Echoes of Burgundy
This project emerges from our residency Pensée Critique at DARE-DARE, as part of the Méthodes et jeux de l’espace: Zones d’existences II program (2025–2026), and as an ongoing inquiry into memory, materiality, and urban transformation. We were invited to take a critical look at the practices of the three artists in the INTERVENTIONS component.
In doing so, as artist-researchers, curators, and educators, we also observed the complexities of urban identities and lived experiences. We approached the city as a living field shaped by migration, identity, and sensory memory, a space continuously redefined through everyday gestures and collective presence. Viewing the neighbourhood of Little Burgundy as outsiders, two people not originally from the area, carrying within us different experiences and knowledge, we were drawn to its echoes because of its rich and complex history.
Within this context, public space is a dynamic and relational environment, impacted by social movements, displacement, and shared experiences. For us, urban identity is not fixed but continuously negotiated. Emerging from emotional encounters with the works of Salima Punjani, Caroline Gagné and Steve Giasson, through bodily attention and material traces, the archive becomes a living process, evolving through participation rather than preservation alone.
Our immersive installation is the result of exploring these dynamics, using deep mapping as a guiding methodology, layering historical traces with sensory impressions and collective memory, allowing us to unfold as an embodied, participatory practice and a living archive. We moved through the city by listening, touching, walking, playing, and sharing, staying close to its rhythms, poiesis and transformations.
The site installation project is structured around three moments from DARE DARE’s 2025-2026 artists-in-residency program. The first moment emerged from Punjani’s invitation to reflect on Holding, Release. Her practices invite us to explore memory, sensory experience, spatial intervention, and collective narrative. The second appeared when Gagné’s intervention, Peupleraie, Corps social et corps sonore, encouraged us to listen to the trees and walk along the Lachine Canal embedded in the collective imagination. The third came to light when Giasson’s work, NEW NEW INVISIBLE PERFORMANCES. captivated us through the reenactment of other artists' works, sharing the pleasure of that gesture collectively.
The guiding question, How do we exist in the urban landscape? remains open and generative. Rather than seeking definitive answers, it invites attention, care, and relation. This critical and creative installation gathers fragments of that process: moments of observation, intimacy, dialogue, and play. Together, these reflections trace an evolving constellation of urban presence, shaped not only by what is seen but also by what is felt, remembered, and shared.
Ritual: unfolding like a slow exhale
We began our research residency with a mindful gesture of care and empathy, introduced to Salima Punjani’s work through an act of mutual holding (S.P. 2025). We met at Parc Sainte Cunégonde, located in Little Burgundy, where the artist invited the public to release what was held and hold what had been released. For the artist, Holding, Release is a practice she describes as “letting go and holding in a way that feels possible.”
For the closing act, the public was invited to gather in the park. The chairs were arranged in a half-circle facing La HALTE and the installation, which had now been taken outside. As the event began, the artist explained the project and welcomed us to choose from an assortment of ceramic bowls, vessels for collective healing.
Punjani led us into a simple yet meaningful practice: holding, releasing, and noticing what passes through the body. What is released is held; what is held is released. We felt free to participate in our own way, to share, to remain quiet, and to breathe together. Everything was tangible: the scent of the herbs and flowers, the warmth of the water, the weight of the ceramic bowl. The circular gathering, the dispersing and regathering, created a space for collective lament and care.
Collective and intimate, a memory held in scent.
Holding, Release made a deep impression. It offered pause. It created an opportunity for meditation and compassion for someone else’s sorrow. It opened a moment to act out humanity. After this impression had taken root in our bodies and minds, we began to examine how we engage with one another across the emotional spectrum. We considered how care, empathy, and affection circulate within shared spaces and collective encounters. We questioned how the gestures of holding, releasing, and receiving might be conveyed. And how they could be remembered and reactivated. As a result, we were inspired to create a sensorial work that retraces our exploration with material and space.
We began to imagine a device that could function as a symbolic container capable of gathering the multiplicity of feelings encountered in that place: in the park and within its broader urban context. It led us to the idea of using a large metal clamp or bracket, abrazadera (embracing) in Spanish, to materialize the gestures of holding, compressing, and releasing the textile pages of a large book that contains the visual language of a lived experience.
Listening to Place
Caroline Gagné’s project, Peupleraie – Corps social et corps sonore, redefines our relationship to urban nature, using technology to generate a more embodied sense of presence. Participants gathered at Parc Charlevoix/Rufus-Rockhead and joined Caroline under the pavilion, sheltered from the bright sun, as she revealed how, to her, the trees were like musical instruments. Our experience with the environment would quickly shift toward intentional listening as the artist invited us to tune in to the trees and walk along the Lachine Canal, evoking what she describes as a “delicate yet striking musicality [that] is deeply ingrained in the collective imagination, evoking feelings of space and tranquillity.”
Groves of poplar trees are scattered throughout the neighbourhoods along the Lachine Canal. They hold layers of history and their sound within the urban landscape reminds us of their enduring presence. They have been longtime witnesses to the urban evolution and growth that surrounds them. The project was accessed via a QR code and an online platform that stores sounds and maps poplar groves using geolocation. With smartphones and earphones, we walked slowly among the trees, down paths and over bridges, seeking connections.
The city breathing through its roots
After the walk, we questioned whether technology could mediate presence without replacing it. In Gagné’s methodology, geolocation and sound mapping heightened our awareness of the poplar trees and their surrounding soundscape. Moving among the trees, we listened to the rustling leaves layered with the city's vibrations. Although technology guided us through proximity, we controlled our movement and the intensity of our listening. By inviting active listening through curated sounds, the project connects us with the poplar trees, encouraging us to see them as co-habitants of shared space.
