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Dreaming a New World, 2008 Photo : Ivan Binet Dreaming a New World Rêver le nouveau monde is located along a straight pedestrian path in a French-style garden between a large boulevard and the train station. The work alters the use of the path, which, no longer a simple passage, becomes the site of an activity charged with meaning. Forty chairs form a long link, a marked trail. These forty chairs are pierced with forty text fragments by forty poets whose writings date from the founding of Quebec City to today. These select moments, these gathered fragments, draw a portrait of society where the relationship between two individuals increases by one, then two, then four others, and so on, to re-create a community of thought. Like the archeological fragments buried beneath this park, which are the fragmented memory of our history, the forty poetical fragments and the names of their authors are cultural and historical artifacts that bear tangible witness to personal preoccupations, inventions of language and individual testimony: they are not complete texts but morsels of text, and those who survey these memories will have to complete and recontextualize them and imagine their source. The work is set in parenthesis by two pairs of chairs, one pair at the entrance on the street and the other toward the train station. The first two chairs are linked not by words but by a bronze piece: a scale representation of the St. Lawrence River between Quebec City and Montreal, the emblematic river, lifeline, umbilical cord from America to the world. This miniature that clearly identifies the two cities is oriented in the same direction as the river itself (which is a few steps away but not visible) and determines the placement of the Quebec City Chair and the Montreal Chair. These chairs are not side by side, face to face or back to back, but at a diagonal, in a position that suggests neither a single vision, confrontation nor negation but a coming together and respect for one another’s choices. At the other end of the path, the other two chairs close the parenthesis. They are side by side, facing the group of poem-chairs; they are staring in the same direction. Under one of the chairs is a representation of the globe of the earth; under the other, a small-scale representation of a “fisherman’s house,” typical of the early dwellings of Quebec City. These two objects – the extremes of public space and private space – are of similar dimensions, and viewers who sit on the chairs so identified can observe the work as a living theatre, watching passers-by who, as they read their way along in permutations with other readers, are the actors of this often silent, always complicitous theatre that breaks the isolation of individuals in the city and renews the unity of place and time that is so closely associated with the theatre. Rêver le nouveau monde is not a simple statement. It is a project that began here four hundred years ago and has been given a specific place to witness the past and dream its sequel, a new world. 40 poets taking part: Claude Beausoleil, Michel Bibaud, Nicole Brossard, Paul Chamberland, Cécile Cloutier, Leonard Cohen, Hugues Corriveau, Louise Cotnoir, Octave Crémazie, Jean-Paul Daoust, Normand de Bellefeuille, Denise Desautels, Alfred Desrochers, Kim Doré, Hélène Dorion, Louise Dupré, Madeleine Gagnon, St-Denys Garneau, Claude Gauvreau, Roland Giguère, Charles Gill, Gérald Godin, Alain Grandbois, Anne Hébert, Dany Laferrière, Gatien Lapointe, Irving Layton, Félix Leclerc, Marc Lescarbot, Paul Chanel Malenfant, Rita Mestokosho, Gaston Miron, Émile Nelligan, Pierre Nepveu, Emily Novalinga, Pierre Perrault, Joseph Quesnel, Jean Royer, Gilles Vigneault, Yolande Villemaire. Michel Goulet. Translation: Donald Pistolesi |
