Où l’écho précède la voix [where echoes precede voices] : Artists : Caroline Boileau, Diego Gil, Stéphane Gilot, Hanna Sybille Müller et Alisha Piercy | Co-curators : Emmanuelle Choquette and Stéphane Gilot

Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain is pleased to present a special project curated by Emmanuelle Choquette and Stéphane Gilot.

Où l’écho précède la voix [where echoes precede voices] is a group proposition based on both a performance-installation created in 2017 ^[1], and an extrapolation of the fictional spaces evoked therein. Collaborators Alisha Piercy, Hanna Sybille Müller and Caroline Boileau are invited once again to take over the architectural structures designed by Stéphane Gilot. The original installation—which unfurled on the ground in a floor plan that echoed the hallways of the classic board game Clue—now takes on a different, fragmented layout, its various elements positioned across the gallery like sculptures referencing corridors as transitional spaces connecting places, rooms, chambers. Organized in a more abstract composition, these fragments now act as an intriguing signage. Like clues to non-existent places, the hallways lead to concealed doors, behind which one may find a bedroom, a ballroom, a library, or maybe entirely new dreamlike, fictional or imagined worlds.

As corridors become portals, a rift opens on a metaverse. Indeed, Alisha Piercy’s large drawings afford us a glimpse into a virtual universe—namely Second Life’s AbTec Island ^[2]—which she explores as a settler artist-researcher. During her excursions into this digital realm, she opens up and listens to the messages of ghostly apparitions that guide the living in the real world. Through her drawings, she gives an analogue materiality to these experiences; proposing ethereal tableaux where architectural forms become speculative, and where the sound vibrations of signals and utterances can take shape.

The spaces summoned by the exhibition seem populated by various spectres whose presence materializes briefly through the written or spoken language. Enters Caroline Boileau’s L’oiseau de malheur, [the bird that brings bad news] a sort of abstract bird that stalks the yellow halls. As it comes to life, it walks towards us and lets us read one of its quills before skulking away. Its slow movements and the subtle noise of his plumage of paper and text follows him around, surrounding him like a constant rustling of pages and feathers. Meanwhile, the words left unread continue to echo in the artist’s watercolour eardrums and ear canals, which might as well represent the corridors and circulation networks between other dreamed, simulated, or distant worlds.

Distances between physical and imagined places become a playground for the performance choreographed by Hanna Sybille Müller, based on her 2016 piece entitled transposition. Sybille, not being in Montreal at the moment, she entrusts the new score to a performer: Diego Gil. He draws memorized, unknown and imaginary spaces, which he describes with his gestures and body. Through his voice, he evokes atypical, closed and sometimes strange places, while his movements allow us to imagine them. Here, movement and sound give shape to text, affording us a vantage point into both surreal and fairy-tale spaces. 

This experiment continues in the small room where the only element one can make out is a small, lonely drawing, emerging from the surrounding darkness as in a dream. Passages taken from several novels and short stories ^[3], read in turn by Alisha Piercy, Caroline Boileau and Hanna Sybille Müller, guide our visualization of the rooms that will remain forever hidden behind the closed doors that line the yellow corridors. 

^[1] Ce que racontent les couloirs jaunes, [what the yellow hallways tell us] presented as part of the 2017 edition of the Art souterrain festival.  

^[2] AbTec Island (Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace/Territoires autochtones dans le cyberespace) is a virtual environment determined by the First Nations and created by artists Skawennati and Jason Edward Lewis in the online game Second Life.  

^[3] Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-paper, 1892. Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet [Le cornet accoustique]. Written in the 1940s, the French translation of this book was published in 1974, two years before the original English edition. Michel Tremblay, La chambre octogonale, 1966. Yoko Ogawa, Hexagonal room [La petite pièce hexagonale], 1994. Herbjorg Wassmo, [Karma’s heritage], 1997. Alisha Piercy, Ice Breaker/Auricle, 2010.

