Students, artists, architects and designers are invited to invent an ephemeral work of art for the plinth that housed the statue of former Prime Minister of Canada John A. Macdonald, vandalized last year and stored since the summer of 2020 by the City of Montreal. The operation of this site, located on Place du Canada, in downtown Montreal, is indeed the theme of the Charrette, the design competition organized by the Canadian Center for Architecture (CCA).
The project should “challenge the idea of permanence of public art” and “focus on Macdonald’s legacy in particular or on issues related to racial justice in general,” reads the descriptive text. of this special edition of the Charrette.
The idea for this competition came from Concordia University art history professor Ronald Rudin, who is also a member of an interuniversity and multidisciplinary working group that has looked into the subject.
“I’ve been interested for a long time in how we present the past to the public,” Ronald Rudin said in an interview. “Traditional monuments give the impression that the past is fixed and unchanging, which is not the reality. “The unbolting of the statue following acts of vandalism gives, he believes,” an opportunity to give visibility to another way of thinking “and to celebrate the ephemeral and changing nature of our perception of history. .
Organizations such as Heritage Montreal and Culture Montreal rather plead, until now, for the reinstatement of the statue on its plinth, but in a context of the reprehensible actions carried out by the one who was appointed on the 1er Prime Minister of Canada in 1867.
Revisiting the past
“The eighteen-meter-high structure commemorated a political career marked by many racist acts, including the establishment of residential schools and the imposition of a head tax on Chinese immigrants,” said the CCA in the description of the competition.
“Ideally, we should not wait for these monuments and places of memory to be vandalized before revisiting them in order to ensure resilience and reconciliation,” Héritage Montréal wrote on its Facebook page on Friday morning.
“If we decide not to return the statue, we will hide this story instead of giving ourselves a platform to talk about it,” pleads Taïka Baillargeon, deputy director of policies at Heritage Montreal, who also sat on the interdisciplinary committee that launched the idea for this special edition of the Charrette.
Ideally, we should not wait for these monuments and places of memory to be vandalized before revisiting them.
“Restoring the statue is not necessarily what Montreal, or Canada, needs,” says Aboriginal artist Nadia Myre, another member of the committee. “The idea of erecting a counter-monument, alongside the statue, may be a solution, but I have never seen this idea implemented in Montreal. Another idea would be to melt it down, ”says the one who does not want to influence the proposals submitted to the Charrette.
For now, the statue of John A. Macdonald is kept by the City of Montreal in a secret location. During his electoral campaign, Denis Coderre announced that he wanted it to be put back on its base. Valérie Plante’s administration formed a committee to assess the file. “There is a committee that will think about all this after the election,” said Ronald Rudin. “But the Charrette will give some visibility to the possibilities that exist for this space. “