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Sur la trace du renard (2011)
Sur la trace du renard is a photographic project produced on the site of the former Canadian Steel Foundries, situated at the east of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve neighbourhood, in Montreal. While the projects for the modernization of Notre-Dame Street plan the transformation of this vacant lot into a strategically commercial site, it is currently being subjected to a discrete occupation where a variety of marginal actors (human and nonhuman) provide an alternative to the idea that the site is a mere post-industrial residue awaiting a better fate.
My project consists of about thirty images documenting the traces of this occupation at different times of the year. During the production of the project, I documented ephemeral encampments of homeless which, I imagine, find in the discretion of the site a semblance of home. I photographed the unofficial paths created by the movements of visitors. I explored the formal potential of the fallow vegetation that proliferates on the site. I made images of what I understood as being a relationship between the animals, the plants and the humans. Finally, I photographed the objects that testified for the life that abounds on the site. All of this, I did it by following the trail of the fox (la trace du renard), imagining the course of this animal living on the fringes of the city and that the walker will meet from time to time in this complex nature/culture intersecting point.
The vegetation that proliferates on the site could be described as "weeds". The people who occupy the site belong to a socially ostracized margin. The animals that occupy the place, such as the fox, are seen as urban presences to be controlled. My project focuses on the interaction between these species. The vine, for example, when growing over small vinegar trees, creates large and dense clusters within which the homeless can get away from the gaze of authority. This interaction between the species (the vine is a "condition of possibility" of human encampment) is present in the images as a kind of reflection on the heterogeneous set of relations active on the site.
The series resulting from this process is structured according to the chronology of production. Without making this strategy strict and absolute, I wanted to make visible the length of my exploration. This durational aspect is observable in the signs of the changing seasons, but also in the recurrence of certain themes and formal motifs (chairs, interlacing plants, etc.), and in the repetition of images that have similar, if not identical, subjects and compositions. This way of sequencing the images find explanations in my desire to render the subjectivity of my experience evident and to signify the inevitable impossibility to explain a complex situation through a single image. If landscape imagery can be accuse of making a complex situation legible and simplified, I acknowledge this problem by giving an accumulation of partial and incomplete understanding of the situation I faced in this project. Together, maybe, all these parts may start to signify and describe tentatively the complexity I approached.
This project is part of a continuing research interest in the relationship that nature and culture cultivate in urban areas. Instead of seeing these two modes of existence as opposite poles, I prefer to look for points of intersection where the complex relationship can deploy its network of infiltration, coexistence and mutual dependence.