left: Théâtre Nulle Part. ‘Fenêtres murées/ Daylight Robbery’ a site-specific performance, based on images of condemned buildings and boarded up windows, that explored the dialogue between a building’s interior private spaces and the public exterior environment. below: Théâtre Nulle Part is a collective of four artists: Mélanie Binette, Maryse Beauchamp, Roxanne Robillard and Catherine Dumas.
Urban Occupations Urbaines is a curatorial platform that I developed for creative and critical engagements with unresolved urban and architectural conditions. 3 In September 2010, I invited Théâtre Nulle Part , a site- specific theatre company, to create a performance at Le Dalhousie . Théâtre Nulle Part used Le Dalhousie as a site to examine, over three weeks, the memory of place, the history of Griffintown’s working class community and the politics of displacement. In the public performance, the façade of the Canadian National Railway viaduct was used for a narrative of shadows, evoking the spectres and history of a bygone community. The performance encouraged spectators to move freely within the cul-de-sac whereby a certain shared, communal and public empathy with the site was elicited. In this way, Théâtre Nulle Part ’s spectators collaborated with the spatial agency of the site to form, temporarily, a new political and public space. 4 Distant traffic and city sounds ricocheted in whispers, loose rubble crunched under foot, the brrrring and restless flapping of pigeons reverberated in the rafters — all this collaborated in shaping a social, sensory, spatial, collective and public consciousness. Théâtre Nulle Part ’s performed interventions restore a tradition, largely eradicated in the nineteenth century, of using streets for theatre.
The urban stage, or the city as a theatre of social action, calls to citizens to drop their dependence on cultural institutions to revisit and reflect on the performative qualities of public spaces. Le Dalhousie is not ‘public’ by definition. Its reputation as a public site is as a site of public interest for artists, the community and spectators which evolved with its temporary and tenuous occupation. Cynthia Hammond says that ‘the publicness of space is not a given; rather, it is something to be continually rehearsed and negotiated, exercised, and sometimes lost’. 5 The temporary use of Le Dalhousie shows that although there are spatial practices that feed dominant divisions of power and space, there are also dialogical processes that contest and negotiate these divisions. Le Dalhousie ‘s public identity was cultivated by the imagination of its users. Despite the initial controversy regarding the reuse of the cul-de-sac as a bus corridor, the economy of public exchange that occupied the site of Le Dalhousie in 2011 showed what dialogical processes hold for the production of publics. Participation and dissent, social processes, contingency and contestation (re)write relations between multiple subjects. They also outline a wide ethical concern for the future of marginal and interstitial urban sites such as the Dalhousie cul-de-sac. c
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3 www.urbanoccupationsurbaines. org 4 See Spatial Agency , an online initiative created by Nishat Awan, Tatjana Schneider and Jeremy Till, for an evolving critical discourse and archive on the subject, theory and practice of spatial agency. www. spatialagency.net 5 Cynthia Hammond. ‘Urban ‘Truths: Artistic Interventions in Post-Socialist Space’, in The Post Socialist City: Continuity and Change in Space and Imagery. Marina Dmitrieva and Alfrun Kliems, editors. Berlin: Jois Verlag, 2010
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