At the Foreman Art Gallery, a Sherbrooke exhibition space affiliated with Bishop’s University, a young and varied audience has been immersed in a particular world since April 29. diving in In the eye of the belugaa proposal by Maryse Goudreau and Noémie Fortin.
Going back to her youth, Gaspé artist Maryse Goudreau remembers that her love of the beluga was always strong. This is because the possible disappearance of the mammal, which has been threatening the species for several decades now, is heightening strong sensitivities in it; noting the political inaction vis-à-vis the pollution that afflicts our oceans, she feels dizzy about the idea that a living being could suddenly disappear from the continuum of biological and terrestrial history.
Independent Commissioner and former Curator of Education at Foreman, Noémie Fortin discovered Goudreau’s work at the Baie-Saint-Paul Symposium in 2017 and was instantly touched by his universe. Accompanied by her young daughter Alix, she sees in her powerful works an ability to move a large audience, her themes bordering on a certain universality.
Finally invited by Fortin, in 2021, to imagine an exhibition for young audiences, Goudreau quietly immerses herself in the heritage of her childhood. “When I was little, the situation of the belugas saddened me a lot, and I had a poster in my room on which we could read the slogan ‘Their future… It is above all ours'”, says the one whose practice , necessarily, calls for ecological awareness. At the idea of a first youth exhibition, the artist quickly became overwhelmed by an insatiable desire to explore differently this emotional charge that has always linked her to the aquatic beast.
A space teeming with imagination
The two join forces to transform the enclosure of the Foreman gallery. Welcoming visitors, artwork Permission first proposes a time out. This very intimate frontal photograph of a beluga’s eye recounts a moment of intensity experienced between Maryse Goudreau and one of the mammals observed in an American aquarium. Their sustained gaze, lasting over two hours, is one of the many transformative experiences the artist has had with these animals. In the gallery, a chain of buoys placed on the ground makes it possible to record the shoes of visitors encouraged to walk around barefoot, the beluga watching over them for the duration of a rooted walk.
“It smells of marine mammals when you enter this exhibition! says the artist, who has, among other things, distributed sealskins in the space of the gallery that invite the touch and initiate contact with the material. This “beluga archive”, which has characterized his practice for several years, unfolds here masterfully: Goudreau regains a child’s posture and imagines new ways of enveloping the visit of young audiences, multiplying innovative approaches that combine photography, videography , sound work and installation.
Through several devices, she tells, among other things, the story of Népi, a young beluga whale stuck in the Népisiguit River, whom she watched over for four days, perched on a rock overlooking it, still wondering if he would survive. At Foreman, the story is relived: the stretcher that was used to rescue the animal, enlarged with skins, is placed on a bed of water and allows children to reenact the crossing of the rescued beluga. A booklet accompanying the exhibition, entitled My night in the hollow of a fintells this sensitive story, another way for the artist to connect with children and offer them a space to develop independent and critical thinking on all these issues that affect the environment and its inhabitants.
An educational approach
In addition to the interactive proposals that characterize the exhibition, the narrative framework of the project, where the themes of extinction and “mothering” cohabit — “the fact of taking care of a child, or more broadly of all beings living, like a mother, in a close relationship based on benevolence and empathy”, according to the artist and the curator – encourages us to better trace our relationships with other living beings. The imagined montage creates anchoring and thwarts eco-anxiety. “We are here in the simplest of sensibility; the beluga is in itself a creature of re-enchantment, you don’t need to do much for its beauty and grandeur to spring forth,” describes Goudreau.
As for Fortin, it seems essential to him to simmer more and more exhibitions for young audiences. “Developing a whole visit scenario with the children, proposing a creative activity at the very end, like in this case inviting the children to model a living thing they want to take care of, all of this involves thinking about the importance of the postures of reception, mediation, circulation and construction of exhibition narratives. »
This invitation to listen to the living and to immerse ourselves in our own feelings, to immerse ourselves in the eye of the beluga, thus allows us to envisage the moments when, together, we will resurface.