CCA exhibit lets the city tell its own story

The CCA plays host to a sprawling, ambitious exhibition as diffuse, diverse and dynamic as the city itself. ABC:MTL is an ongoing series of talks, exhibits, workshops and cultural events, which will shift and change over time to continuously forge new connections between different facets of local cultural life.


Image of invisible radio waves over the city by Electrosmog. Image courtesy of the CCA.

Over the next five months, the CCA plays host to a sprawling, ambitious exhibition as diffuse, diverse and dynamic as the city itself. ABC:MTL is an ongoing series of talks, exhibits, workshops and cultural events, which will shift and change over time to continuously forge new connections between different facets of local cultural life.

The exhibit marks a new approach for the CCA. “Usually research projects before exhibits take two to four years, so they’re full-fledged, comprehensive research projects that are then shaped into the form of an exhibition and a publication,” says Simon Pennec, the Centre’s curatorial coordinator. For this exhibit, however, the gallery instead turned to an open call for contributions, in order “to allow the public to let the city speak for itself” and avoid “trying to shape a comprehensive notion of Montreal.”

“Each project looks at a particular institutional or architectural phenomenon, a social, political or cultural condition through a project,” says Pennec. “The project illustrates a very particular idea that will then be complemented by the series of public programs that we’re putting together.”

“La fierté a une ville,” (Montreal 1983), part of the Illuminated Signs series by Gabor Szilazi. Image courtesy of the CCA.

“La fierté a une ville,” (Montreal 1983), part of the Illuminated Signs series by Gabor Szilazi. Image courtesy of the CCA.

The exhibit is only the latest installment in the Centre’s commitment to finding new ways to frame urban planning, architecture and city life today and in history. While past shows have explored the city’s fortress foundation, its cultivation into a metropolis and, most recently, the major changes that took place during the relative prosperity of the 60s, ABC:MTL attends more to everyday life in Montreal, to the details that stitch together the fabric of quotidian life, rather than large-scale, top-down urban renewal projects and makeovers.

In part, according to curator Fabrizio Gallanti, this different curatorial approach reflects a shift in how the city has changed over time: “There was a very politically-driven transformation of the city in the 60s, when the economy was boosting and there was an optimism about Montreal in the future, and then after the Olympics I think that stopped. Since then all the attempts to direct it top-down approach to the city’s transformation have not been so successful. So we see self-initiated, self-organized bottom-up strategies of modification of the city,” strategies that are reflected in both the exhibit’s focus and its execution.

Each phase or motif of the exhibit is staged in a series of rooms that highlight the intersections between the diverse projects included. After a wildly successful vernissage earlier this month, Phase A stays on the walls to Dec. 9, when it will be superseded by the next phase, which will look beyond the island’s shores to explore the commercial, financial and cultural aspects of suburban Montreal. The Centre still has over 50 projects on deck to mount, with the next round unveiled Dec. 12.

While the scope of the project is tremendous, no exhibit, no matter how ambitious, could hope to cover all of Montreal life. But, as Gallanti notes, “We’re also very intrigued by what has not been submitted. There’s this idea that there’s no working class in Montreal, there’s this idea that we are all young, smart creative people and nothing material is produced on the island, but we know that this isn’t really the case. So we asked why that was not captured by anybody.”

Such questions point toward one of the exhibition’s central objectives: not just opening up the gallery space to the public via an open call, but also including the public by staging events that encourage discourse around public issues facing our city.

“It’s an experiment for us, we wanted to open it up to a more democratic conversation, to everybody, to the public in general,” says Gallanti. “We like to call it a non-exhibition, because for us whatever happens on a more discursive basis — seminars, performances, concerts, workshops, ateliers — have exactly the same value as what is on the walls.” ■

ABC:MTL is on at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (1920 Baile) through March 31, 2013. Phase A of the exhibit will remain on display to Dec. 9.

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