Both a love letter and a funeral oration for an entire section of the historic district destined to disappear due to its proximity to the Horne foundry, the multidisciplinary project Noranda open city offers a sensitive incursion into the intimacy of the future expropriated people of Noranda while providing some keys to better understand this community torn apart by arsenic.
As the motley crowd of the Festival de musique émergente (FME) prepares to arrive in Rouyn-Noranda, a strange multidisciplinary hydra has taken up residence near what is already being referred to as the “buffer zone” formed around the Horne foundry. Dancers, videographers and visual artists have set up their headquarters at the Petit-Théâtre du Vieux-Noranda (PTVN), a stone’s throw from the cursed perimeter.
“This is the emergency response to the shockwave created by the announcement of the buffer zone,” says Rosalie Chartier-Lacombe, a Rouyn-Noranda native and general director of the PTVN, to describe the ambulatory presented for the first time to the population of Rouyn-Noranda last week.
The shockwave she is talking about is the demolition announced in March 2023 of the 80 or so residences closest to the Horne foundry. And in the process, the dispersal of more than 200 households tightly knit by the little rough edges of daily life in a working-class neighbourhood. In the days following the announcement, the PTVN opened its doors so that the main parties concerned — who learned the news in the media at the same time as the whole of Quebec — could come together to help swallow the pill.
“We did it to be in action. Because it was the only possible answer,” says Rosalie Chartier-Lacombe, referring to the citizen meetings and the work that emerged from them and which will be presented in separate pieces between the FME shows all Labour Day weekend. “It allowed us to enter into a relationship of trust with people, to understand better.”
We wanted to work with interpreters from the community here, in Rouyn-Noranda. I think it’s important not to just be a “fly-in, fly-out” company.
Dialogue space
From summer 2023, the PTVN mandates the authors of the epistolary exchange Arsenic my love so that they can hold out their microphone to the people of the neighborhood. Jean-Lou David and Gabrielle Izaguirré-Falardeau thus collect the raw material for the soundtrack of the show Shutdown, tribute to the mining workers in a contemporary dance version delivered by the Montreal dancers of We All Fall Down and their Rouyn-Noranda counterparts of the CopperCrib. The duo also unearths forgotten images of the 1953 strike in the archives to fuel a mapping architectural on the history of workers’ and citizens’ movements, entitled Resistancewho, just like Shutdownis an integral part of Noranda open city.
“We wanted to work with interpreters from the community here, in Rouyn-Noranda. I think it’s important not to just be a company in fly-in, fly-out “, argues the choreographer of We All Fall Down, Helen Simard, as sensitive to the realities of artists from remote regions as she is “fascinated” by the “choreographed bodies” of mining workers from the villages of Abitibi and northern Ontario, where she grew up in a family of geologists and prospectors.
Even though she would have liked to hear them talk directly about their daily lives and the delicate position they find themselves in since the arsenic saga, far be it from her to throw stones at the smelter workers, she maintains, being well aware that the copper present in her new cell phone did not fall from the sky. “It means that it takes a smelter, that it happens in someone’s backyard. The fact of being here and being able to engage on the environmental issue, but also on the social issue, how it affects the citizens of the neighborhood, the smelter workers, who are just human beings who go to the job “Every day is interesting,” says the choreographer.
A community to be united again
This is an idea shared by director Dominic Leclerc, who edited Resistancewho has been documenting the final episode of the Horne soap opera since 2019 for a documentary to which new chapters are constantly being added. The son of citizens involved in the 1980s mobilization that led to the construction of a sulfuric acid plant to divert sulfur discharges from the smelter, he sees instead Noranda open city like an outstretched hand.
“We quickly realized that there was [des liens] between the union movement of the 1950s and the current citizen movement. It has always taken a mobilization movement for things to change. I think there are a lot of workers who are happy that there is a citizen movement, but in their position, it is perhaps more complicated to say it,” he mentions. He adds that he wanted to find the right balance for his montage, so that it would be both “educational and entertaining” for those who struggle to understand the internal divisions in his city.
The fragile installation Lose Rootfrom the all-female collective Tomber debout, is interested in the small tears of the expropriated, those that “the great history will not remember”, says the artist of the year of the CALQ in Abitibi-Témiscamingue, Violaine Lafortune. With her acolytes Ariane Ouellet and Valéry Hamelin, she went to “have tea” with a dozen future expropriated people a year after the fateful announcement.
The visitor thus wanders through fragile paper corridors where Lafortune’s drawings have been erased to illustrate the imminent erasure of “memories, love, sorrows, births” in these homes. In the soundtrack, the testimonies evoke the dilemmas, the power struggle with the Foundry as well as the unknown as to what will happen next, guiding the visitor to the center of the room, where a model of a house has been installed that flies away under the gaze of its owner.
“It’s like we’re taking over [des petits drames de la zone tampon]”Because when you hear too much about it, it no longer means anything, it becomes numbers, logistics, negotiations. We have opened the door to another way of talking about what we did not think was political,” explains Ariane Ouellet.
Because the question that remains, Dominic Leclerc sums it up aptly: “Can we still question the idea of destroying the historic district of a city on the eve of its centenary?” He is referring here to the celebrations of the 100e anniversary of the “copper capital,” which will take place in 2026. “There will continue to be children born here, we will continue to put down roots,” Rosalie Chartier-Lacombe offers in response. Even if it is polluted, it is our city, our community. We will not leave. So, we will have to find solutions.”