SLEEPING PLACES
Sleeping Places celebrates the northern nature of Montreal, a city characterized by its seasonal fluctuations. It is an opportunity to rediscover the lost spaces of winter, places that are forced to be inactive, asleep.
On the Champ-de-Mars, a winter garden is set up, a multi-sensory journey through the frozen Laurentian flora. Ice walls freeze nature in full bloom and try to make us dream, beyond evaporation, by contemplating the beauty of an ephemeral herbarium.
The installation captures, in a moment of daily life, the awareness of the passage of the seasons thanks to the ephemerality of the materials. The garden responds to the winter that takes its course, little by little, through its melting. As the temperature warms up, the blocks let out the different scents of the flora. There is a tension between the fragility of the plants and the power of the ice, between the English garden (the flora in its wildness) frozen in the highly structured form of the French garden.
Exposing a significant legacy of the city, the herbarium of Marie-Victorin, the project requires a space charged with memory as a backdrop. The Champ-de-Mars, the site of the vestiges of our past, lends itself perfectly to the symbolism. Intrinsically, Lieux dormants refers to our memories of summer and creates a dialogue between the seasons by the very nature of its materials.
Building with ice is essentially working with water. Fluid, always changing, malleable, but never totally controllable, the type of ice chosen allows for all the bubbles and cracks that will appear over time. A sampling of Laurentian flora is presented - 117 native species are installed in watertight boxes: the ice is poured in a cold and controlled environment to avoid the cracking of the moulds. Like a herbarium, a label is associated with each species for identification purposes.
(From competitor's text)
(Unofficial automated translation)
The members of the jury found this proposal very poetic and raise the sensitivity and qualities of the rendered images.
It is a project that plays delicately with nature, the seasons and offers a beautiful place for art in the city. Proposing the setting in ice of plants during their blooming, the proposal plays with the notion of "time". Its ephemeral and evolving character (when the ice melts) gives it many possibilities and qualities, centered on the sensoriality (smell/touch) of the installation.
The jury therefore wished to highlight this very interesting and thought-provoking project (the memory of the seasons), but whose implementation and spatial layout would benefit from further refinement.
(From jury report)
(Unofficial automated translation)
12 scanned / 12 viewable
- Presentation Panel
- Presentation Panel
- Perspective
- Site Plan
- Schema
- Schema
- Schema
- Photograph
- Photograph
- Photograph
- Photograph
- Photograph
