QUEBEC.- The notion of public art is a utopian and contradictory concept that can only be achieved through extraordinary circumstances, as it is meant to be fully public, made by the people, for the people, as Lucy Lippard wrote in her 1977 essay, “Art Outdoors, In and Out of the Public Domain.” [1] At that time, only one example had achieved this democratic form of art, which will be presented as part of this program of events in the film Brigada Ramona Parra (1970). It encapsulates a political utopia at a given moment that will serve as the basis for an ideal political climate for this project. Is art best created under certain political conditions?

REMEMBER, PERFORM, FORGET: Binding Space Through Utopia, on view at the PHI Foundation, is a program of gatherings with Kerstin Honeit, The Society of Affective Archives, and Rodolfo Andaur, that is grounded in historical references that problematize the notion of place and public art. In particular, this includes the issues of governance, freedom, gender inequality, accessibility, the permanence of objects, the ephemerality of collective memory, and the documentation and preservation of past events. Is it possible to preserve only through the performance of oral tradition? Do we rely more on objects than people to solidify a collective memory? These references will be examined in the presentation of a series of videos that groups archival and art video works that articulate history as well as a conception of the future.

Through the presentation of a series of videos, and various events comprising artist talks, publication launches, and outdoor activities, the program invites us to envision the notion of place and the role of public art through the lens of an idealized political climate wherein we can evolve. These issues are challenged by The Society of Affective Archives, Kerstin Honeit, and Rodolfo Andaur’s practices. They will each relate their research to their respective locations—Montréal being a connecting site for them— as well as their respective cultural and artistic backgrounds. What is made of a place is what the public makes of it: we build, reject, and create our own freedoms and powers. Through different narratives, words, actions, and curation, there will be a sharing of perspectives on how ecologies and economies are partly cherished and demonized. Ultimately, this program asks: can public art belong to everyone, and how do we inhabit spaces to make them ours?

Curated by Victoria Carrasco

In her essay, Lippard states numerous times that public art does not exist under the idea of what public art really is, as it is supposed to partly fulfill the social needs of a specific environment and aesthetic intent of the artist. Lippard says of the most successful example: “Nothing has responded better to these needs in American cities than the burgeoning mural movement, modelled in part of the Chilean mural brigades, whose effectiveness was proven by the Junta’s haste to erase them when Allende’s government was overthrown.”

This program is made possible thanks to The Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP) Leadership Fellowship with support from the Ford Foundation. We would like to thank the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) for generously providing us with these films, as well as the Goethe-Institut Montreal for their support.

Kerstin Honeit

Kerstin Honeit is a Berlin artist who works with experimental documentary moving image formats. In her videos, she researches mechanisms of representation within hegemonic visual worlds and, above all, cultural and linguistic modes of translation in cinematography. Her focus is on the politics of the (film) voice and, in particular, on how the voice, as a queering event between moving images, can shake up the gaze regimes of the dominant culture. Last year, against the background of Honeit’s moving-image-practice, the monograph Kerstin Honeit. Voice Works / Voice Strikes was published by b_books.

La Société des archives affectives

The Society of Affective Archives is a collective entity dedicated to artistic collaboration, the production of affective archives, and the preservation of peripheral knowledge. Inspired by the image of the rhizome, a form wherein multiple paths converge and divide in a continual process of transformation, the collective draws upon the principles of experimentation and creative encounters. Animated by the collection and safeguarding of that which lies on the cusp of disappearing, or at the margins of consciousness, the Society is a romantic conceptual exploration conceived by its founding members, Fiona Annis and Véronique La Perrière M. Since 2010, they have jointly explored the territory of research and creation in the visual arts.

Rodolfo Andaur

Rodolfo Andaur is a visual arts curator and cultural manager. He studied journalism and holds an MA in Art History. He has worked on directing, promoting, and diffusing transdisciplinary projects. Furthermore, Andaur has taken part in curatorial teams that focus on critical analysis and reflection about the anthropocene, climate change, and eco-geopolitics in Latin America. Not only do those proposals produce knowledge through the visual arts, they have also contributed to the dissemination of renewed thoughts on research into unknown territories. With this background his work has been prized both by the Tarapacá Regional Government for his contribution to cultural management (2011), and for his participation in the international project called “Examples to Follow: Expedition in Aesthetics and Sustainability” (2017).

PHI Foundation
REMEMBER, PERFORM, FORGET: Binding Space Through Utopia
August 16th, 2023 - August 27th, 2023

Program Events