Marina Planas

 // Manifestation Je(us), Longueuil, Montreal // 2022

Community project through archival intervention, video and digital prints.

Video: https://vimeo.com/809680743

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    The historical memories of Longueuil are generated by the stories of local heroes and people who have contributed to shape and build what is known as History. Meanwhile, the discussions developed by the citizens, the singular experiences and sensations, are not recorded and are part of a popular patrimony normally forgotten or normativized. This is the result of a mediation project involving citizen participation. The main idea was to generate life in disused and discarded places through two workshops. The first action took place at La station de pompage (workshop_01) with students, and the second at l'Archive du Marigot (workshop_02) with the same group of participants. The whole process was documented on video and projected in the exhibition hall supported by photographs and other materials.

La station de pompage of Longueuil, designed in 1987 by architect Mario Petrone, is an intermediate space located between Pointe Sainte Charles street and Taschereau boulevard, halfway between the old and the new Longueuil. It is a barely known architectural space with very little public information available about the work. It is a forgotten place in Longueuil that is very difficult to reach due to its lack of access. A silenced, unreachable and unknown site that serves to explain untold stories, generate debate in the community and think about themes that are often ignored. The workshop consisted of documenting singular experiences of the site and its particularities (its design, materiality, but also misuses, transformations, wasting, contextualization...).

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The inaccessibility of the site is probably the reason for its strange reality: a green, concrete island surrounded by roads. While much of the debate is currently focused on needed future parks, paradoxically La station de pompage, a well-kept urban garden with great potential, is ignored and left unused. The station reveals our contradictory emphasis on conservation and ecological awareness, while leaving existing spaces underutilized and unshared.

The complementary and diverse recordings made by the students to document these in situ meetings at La Estation were used to reveal collective thoughts and discussions in order to generate a story that is not normally told. The documents produced during the action-workshop were subsequently entered into the archives of l'Archive du Marigot.

Paradoxically, archives serve to keep the traces and memory of who we are, but they often fall into oblivion and become lifeless empty spaces. Few resources are devoted to maintaining, interpreting and activating documents, images and files. 

These archaeological and excavation sites rarely function as an agency or platform for debate and discussion. At l'Archive du Marigot, the main concept was to activate the space with the residents and workers of the area to develop an artistic intervention in the archives (related to urbanism, architecture and community).

The intention was to bring the archive closer to the public and the students to understand how an archive works, how to question its own internal narratives and its function for society. The idea was to use the images they produced in the previous La station de pompage workshop and work with the concepts they developed as a result of the first meeting. In the archive, their main task was to search for images of La station de pompage and its surroundings and to insert the images they had taken in the previous workshop so that documents of La station de pompage would remain in the archive.