The experience transcended observation and connection with the environment; it was an embodied engagement with space and sound, informing our approach to the urban landscape. As we explored the surrounding area, we captured photos and videos, tuning into the colours and textures of the bark, the flutter of leaves in the wind, the breeze against our skin, and the warmth of the sun. An embodied multisensory journal of affect began to grow, collecting sensory data—soundscapes, textures, and environmental traces. We explored ways to integrate our collection of images and videos to invite others to engage in a sensory journey, one that not only reactivates those memories but also generates new ones.
Online Gestures, Shared Questions
Steve Giasson’s work, NEW NEW INVISIBLE PERFORMANCES, is described on the DARE-DARE website as follows: “He will deconstruct his practice as much as possible in order to rethink it in relation to his identity… and the historical, political, socioeconomic, and ecological context in which we live.” For six months, from November 2025 to May 2026, Giasson committed to generating a new performative action every Tuesday and Thursday. These were disseminated across Facebook, Instagram, Truth Social, and www.performanceinvisibles.com. The ongoing temporal framework shaped how we encountered and anticipated his work. The first post appeared on November 25, 2025, and opened with No. 254, Changer de visage, a reenactment of Eliseo Mattiacci’s 1973 Rifarsi, first presented at Galerie B-312 on August 17, 2025.
Giasson's repeated weekly reenactments of other artists’ work are captured in photos and shared on Instagram with captions in French, English, and Spanish. At a glance, his performative gestures appear modest, persistent, and attentive, but we know there must be something more to these interpretations. Reenactments of any kind provide opportunities to reach back into history, and, as observers of these performative reenactments, we are exposed to content that connects us with art and history but also reveals a contemporary political questioning, one that the artist is also uncovering for himself.
Urban skin — layered, porous, alive
What does it mean to create a reenactment? These reenactments are defined by acts of performing and reimagining. Giasson focuses on gestures and processes while highlighting the ephemeral qualities of the original works or performances. His work contains many layers and elicits many questions, prompting an intriguing effect precisely because it is a reenactment of another artist’s work. While the reenactments prompt historical inquiry, they also reshape how we engage with performance in the digital age.
From our perspective, his work influenced our process and highlighted new ways of viewing the archive and engaging with its multimodal forms.
The steps to view his performative work involved opening Instagram and scrolling through his account’s profile feed, a familiar gesture for longtime users. In this sense, the work is activated through scrolling, with viewers becoming participants opting to like, save, share, and/or comment. For those unfamiliar with the context, a deeper understanding requires investigation. How far does one go to understand an artwork?
Through a conceptual yet fun discipline, Giasson delighted us by recreating other artists' works, sharing the pleasure of that gesture collectively. From there, a playful energy awakened in us, and we decided to include a series of videos in which we reconceptualized a past work by Elsy, relocating them to the present. The soft, elongated sculptures, “los floppy”, as we called them, were noodle-like forms that we used to create a series of performative videos, complicit and slightly disruptive in relation to the conditions of urban space.
Evolving presence
Throughout the residency, we activated a multisensory and multimodal archive composed of gestures, sounds, textures, images, found materials, and encounters. Salima Punjani’s Holding, Release evokes gestures from another time. It is an intentional and embodied experience rooted in magic and healing. There is an emphasis on cultivating moral imagination and community by fostering sympathy and connection with the other, promoting emotional intelligence and self-reflection. The outcome of such socially engaged artistic projects is almost always transformative. That moment revealed how empathy can circulate without expectation, how compassion can exist without asking anything in return. We left with something more, subtle but present.
Caroline Gagné’s Peupleraie revealed synchronicity was not necessary. Each person moved at their own pace, yet we shared the same terrain and moment in time. As users, we all had access to the same archive of sounds, while each of us retained agency over how we experienced the sonic intervention. This project merges technology with the natural world, relying on the user as an active participant in its realization. The work only comes into being through lived experience. Without engagement, it remains suspended in digital space, latent and unrealized.
In Steve Giasson's series of reenactments, we also have agency over how long we stay with an image. Although social media is a public platform accessed by millions, viewing on a handheld device feels private and embodied, in contrast to traditional public art experiences. Since performance is typically experienced in the physical presence of others, and our smartphones are designed to be held individually and absorb our focused attention, the experience felt/feels unexpectedly intimate and anticipatory. There is a separation between the moment the performance takes place and the moment it is viewed publicly. Therefore, his decision to reveal his performative gestures through digital spaces means that his work and its critical and political messages become more widely accessible than if presented solely in a gallery or other institutional space.
By critically and creatively engaging with these practices, we sought to redefine the archive as an evolving, participatory process. The installation we developed during our residency at DARE-DARE brings together sensory research and collective memory into a dynamic reflection on the urban experience and history of Little Burgundy, evoking gestures of care, the urban landscape, the Lachine Canal, the community, and the poplar trees, places that the artists invited us to inhabit in a sensitive, attentive, playful, and complex way.
Through objects, devices, video diaries, photography, digital collages, assemblages of images, layers, and sensory mapping, the work functions as a living repository—one that reconfigures public space through layered narratives that continue to shape how the neighbourhood is lived and understood today.
Echoes of Burgundy explores the possibility of holding and sustaining the affects and emotions that emerge within collective experience and urban space. Through cultural, historical, and landscape images, we construct a poetic and tactile environment—an invitation to feel with the hands, to navigate through moving images, and to inhabit the encounter.
In this way, the installation becomes a space of relation: between friendship and collaboration, urban life and historical landscape, memory and presence. It traces the shared moments that unfolded throughout the year-long residency, proposing an evolving constellation of experiences grounded in the place where we met and the art we experienced
Denise and Elsy | C o l e c t i v a O Z
Montreal, May, 2026
