Interdisciplinary artist Guillaume Adjutor Provost approaches counterculture, alternative narrative and counter-history as modes of storytelling from the margins. Its posture embraces that of research-creation and is interested in historical political articulations which make the boundaries between the intimate and the collective porous. In Drummondville, at the DRAC art contemporain center, his exhibition Meeting of disappearances looks at a flagship event in the recent (inter)national framework: the Summit of the Americas, held in Quebec in 2001, including the demonstrations and arrests that followed. resulted and catalyzed the discourse of social struggles still finding their place in the current landscape.
The archives of the Desjardins art gallery
While DRAC art contemporain was recently added to the list of Quebec venues approved as museums, the genesis of the exhibition goes back to a previous chapter in its history, where it still bore the name of Galerie d’art Desjardins. Provost says the project was first built around his experience as an audience there. “When you enter DRAC, you feel all the work that has been done to renew the mandate and identity of the place. I was planning to exhibit there, and to provoke a dialogue with the space, I became interested in its archives which contain more than forty years of programming. I came across the work of Jean Lauzon, on his series Take time who documented anarchist gatherings organized in the Eastern Townships at the turn of the millennium and some of whose photos were presented at the gallery in 2001, at the time when the Summit was being held nearby… That immediately appealed to me touched, challenged. »
Provost had already encountered Lauzon’s documentary work before. If he had the idea of tackling the Summit of the Americas and then thinking about its societal and human repercussions, coming across the photographer’s sensitive eye again instantly made sense for the rest of his project.
When you enter DRAC, you feel all the work that has been done to renew the mandate and identity of the place
“The series has not been revisited for 20 years, for lack of having been the subject of a book or an exhibition. In my case, I remain very moved by all the intimacy that emerges from these photos: the great proximity between the subjects, but also the total absence of the camera, as if the photographer had had direct access, without filter , to the people in front of him,” says the artist, who notices a divide with our current constant concern for representation. For him, Lauzon’s corpus reflects the authenticity of the individuals from this punk fringe whose political speeches were close to those of the people on the front line during the Summit, who contested the ambient ideal of globalization. He adds, reflecting: “Historical distance always informs the way we look at these stories that belong to the past. »
Dialogical aesthetics
Sensitive to the advent of alter-globalization discourses and interested in what remains, the artist intends to create an exhibition in conversation with Jean Lauzon, like a quilt story around the economic transitions of the 21st century.e century and their repercussions. Hundreds of sources accumulate over the course of its design — the research is methodical, visits to BAnQ are frequent. The artist studies the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas), the main subject of the Summit, through articles that corroborate one of the reasons for protesting the demonstrations: the initial inaccessibility of the texts discussed at the Summit.
Documentary sculptures, photographs of reality; the materiality of Provost’s work is conceptual and it is important for him to play with his different degrees of reading. Through various strategies, he invites the factual into his plastic experiments, shapes a sculpture taking up the molecular constitution of the tear gas used as a riot control agent during the Summit, simulates under a resin dome the model of a prison which incarcerated more than 300 demonstrators during of uprisings. These models sit alongside scraps of newspapers found in the national archives on low plinths. Lauzon’s photographs, printed on cardboard and folded by hand to give them a new reading, instead adorn the walls.
“Beyond the question of politics, it is the questions of individual and collective experience, ways of belonging and representing oneself or identifying with oneself or with a group that inhabit me,” says The artist, who seeks to bear witness, in this curated installation, to a form of sensitive experience experienced in the light of his research. Through their diversion and through the encounter, he reveals, recontextualizes and puts ideas into circulation, letting the public approach them through a new proximity.