This is the 17th edition of the Art Souterrain art festival, which every year adorns the long, empty corridors of the liminal spaces of the -apparently endless- tunnels beneath the city of Montreal.
For this year’s edition, the theme is Habitat Souterrain, and the works of the 27 artists on show explore the concept of habitat and habitation; living space, intimacy, life in society and more or less in harmony with the environment. It’s like a catalog, an almost documentary scrapbook of everyday life…
The festival runs from 6pm on March 15 – the launch evening – to April 6, and is completely free of charge.
Montreal, habitat and the space in between
This year’s edition of the Art Souterrain festival is supported by the Ville de Montréal and its executive committee responsible for culture, gastronomy and nightlife, and Marie Plourde takes the stage to reaffirm her support for accessible art – which, during Habitat Souterrain, will be displayed in the tunnels and spaces between the great towers of the Ville-Marie district: the World Trade Center (where the tour begins), the Palais des Congrès, the Jacques-Parizeau building, the ICAO, and Place Ville-Marie.
The exhibition’s curators, Eric Milette and Geneviève Thibault, each have their own conception of habitat, and have brought to this festival artists who explore the themes they associate with it.
For Eric Milette, who is dressed almost identically to the director of dreams and transcendence David Lynch, we appropriate (or not) a place to live in, we live our intimacy in it, we store our memories in it and we lodge our hearts in it. He also talks about the material, the immaterial and the space between the two that thehabitat can be.
Geneviève Thibault speaks of the habitat as “both the place we inhabit and the place that inhabits us”, and as a space that can be “the body, the house, the planet, the universe”…
The works are exhibited in spaces of transition, of nothing, where people walk (to get from point A to point B) and rarely stop. With white lights, gray carpeting on the floor, an echo of the subway passing by, and the occasional ray of sunlight outside to let us know what time it is. It’s a liminal space where the works are like a museum that appears in the middle of nowhere; a breath of fresh air, cataloguing human life – to be appreciated, to be studied, and by stopping in these tunnels and great halls you have the impression of discovering a new space.
The program
The festival will run for three weeks , and in addition to the works on view in the underground city, there will be performances (two of which are eagerly awaited this weekend), conversations with emerging artists and curators on Tuesdays, and a round-table discussion at the McCord Museum with Architectes Sans Frontières Québec on the theme “Habiter l’espace, façonner la comunauté”.
The full festival program is available online here!
You’ll also be able to see works above ground (after having seen the first part of the exhibition below) at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, at the MAC in the architectural-futurist exhibition Les Gratte-Ciels par la Racine, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and in a dozen galleries across the city. We also recommend that you look up as you stroll around Montreal, because the scrapbooking architecture of the downtown core is, in itself, a catalog of modern life since the arrival of settlers on the island.
A catalog of modern life through habitat
We follow Eric and Geneviève, and Art Souterrain’s managing director Frédéric Loury as they take us lower down, beneath the World Trade Center, along the corridors on whose walls the works are displayed, highlighted with sophistication in the tunnels that are otherwise rather dark and transitional.
Many of the artists exhibit photographs, and we won’t spoil the fun of discovering them all, but it’s artist Jeanne Castonguay-Carrière , in Montreal for the opening of the festival, who first says that her photo series Maison de Paille (2021-2024) is like a “notebook”, a “photographic diary”. Her photos, snapshots of the younger generation (her children) in conversation with nature -also that of Jeanne’s childhood- have the taste of nostalgia, anxiety and youth documented with care and with the absolute happiness that comes with creating art around the everyday.
She’s not the only artist at the festival to present work that resembles a loving catalog of the everyday. Samuel Saint-Aubin documents the dust between his floorboards, Eric Tschaeppeler presents the interiors of houses and apartments of childless people, Céline Lecomte has photographed all the faux-natural spaces she has come across on her way, Éloi Perreault photographs all the corners of Matane to make them immortal…
There are plenty of other artists to discover, and plenty of unexplored corners of underground Montreal to wander around… We invite you to go and see them as soon as possible, and if you can during one of Art Souterrain‘s guided tours !
Enjoy the festival!