You will have understood it for a long time, I like to talk about heritage, the one that we mistreat, that we trample, that we erase with mechanical shovels, ignorance and opportunism.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
Each time I witness this, I try to push my reflection further on the feelings that inhabit us in the face of this devastation.
Why do we cry in front of an ancestral house that has been in bad shape for decades and that we are eliminating in order to erect beautiful brand new condos? Why are we shocked by examples of hypocritical facadeism? Why do we have the heart in a thousand crumbs to see monuments of great value that our lack of means (and creativity) cannot bring to life?
These questions are irrational, visceral, emotional.
It is with these tools which are not that Marie-Hélène Voyer wrote The habit of ruinsa book that has given me immense pleasure over the past few days and that has helped me answer the questions I have.
Normally, Marie-Hélène Voyer writes poetry or is interested in literature. But this time, she slipped into the skin of the essayist to write this book which, she says from the outset, is not “an exercise in nostalgia”.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE EDITOR
Marie-Helene Voyer
She takes the time to tell us that her pavement is not a “plea for a glorification of the past, for a petrification of our built heritage, for a calcification of our landscapes or even for a museumification of our cities”.
It is even less an investigation into “the systematic demolition of our built heritage or the methodical dilapidation of this cultural and memorial heritage of which we deprive our children”.
On the other hand, the author does not hesitate to express her “annoyance against the fetishists of the inauthentic, against the euphoric ones of false grandeur and against the bargainers of freedom who confiscate the common space for the benefit of a privileged few”.
With a writing of great beauty, but not at all eye-catching, Marie-Hélène Voyer highlights our indifference, our passivity, or what she calls our “anaesthetized habituation” to the gestures that are made every day (3000 old buildings are demolished every year in Quebec) by voracious promoters and elected municipal officials who have lost their way in the face of fat and easy sources of income.
Over time, we got tired of the battles, we integrated these demolitions in the name of modernism and novelty. “In the most total indifference, every day we shatter our sense of duration and our relationship to time a little more,” writes the author.
Over time, we got used to living with ugliness. Moreover, we no longer know (or we no longer dare) to name ugliness.
Better than that, we have become accustomed to living among the ruins, those of buildings ravaged by flames (the author lists the main major fires that have devastated cities in Quebec), those that are too expensive to maintain , of those that no longer fit with the ambient architectural landscape that we have invented for ourselves.
One of the most interesting passages of this work is the one that deals with this architecture of the suburbs and the “booming” cities that multiply the advertising campaigns for people to go and live there.
It is about these mega-houses or these neo-mansions, “these reminiscences of Italian villas, scraps of American ranches, or even vague ideas of Victorian castles”.
The author underlines in broad strokes that, while proceeding to erase our heritage, we are erecting entire neighborhoods that we claim to call “domain, manor or seigneury”.
We go to Europe to drool in front of splendid and moving monuments of the XVIIand and XVIIIand centuries to better come back here to witness the demolition of the meager treasures that we possess in the comfort of our house at Domaine Machintruc.
We raze ancestral agricultural landscapes, we demolish authentic heritage houses, precious and irreplaceable traces of our history, all this to build something new that mimics the old.
Extract of The habit of ruinsby Marie-Helene Voyer
Among the many themes covered, there is one that is one of my hobbies: facadeism, “one of the most virtuous hypocrisies invented by those who claim to have the preservation of existing places at heart”.
This concept, invented to give promoters a clear conscience, consists of keeping a “clipping” of the destroyed building to create a “touching reminder” of the past. “There is something Frankensteinian in this architecture of splicing and hollowing out,” dares to write Marie-Hélène Voyer.
Our insatiable thirst for new and novelty prevents us from seeing, understanding and reflecting on what we are doing to our heritage.
We could also talk about an urban plan, the way in which housing is turned upside down in big cities, but also about these “structuring” projects and these infrastructures “varnished with a green conscience” that are thrust into our heads and which, once finished, show the Christmas tree that we passed off.
We got used to ugliness. And every time a piece of our heritage disappears, we remember that. It is undoubtedly this emotion that we feel.
The habit of ruins – The coronation of oblivion and ugliness in Quebec
Marie-Helene Voyer
Lux Editor
216 pages