View of Griffintown, 1947.The white circle indicates the location of Parc Gallery
urbanism | participation by pouf ! art + architecture
Biting Back art and activism at the dog park
publ ics community montréal animals developers
Parc Gallery was privatised in 2007 in preparation for condo development (opposite, top). Our two-year collaboration with the users of Parc Gallery asserted the publicness of Parc Gallery, using art and outreach to show its history, present use and future importance. Our motivation was to present a counter-argument to city officials’ and developers’ claims that the park was empty space, and to create a rationale for saving the park. In Elizabeth Grosz’s term, we ‘made visible’ Parc Gallery’s inter-species vitality, its meaning as shared space and what we discovered about its surprising heritage.
In 2010 , pouf! art + architecture began a site-specific project under the rubric of Urban Occupations Urbaines (UOU), a year-long, neighbourhood-based curatorial platform located in the rapidly gentrifying, post-industrial neighbourhood of Griffintown, Montréal (above). Curator Shauna Janssen, also a contributor to this issue of On Site , devised UOU to engage artists in an urban space of dramatic transition. The site of pouf! ’s intervention was a well-used dog run known as Parc Gallery. Yet, beyond the humans and dogs who frequent it every day, this green space is little-known and is thus vulnerable (below).
View of Parc Gallery, Griffintown, 19 August 2012
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