Program > Outdoor Session

A playful outdoor performance, an organizing of space through actions of weaving and making braids. While walking/braiding, attention is given to ambience and alerts the inner and invisible structures of space. The playing with threads strongly connects body and space and offers an embodied understanding of “the-in-between”.

Based on meditation in Traditional Chinese Medicine, this activity invites participants to experience different ambiances from space to non-spaces in an area of strong economic development sitting astride the old port and Griffintown.The guided meditation will first take place in the Darling Foundry, an old factory now rehabilitated into a Visual Art Center. Then we will go out for a meditative walk experiencing four non-spaces located in the neighborhood.

Always in action, but frequently ignored, the sense of smell plays an important role in our everyday experiences of cities and the streets, squares and public places within them. This walk offers the opportunity to its participants to focus upon this much under-estimated sense and to examine the odours that can be detected in a range of different areas in Montreal (including a short trip on public transport), and to think about their relationship to how those places are perceived. Not to be sniffed at, this walk will explore influencing factors in urban olfactory experience, highlighting characteristics of this fascinating sense, past, current and potential future considerations of smell in the design of urban areas. Additionally, it will offer insights into the role of walks in researching sensory characteristics of the city and will draw from experiences of similar previous walks implemented in cities across the United Kingdom, mainland Europe and the United States. Participants are asked to wear sensible footwear, to dress for the weather and are advised to bring a drink along and to avoid wearing heavily scented products and perfumes.

You are invited to a ramble in time via the smellscape. The activity will take place in two parts, regardless of weather conditions. Plan raincoat and/or umbrella if the sky is gloomy. Starting point: S-W corner of St-Laurent blvd and St-Viateur St. Approximate duration: 1h30. In first stage, on the trail of smells, you will have to follow a specific route using a map. The urban path goes between Mile End and Outremont districts. Your mission will be to indicate on the map the places where you smell odours, to note a brief description of the image which spontaneously comes to mind at this very moment, as well as the space-time in which the smell brought you — past (memories), present (novelty), future (anticipation). In second stage, the maps of all participants will be combined. There will be a discussion and an exchange about the experience. The purpose of the activity is to explore how our olfactory memory alters our perception of the space-time environment. Indeed, without being fully aware of it most of the time, the smellscape gets into our unconscious and makes us travel through time. We travel the city, crossing the different space-times that our olfactory memory stages for us in the present.

This session will take participants on an improvised listening and sounding walk between the Canadian Centre for Architecture and Concordia University. The soundwalk will be followed by a discussion of what we hear. The session will be recorded and a multimedia piece will be made for online presentation.

Monumental orchestra composed of multiple configurations and shifting, city and its public spaces offer to the ears of their inhabitants a real urban symphony. Often overlooked as composers, these same individuals, daily users of urban public spaces, participate in the writing of the immediate and perpetual interpretation of this partition by performing their mundane activities. Starting from this idea, a device have been build. Imagine being able to participate more meaningfully in the development of instant urban concert through our mundane activities, such as walking, moving. Worn by the user, the device magnified the sound of footsteps during his daily urban routes. New relationships are then created between the user and the city. Soil textures, reverberation of a narrow street, etc., a whole sound universe is then revealed to the ears not just of those who produced it but also to those who hear it. In other words, the portable device can exacerbate multiple particularities of pedestrian sonorities produced during our urban wanderings and make extraordinary the ordinary sound of everyday life.

This performance uses a methodology based on the composition and the presentation of a soundwalk, broadcasted by four walkers using a mobile audio device. This soundwalk proposes to modify the sensitive and social ambiances in order to amplify their perception and test their reactivity.

The site is located in the Mill Street area of Montreal. Our intervention tries to reveal the fragmentation, the scale and the tone of the place through a multisensorielle promenade. The course will highlight different readings of the place, its atmosphere, its characteristics and will contrast, through its built environment, conveyors and other airial objects but also its sound landscape and its atmospheric features.