Thomas photographing Maurice for his portrait, 2011
Portrait of Maurice, 2012
In September 2010, pouf! took a team of graduate students from Concordia University to interview park users about their knowledge of and experiences in the park. 3 In exchange, we offered photographs of the dogs (who proved to be charming subjects, above). This delightful day led to the accumulation of interview matter from twenty-five individuals and hundreds of photographs of dogs, dogs and people, and the park itself. pouf! then did archival research about the history of the park, through which we discovered its activist origins. To keep the project in circulation during our research phase, pouf! built a blog: fifty posts provided updates, links, photographs and archival findings to the growing community of concern about the future of Parc Gallery. As time went on, we diversified our efforts. In addition to creating a petition, launching a letter-writing campaign and producing several documents for the City of Montréal’s Office for Public Consultation (OCPM) 4 , pouf! designed, wrote and published a bilingual publication, below, about the park’s history and present use, detailing the uncertainty that threatened the park’s future.
5 Thomas Strickland and Evan Kirkland were the portrait photographers; Shauna Janssen documented the event; Cynthia Hammond, Marie-France Daigneault-Bouchard, and Nuria Carton de Grammont undertook interviews. 4 The office for public consultation is a supposedly non-partisan group that acts as a liaison between the public and the city with regard to new development, construction and major changes to the urban fabric. One of the major controversies surrounding Griffintown’s development was the lack of public consultation – the OCPM only became involved after several rounds of proposals from developers were accepted and revised, and only then after a lot of bad press. The consultation was reluctant at best and, for many, came in too late to have any effect. Another facet of this issue is that the OCPM has no power to actually change outcomes. They can only advise the city on public opinion and provide venues for the expression of that opinion. Yet even this is weak, in practice. At the OCPM meeting about Griffintown in January 2011, for example, politicians were given the microphone at the start of the talks, and left before members of the public spoke. At another event organised by the OCPM in the same year, again the competing political parties were given the space to speak first, without any limit on their time, and only after they had finished (and some left) did the public have a say.
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dog parc gallery publication. pouf! art + architecture, 2011
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