This summer, The duty takes you on the side roads of university life. A proposal that is both scholarly and intimate, to be picked up like a postcard. Today, we are interested in creation and how it can help us understand the effects of environmental upheavals on the Magdalen Islands.
To understand the experience of climate change in the Magdalen Islands, collective creation workshops were conducted by a team of researchers and artists with members of the local community. Started in May 2023, the work will continue for a few more months to bear witness to the daily experience of solastalgia on the Islands.
Solastalgia refers to a form of emotional distress caused by the rapid transformation of our immediate environment, leading to a loss of bearings and a possible alteration of our identity. It is a homesickness that we feel when we are at home, when what is familiar to us (landscape, territory, habitat, ecosystem, etc.) changes to such an extent that we no longer recognize ourselves in it. Often associated with eco-anxiety, of which it is the social side, solastalgia is more present today as climate change intensifies.
Located on the front line of the environmental crisis, people living in the Magdalen Islands experience these upheavals first-hand, whether it is cliffs and paths that are gradually crumbling into the sea, or even hurricanes, such as Fiona last September, which devastated a weakened territory in a few hours.
Faced with these galloping changes, what do we want to keep and protect from Madelin’s memory? What do we want to see continue in the future? How else to inhabit one’s present? How can artistic creation contribute to offering another perspective on the transformation and adaptation of the Madelinot territory?
The project Creative solastalgia attempts to answer these questions by exploring the creative and transformative potential of solastalgia. It starts from the idea that art is unifying, especially when it is collective and participatory, and that it can help to bring out solidarity or consolidate resilience, offer a perspective, sometimes a refuge, or even pose as a driver of change by imagining other ways of thinking and experiencing environmental transformations.
Led by four UQAM professors, authors of this article, this transdisciplinary adventure is based on the collaborative construction of knowledge by directly involving people who experience climate change. Its approach therefore involves establishing lasting ties with partners and various local communities, including fishermen and women, seniors and students, artists and newcomers.
Thus, last May, through a series of workshops for all audiences, the team of researchers explored, with the Madeliniennes and Madelinots, new ways of telling their memories, their emotions and their aspirations in order to imagine together a future for the archipelago, sustainable and desirable.
Souvenir Bank
Overlooking the heritage site of La Grave, it is at the Museum of the Sea that these friendly and free activities were held. The first invited people to project their memories into the future by using storytelling, drawing, storytelling and the assembly of images and objects evocative of life on the archipelago. The sound of the lighthouses having disappeared, the community ties and the smell of the Islands are all memories to carry into the future.
A second workshop offered participants the opportunity to connect to the paper imprints of the reliefs of the Islands to express emotions. The projections in the face of landscape changes also allowed them to share stories and feelings related to the coast.
CEGEP sociology students were, for their part, invited during a prospective workshop, to travel in time. Through the writing of the front page of marine magnifying glass of May 26, 2043, a fictitious local newspaper, the young people imagined a philanthropic festival to finance the construction of wind turbines, the development of the culture of native insects in a future in food autonomy and, in order not to leave their Islands, the opening of a university!
Madelinots and Madeliniennes also received the invitation to form letters of the alphabet from a collection of objects specific to daily life, such as materials related to fishing or natural elements gleaned from the coasts. These letters made it possible to create a typeface called Madeli (soon available as a free download), which was then used to write Madelinian expressions.
Based on a sound and video montage of the seabed near the Havre-Aubert marina, another activity offered to discuss the representative sounds of the Islands (like the wind) and to imagine those to come (for example that of the personal watercraft to connect the islands together if the roads were to be submerged). This shared listening experience was full of surprises for the public, who wondered about the way in which climatic upheavals also affected this underwater “world of silence” and the forms of life that inhabit it.
Finally, a last workshop introduced those present to the manufacture of a solargraphy camera from recycled cans. Participants were invited to tell an anecdote about the place chosen to host their homemade camera during the fall. The photographic imprint, which is made here over the long term, testifies to the passage of time and the trajectories of the sun in the sky to keep track of what does not pierce through everyday life, but is nevertheless affected by climate change.
Collaboration with local partners and the local community enabled these workshops to serve as spaces for dialogue and sharing where individual experiences were transformed into collective narratives. In the coming months, the results of these co-creation workshops will be compiled with other stories and images into a collaborative atlas. Born in the archipelago, this work will be that of the people residing there offering their original perspective on their changing territory and testifying to their attachment to their place of life as well as their ability to find creative paths to revisit their memory and project their subjectivity differently in the face of ongoing transformations.