Organized by Culture pour tous and Littérature québécoise mobile with the collaboration of Mouvement Art Mobile during the 24th edition of the Journées de la culture, the third edition of Particles – Unexpected Correspondences brought together 37 writers and visuals artists, and 125 members of the public from Quebec and abroad. Photographer and director Joannie Lafrenière and writer Yara El-Ghadban were the proud ambassadors of the event.

 

On October 22nd, from 2 to 4 p.m., everyone hopped on Twitter to exchange views around the theme “What room of one’s own?” The choreography went like this: writers would start the conversations with short and open texts, and artists would respond with visual works specially prepared for the occasion. The public was invited to join in the surprising exchanges with their own texts and images in order to create a large scale and performative dialogue.

 

In reference to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, this year’s theme was rooted in feminist discourse and resolutely open to a diversity of voices and practices. The idea was to collectively discover current or past rooms that bear witness to the stillness, strangeness, and difficulties encountered during the pandemic. In times of crisis—and lockdown especially—these rooms, real or imagined, are shared with family, friends, and colleagues mainly through screens. Needless to say that for some, this is a luxury. As the frontier between public and private space become more porous, our socials masks, too, are eroding. With that in mind, the third edition of Particles, in its own artistic and literary way, questioned our uneasy perceptions of the places we (try to) inhabit on a daily basis.

 

- Benoit Bordeleau, Coordinator at Littérature québécoise mobile

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A micro narrative of our confined lives

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Participants : @FelixAnt_All, @nt2bert, @LandryDiane5, @beteferoce, @samuel_i_m, @Momentpartiel, @jessdesica, @clpeloquin, @ysoboy, @LynnRoy_corr, @fre_dub, @pagemonique3, @ElgatitoColorao, @AudreyWay, @catlap78, @ChloRobitaille1, @PhilippeGingra3, @Lucktally, @LoraineCahun

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Following the event, the Musée d'art de Joliette was given the mandate to develop a virtual exhibition from a selection of the public’s poetic and visual contributions. By this curatorial approach we wish to bring out new layers of meaning.

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Addressing the perception we have of the spaces we live in seems impossible without commenting on the new collective experience of the past months. The lockdown has indeed profoundly changed our ways of experiencing space and time. It affects our daily lives as much as our imaginations. While public spaces lose their vivacity, our homes become the theater of every sphere of our lives: work, creation, entertainment, (virtual) meetings with people we love. Shared or not, these houses (now worlds) might also become places of immobility, boredom, routine, and solitude. While the isolation and sedentary lifestyle brought on by the lockdown generate a loss of hope for many, others wait with patience and stay the course by drawing on their imagination to reinvent the spaces to which they are confined.

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This tension between discouragement, resilience, and hope is palpable in the poems and images selected here. Even if they were gleaned from the 2000 publications exchanged on October 22, texts and visual works seem to respond to each other. They recount intimate experiences and echo shared feelings. Together, they can be read as a sensitive micro narrative of our confined lives, and certainly testify to a shared need to talk about this extraordinary experience.

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- Camille Rémillard-Vigneault, Guest Curator, Museology Intern

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* By clicking on the texts and images, you will have access to their original context of publication on twitter. *

 

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The Musée d'art de Joliette would like to thank Culture pour tous, Littérature québécoise mobile and Mouvement art mobile for the organization of this third edition of Particles – Unexpected Correspondences and for their collaboration in the organization of this exhibition.

We would also like to thank the public for their poetic and visual contributions, without which the conception of this exhibition would not have been possible.

 

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