Housing a Home: Borrowed Views

UOU in collaboration withMAI (Montréal Arts Interculturel) works with artist Riaz Mehmood to examine notions of home, shelter and community in the urban environment.

In the summer of 2010, artist Riaz proposed to me his idea for initiating a creative process that would explore a sense of an evolving and imaginative space in Griffintown. The installation of Housing a Home: Borrowed Views, while initiated by Mehmood, is the result of a collaborative reflection upon the poetic and spatial relationship between a city’s residents and its public/ private spaces.

Participating artists include: Anne Bertrand, jennadawn/maclellan, Larissa Diakiw, Didier Delfolie-Noulin and Danielle Lewis.

It is the context of urban change and examining notions of home, community, and ideas about what constitutes public and private spaces that has inspired a collaborative occupation within this site. This site is  privately owned by local land developer Roland Hakim & Associates, and has been generously donated for our temporary use. The site is currently designed as a green parking lot. The site’s future, however, remains relatively uncertain. Situated between the Bonaventure expressway and the Canadian National railway viaduct, the site is located within the boundaries of Municipal plans to create a prestigious gateway into the city.

Griffintown holds an especially privileged place in Montreal’s history, once the crucible of Montreal’s urban development and resonant within Canada’s pre/industrial history. Since the 1970s Griffintown has become an urban site of pastness and abandon. Griffintown, however, is not a place of stasis. Rather, it is marked with changes that keep its past alive and also with changes that have eradicated the past. Most recently, Griffintown has seen deep and enduring tensions between the interests, limits, and promises of urban renewal and heritage preservation. Undoubtedly, the process of gentrification in Griffintown has begun. The city’s planning strategies have been predominantly based on revitalizing the neighbourhood through commercial and residential condominium projects.

The artist-collaborators of Housing a Home: Borrowed Views while acting upon and collectively occupy this site, do not stand outside of their experience of Griffintown. Rather, their intervention and reflection upon Griffintown’s changing cultural landscape draws attention to the nonconforming uses of urban spaces, those spatial practices that fall outside of a city’s zoning by-laws, and the material processes of gentrification. Moving beyond artistic modes of production, Housing a Home: Borrowed Views also performs as social intervention that stages the public audience within one of Griffintown’s many contested spaces.

Housing a Home: Borrowed Views is a creative response to the processes of urban renewal and place making that are occurring within extraordinary urban conditions. Through their collective occupation of the site, the artist-collaborators observe and reflect upon the elusive relationships between a city’s residents and its public/ private spaces. Materials local to the neighbourhood have been gathered, reused and recycled to construct the installation.

Originally “a borrowed view” was used to describe the art of gardening known as shakkei in Japenese or jie jing in Chinese. Shakkei is the art of creating a garden based around a borrowed view and treating the landscape as if it were a large painting. “Borrowed Views” is conceived of here, on this site, as an occupation or spatial appropriation for re-imagining an open, fictive and playful urban space. It is in this sense that the site functions as a mise en scène for both the collaborators and the public to rehearse their experiences, desires and expectations for the site’s future.

For more details on Housing a Home: Borrowed Views and dates for the public engagement please check UOUs calendar of events. For more information about daily project developments please visit the blog http://housingahome.wordpress.com/