“Babies have been bought here,” says multidisciplinary artist Heidi Barkun bluntly as she walks down a hallway at Project Casa. In the entrance, an imposing and outdated metal cupboard – which is not usually there – piques the visitor’s curiosity. The yellowed labels stuck on the shelves suggest that it was used to store medical equipment.
“This artefact, which dates from the time of the private hospital and which was kept in the cellar of the house, is there to remind us of what happened between these walls”, she explains. In the 1940s and 1950s, single Catholic mothers came to the “White House” to clandestinely give birth to children who were to be sold to Jewish couples on the black adoption market. Today, the floors of this former clinic converted into an inn and then into a cultural space creak more than ever, to warn us, in a way, that after decades of silence, this truth is ready to be seen and heard.
Two years later LET’S GET YOU PREGNANT!presented at the Galerie de l’UQAM in the form of a conversational installation between some thirty participants who have not succeeded in becoming mothers, Heidi Barkun continues her exploration of the intimate and taboo theme of infertility with Be fruitful and multiply. This time, his highly contextual exhibition is brought to life through his own works, of course, but also, and above all, through the past of the Casa Project building and the voices of five of these “black market babies”, now elders. , which she found.
It all starts in 2020, when she comes into contact with journalist Adam Segal, himself the son of one of these “adopted”. The archives that he sends to her reveal the existence of an essential part of the history of Montreal which has only been told half-wordly, that which made the metropolis a hub of the black market of adoption across the country and even as far away as New York. Who were these couples in need of a child? What was their experience?
“I approached these Jewish parents who once bought their child in this former private clinic to talk about the common experience of infertility”, says Heidi Barkun. According to her, the gallery space of Projet Casa becomes the metaphor of a fertility clinic: “People arrive with their desire for parenthood and pay to have a baby. It’s weird to say “buy a child”, but that’s what happens in a fertility clinic. We pay and we hope that the in vitro fertilization process works. »
When the truth survives the desolation
In his sound work Tell me about your parents, which resounds in the old waiting room of the hospital – the first room on the left when you enter Project Casa – Heidi Barkun thus asked the five “babies of the black market” met what were their links with their parents . “Even though there was a lot of love in their family, their parents kept their adoption a secret until their death. It was only then that these children set out in search of their roots”, says the artist, who evokes their difficulties in finding the truth due to the lack of information. She believes that their parents, scarred by the Holocaust, hid for a long time behind traumas and things left unsaid. “Having experienced it, I also know how difficult it is to talk about infertility when all your friends around you have given birth,” she adds.
In this exhibition, whose title, Be fruitful and multiply, is taken from Genesis, Heidi Barkun probes in particular the role of a wife when it is impossible for her to become a mother. “I am not a believer, and I allowed myself to question what I learned from my Jewish upbringing and certain religious traditions, in which the family occupies a central place. The artist, who was unable to give birth, also addresses this mourning forced by a failing body. His painting I wish I had river so long I would teach my feet to flynamed in honor of river by Joni Mitchell, “one of the rare songs that speaks of the heartbreak of leaving one’s child for adoption”, and in memory of his thirteen lost embryos, can be seen as a reflection on this multitude of sorrows that were born in the enclosure of Project Casa. “It’s not just about the grief that my infertility engenders, but the grief for these single mothers to have their children taken away from them,” she notes.
If his imagination occupies the space of Casa Project for the time of Be fruitful and multiply, Heidi Barkun now wants the truth to prevail. “It’s not to point the finger at this or that culprit, but to establish the facts about what happened here, between the four walls of this ‘white house'”, underlines the artist. And so as not to miss any anecdote that could be told to her, she promises, as soon as possible, to be present on site to welcome the public and open the discussion.