Quartier Éphémère rediscovers the Faubourg des Récollets by KEITH MARCHAND
The group responsible for staging the show, Quartier Éphémère, were among the first to rediscover the area's potential. They are a non-profit organization that moved into the area in 1984 under the direction of Caroline Andrieux, who had worked in her native France with the L'Usine Éphémère group. L'Usine Éphémère is a decade-old outfit that has become known for taking over derelict buildings in and around Paris and changing them into fertile cultural centres. The Montreal space that Andrieux has developed stands at 16 Prince Street. Comprising 15,000 square feet of space, six artist studios and recording facilities, it is the base of operations for the ambitious Panique show. Panique will feature numerous free activities including guided tours of the neighbourhood, conferences, street parties, performances and, of course, the work of the participating artists. A dozen buildings have been chosen for the artists (selected from across Canada and France) to take over and interpret in whichever way they feel best responds to their vision of the site. The artists were, in effect, given freedom to take these abandoned foundries, warehouses and tool-and-die shops and present their work on either the interiors or exteriors as an act of reclamation, either architecturally, socially or historically. The participants in this unique event are: Alain Paiement, Marcus MacDonald, Nadine Bayla Norman, the In Situ group, Claude Levesque, Jessica Carpenter, Véronique Joumard, Pierre Huyghe, Gilbert Boyer, Michael A. Robinson and Roy Arden. Panique au Faubourg is not intended solely as a "group" art show but also to showcase the potential of this overlooked neighbourhood. Quartier Éphémère's goals are to reclaim some of the derelict sites and make them into cultural centres for what they see as an artist population that has not been effectively represented by traditional, commercial galleries. Panique au Faubourg runs to June 29 |
Panique au Faubourg is a five-week event featuring the work of over a dozen participants, taking place in the mostly abandoned, post-industrial section of Old Montreal known as the Faubourg des Récollets. Located just west of the newly spiffy Old Port (roughly encompassing the area between Notre-Dame and de la Commune, the Bonaventure Expressway and McGill Street), this is an area reminiscent of TriBeCa in New York before gentrification and trendy shopping rendered it almost culturally fallow.