Early in the morning, the Huron Wendat Hotel-Museum in Wendake (a Wendat Indigenous reserve), a good half-hour’s drive from downtown Quebec City, looks a bit like a more sophisticated version of Twin Peaks. The parking lot is sporadically covered with layers of yellow fallen leaves. It’s full; we have to drive around twice before finding a spot to park, a little too close to a small red sports car.
The Hotel-Museum, a major Indigenous tourist attraction in the region with stunning architecture and a place where First Nations peoples and settlers have met. On October 22, that’s where the press conference was held to announce the first edition of the Biennale Extra!, an international biennial dedicated to the literary arts.
The Biennale Extra! will take place in Quebec in the fall of 2027.
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THE EXTRA BIENNIAL!
The literary arts encompass poetry, prose, and essays in their performed, auditory, visual, and digital extensions. As they say, “literature leaves the page.”
The first Biennale Extra!: a collaboration between UQAM, the Centre Pompidou, and Productions Rhizome. But the press conference began with a ceremony of purification and gratitude led by a Wendat Elder—rhythmic, spoken softly and without a microphone, participatory, and filled with the sublime scent of sage smoke.
Jean-Max Colard, from the Centre Pompidou’s spoken word department, talks about the sound poetry developed at the Parisian museum-center in the 1980s, the spoken-word magazines of the 1970s, and the spoken-word lectures of the 1990s and 2000s. The literary arts are very serious, but they’re also very broad. They belong to the wind, to dreams, and to the automatic mouth.
Incidentally, EXTRA takes its name from the Centre Pompidou’s Festival Extra. “Extra-literary,” beyond the book. The festival, in partnership with the Université du Québec à Montréal and Productions Rhizome, is undergoing a Kafkaesque metamorphosis that will leave plenty of room for artistic freedom. All the literary geniuses and eccentric writers will be able to find their place there—the space will be just nebulous enough.
It reminds us a bit of the Dada movement, of “exquisite corpses,” and of Dalí’s book in which he refers to himself as a drug.
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Simon Dumas, artistic director of Productions Rhizome—which has been exploring literary forms in Quebec for 26 years—speaks of a perfect alignment of the stars. His one-on-one literary salons, the “faire-lire,” have long been bringing artists and literary forms together. And not just in Quebec City, but also in Brussels, Rimouski, and Bordeaux.
For them, as well as for UQAM, the drive for research is at the heart of their participation in the Biennale Extra. Through theory, the famous academic “research-creation,” and poetic concepts that are complicated to explain, the biennial will serve as the heart of the literary arts in Quebec for an entire season: the fall of 2027.
To keep an eye, a whisper, or a finger on the Biennale Extra, we recommend signing up for its newsletter here.
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