March 30, 2019
Opening and performances : February 16th, 2019
Welcome at 4pm, performances will start at 4:30pm
For their first collaborative performance exploring the theme Nouvel-Ontario (New Ontario), Pascaline Knight, Mariana Lafrance and Julie Lassonde question the notion of welcoming and the conditions that foster its success or present challenges.
Having a house with wide open doors. Inhabiting your own body to be open to others. Being yourself, firmly standing on your own two feet. Welcoming supposes equilibrium between the individual and the collective, security and experimentation, risk and goodwill. Above all, it requires the freedom to consent to encountering the unknown.
Time, language and ego are structures that mask the immediacy of the body. The performances of these three artists reaffirm the notion of body awareness as the primal and founding place from which conscience and speech emerge. The here and the now might not be what they should be, but freeing gesture and language from their familiar mediators allows us to imagine other modes of togetherness.
Through a number of absurd or poetic gestures, individually or as a group, the three artists launch a conversation inspired by the childhood of persons and peoples to reveal the aspirations of a thriving Francophone community.
This artist residency project is part of the Place des Arts’ “Projet Manifeste.”
Accompanying text
Partners and sponsors
This is one of the 200 exceptional projects funded through the Canada Council for the Arts’ New Chapter program. With this $35M investment, the Council supports the creation and sharing of the arts in communities across Canada.
Mariana Lafrance
Mariana Lafrance is an interdisciplinary artist working in Sudbury and on Manitoulin Island. While her earlier photographic work revealed a fascination with urban space and social phenomena, more recently her work has been about slowing down and tuning in to natural materials and moments. Mariana started learning photography in her early teens. She first exhibited her work in 2006 in Sudbury, following the launch of the popular photoblog La petite fumée... and the little smoke. She received a Northern Arts grant from the Ontario Arts Council in 2008 for her exhibition at the artist-run centre Galerie du nouvel-Ontario in Sudbury. The same year she published a first book of photos with Les Éditions Prise de Parole, entitled Site Unseen/La ville invisible, grouping together her photographs of Sudbury. In 2011, she was awarded an emerging artist grant from the Ontario Arts Council, with which she developed a work exploring the challenges of anxiety in social settings.
Artist ProfileJulie Lassonde
Originally from Montreal, Julie Lassonde is an interdisciplinary improviser and performance artist who is interested in subjects such as gender, intimacy, socio-legal norms affecting daily life and processes related to performativity, such as repetition. Trained in corporeal mime school, she presented solo performances and improvisations in Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver, Victoria, Berkeley, San Francisco and Edinburgh. She also studied law at McGill University. She is a member of the Law Society of Canada and the Barreau du Québec. In 2006, she was awarded the Law and Society Graduate Fellowship and an interdisciplinary master’s degree at the University of Victoria. She received the Innovative Electronic Theses & Dissertations Award from the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations for her thesis, in 2007, in Uppsala, Sweden. Julie published "Performing Law" in The International Journal of the Arts in Society (2006) and co-edited the book Collision: Interarts Practice and Research (2008).
Artist ProfilePascaline Knight
Pascaline Knight has an Interdisciplinary Master’s in Art, Media and Design from OCAD University (2017) and a bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts from Concordia University (1996). Her art consists mainly of a combination of writing, drawing, micropublishing and performance. She is preparing for two residencies in engraving at AGALab in Amsterdam and Kala Arts Institute in Berkeley, California, in the near future. In 2019, she will go on a research and creation residency sponsored by the CALQ and the Christoph Merian Foundation in Bâle, Switzerland.
Artist Profile