PERFORMANCE PROGRAM
June 1 and 22, from 3 p.m., presence of Caroline Boileau's oiseau de malheur
June 15, 3pm, performance by Hanna Sybille Müller, interpreted by Diego Gil

BIOS

Alisha Piercy is a settler artist-researcher and doctoral candidate in Cultural Studies (Research-Creation, ABD) at Queen's University (Canada) and researcher at the International Council of Design (Montréal, Canada). Her interdisciplinary work includes drawing installation, film, and she is the author of poetry and novels. Her current project, a speculative theory-fiction, engages with research in hauntology, living Indigenous sci-fi, speculative design and multispecies worlding. The work explores the specters of colonial inheritance and haunting as a creative force that unsettles the human relationships to land, water, and other-than-human worlds. Her spatial imaginaries engage Western and Indigenous ontologies and storytelling methods in all their potentialities and incommensurability.

Alisha was a Banff Centre for the Arts Writing Resident in 2021 with poet Jordan Abel (Nisga'a Nation) and her fiction is published with Book*hug (Toronto). Her artwork (both collaborative and solo) has been exhibited at Somerset House(London, UK), Simultan Festival XVII, (Timisoara, Romania), Athens Digital Arts Festival Online (ADAF) (Greece), Noviembre Electronico (Buenos Aires AR) and in Montréal and Québec, at galleries: AXENÉO7, Diagonale, fofa, MUTEK, Centre Clark, Société des arts technologiques (SAT) and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain (forthcoming Spring 2024).

Caroline Boileau is a multidisciplinary artist, curator and educator living in Montréal. Working from a feminist perspective, with a specific interest in health issues - intimate, public, social and political - Caroline Boileau creates artworks, often hybrid, which are developed through a multidisciplinary practice using installation, drawing, video and performance. The hybrid body, the multiple representations of the body - woman's body in particular - is a recurring theme in her research, inspired by the history of art, the history of medicine, science and current events. Working in dialogue with places, collections and objects, communities and people, her practice reveals improbable cohabitations by proposing the transformation, both poetic and political, of a shared space.

Recently, she presented Petits tracas et autres délices, a selection of drawings and artists' books in the atypical space of Hangar 7826 (Montreal, April 2023). She also participated in the three-part group show Le septième pétale d'une tulipe-monstre at the Maison des artistes visuels francophones (Winnipeg, fall 2022), the Galerie d'art Louise-et-Reuben-Cohen (Moncton, winter 2023) and the Galerie de l'UQAM (Montreal, fall 2023). In winter 2024, she presents the culmination of an almost four-year residency project with the group exhibition Les engendrements at the Galerie de l'Université de Montréal, as part of the McConnell Chair-Université de Montréal research-creation project on the reappropriation of maternity: liberating women's voices.

Diego Gil is an Argentinean choreographer, performer, and philosopher that studied in Amsterdam at the School for New Dance Development (BA), Das Choreography (MA) and holds a Ph.D. at the Humanities program of Concordia University. For more than a decade he worked as a professional artist between Amsterdam and Berlin and for the last eight years, he has been based in Montreal. He worked intensively with the Sense Lab, a research-creation laboratory at the intersection of philosophy, art, and activism, in the organization of aesthetic-politic events (i.e. minor movements (2020-19) schizosomatic workshop series (2019), movement of thoughts (2018-17)).

