ARTIST’S APPROACH
In 2013, In honor of the 5 years birthday of the death of Fredy Villanueva, I started a project of documentary photographs about Montréal-Nord. At the time I was beginning to question the restrictions imposed by photojournalism, my profession. I was interested by this borough because I found the mediatic covering schematic and spectacular : gangs, drugs, etc. However, during my interviews, people were praising the neighborhood’s “tightly-knit” community, “like a village where everybody knows each other”. It’s this reflection that gave birth to corpus Grand Nord, which documents the social links between inhabitants of the borough, a way of being faithful to the point of view of the inside rather than the one of the outside.
In 2018, I decided to add a new chapter to this long term project by creating photographic discussions across time. I went to meet with the seniors of Montréal-Nord, who grew up while the borough was just a small village. I picked photographs from their family photo albums which we reinterpreted with groups of the Montréal Nord residents, originating from Quebec or overseas, people from Haiti, Turkey or all the way from Salvador.
THE ARTWORK
Grand Nord
Photography and sound, 2018
The result: dyptics juxtaposing two images, it is in part a documentary, citizen art and historical photography. The composition leads the spectator in a world of fiction, while still being a true reflexion on historical history and the evolution of society and quebec’s identity.
Curator : Skol
