Rendez-vous des disparitions

“We who are the inheritors of a destruction, the children of those who, being expropriated of their commons, have been the prey not only of exploitation but also of the abstractions that made them into whoevers, we have to experiment with what is likely to recreate ... the capacity to think and act together.” (Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism, trans. Andrew Goffey (Lüneburg: Open Humanities Press and meson press, 2015), 152.)

The exhibition Rendez-vous des disparitions focuses on the development of alter-globalization at the turn of the new millennium. It returns to what could be described as a threshold or period of rupture. What were the key moments of alter-globalization thinking before the democratization of the internet? As with a mosaic novel, how can the language of the visual arts help us to reconstruct history using distinct elements?

The installation is a dialogue between two bodies of work. On the one hand, a series of photographs by Jean Lauzon shows anarchists and punks gathering at Festipunk, an annual event in Melbourne, in the Eastern Townships, between 1998 and 2000. This series was first presented at the Maison des arts Desjardins Drummondville in spring 2001 and then travelled to various churches in Drummondville and select locations in Montreal and Trois-Rivières. On the other hand, Guillaume Adjutor Provost presents a new series of documentary sculptures concerned with the media’s treatment of the Third Summit of the Americas, held in Quebec City in April 2001. Through their juxtaposition, the two bodies of work provide a picture of various attitudes, between anger and resistance, emerging in a changing world.