Emmanuelle Choquette is an author, researcher and independent curator. With a master's degree in art history from UQAM, she is particularly interested in practices of appropriation of archives that aim to rewrite hegemonic historical discourses, and that take a critical look at exhibition and curatorial formats. Her research focuses on the articulation of political and institutional spaces within practices that are often installation-based and performative. Her texts have appeared in the magazines Espace art actuel, Vie des arts, le Sabord, Ciel Variable and esse art + opinions. She co-edited the publications L'art imprimé, entre mixité et hybridité / Gráfica Abierta: Rutas expensivas en la gráfica mexicana(Arprim, 2022) and An annotated bibliography in real time : performance art in Quebec and Canada (Artexte, 2019). Her curatorial projects have been presented at OBORO, Maison des arts Desjardins de Drummondville, Artexte, galerie Pierre-François Ouelette art contemporain and soon at Museo Nacional del Cacao (Guayaquil, Ecuador). She has participated in research residencies at Est-Nord-Est (St-Jean-Port-Joli) and at Laboratorio Arte Alameda (Mexico City) in collaboration with OBORO. From 2013 to 2021, she was executive director of Arprim, a test center for print art, where she coordinated an exchange between Mexican and Canadian artists. She was vice-president and then co-president for 4 years of the board of directors of the Regroupement des centers d'artistes autogérés du Québec (RCAAQ), and currently sits on the boards of Est-Nord-Est and SBC Galerie d'art contemporain. 

A native of Belgium, Stéphane Gilot has lived and worked in Montreal since 1996. He holds an MA in visual and media arts from the University of Québec in Montreal. Gilot's hybrid constructions and imaginary locales invite us to take part in an array of situations. Dubbed "plans d'évasions", these constructions are a set of autonomous units that contribute to the construction of the "performative city," an on-going and evolving project. The presentation of these structures-drawings, watercolors, models, shelters, video components-betray a marked interest in the social organization of cities, in our behavioural habits, and in a reconsidered anthropology of habitat. His architectural installations and video performances have been shown extensively in Canada and abroad (Belgium, France, Germany, USA, United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Serbia, Spain, Finland and Brazil). Notable solo exhibitions include The Performative City at Optica Gallery, Montreal in 2010 and Quebec City Museum of Fine Art in 2012; Multiversity at the Uqam Gallery, Montreal in 2012; La Station, presented at Oboro, Montreal in 2006; Videogame, at Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto in 2005; Foire d'empoigne, at 251 Nord, Liège, Belgium in 2003; and Libre arbitre, at the Contemporary Art Museum of Montreal in 2001. His work as been shown in institutions like the Morris and Helen Belkin Downtown Gallery of Vancouver in 2002, the Canada House of London (U.K.) in 2003; the Transmediale of Berlin in 2006, the Flux Factory of New York in 2007,the Model Arts and Niland Gallery (Sligo, Ireland, 2009) and his work was part of the first triennial of contemporary art from Quebec at the Contemporary Art Museum of Montreal in 2008. 

Hanna Sybille Müller (1976) is a choreographer, dramaturg and dance artist living in Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal. Her main focus is language, movement and its interrelations. Sybille is interested in both language’s and the body’s strange, magic and ordinary potencies. You regularly find her in a studio translating philosophical or scientific ideas into choreography and movement scores. She likes to misuse everyday objects to create spaces (stage sets) that invite audiences into a non-frontal relationship with the work. Her choreographies often take place between the boundaries of dance, performance, theater and installation. She is always questioning and altering parameters of conventional dance by making immersive multisensorial work that de-emphasizes sight. Developing playful relations with and between audience members and some humor is part of her work.

She has been questioning what it means to collaborate with humans and non-humans, in her most recent collaboration with Erin Robinsong: Polymorphic Microbe Bodies which premiered at the OFFTA festival in June 2023 and was presented as a somatic dance film (webcast) in 2021 at Tangente in Montreal. In her ongoing project The Choreographic Garden (2023) in collaboration with the Musée d’art de Joliette she and her team are learning from plants what it means to think, move and be vegetal. The Choreographic Garden is also an actual garden growing in front of the Musée d’art de Joliette.

In the work Moving through the Archive (2022) with Galerie UQO in Gatineau she questioned the objectiveness of archives and archiving. This work additionally led to the exhibition The instability of the Archive (2022) at Galerie UQO. 

Originally from Germany, Sybille studied dance at the Rotterdamse Dansacademie (RDA) and received a diploma in media studies at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) in 2012. Sybille regularly teaches choreographic practices. Sybille is also a member of the Continuum Mentoring group to become a Continuum teacher.