Sarah Chouinard-Poirier, Kinga Michalska, AM Trépanier
Artists in residency
- Residency
This Autoresidency project is the follow-up to the autumn 2022 Call for Proposals.
Pologne-en-Québec [Poland-in-Quebec] is an interdisciplinary project by Kinga Michalska, Sarah Chouinard-Poirier, and AM Trépanier that explores the concepts of communities and queer futurities in the era of housing crisis, late capitalism, and climate collapse. Pologne-en-Québec intertwines the languages of documentary film, video performance, community archives, and speculative narrative to question: Why are collective and rural life such appealing yet complex common grounds for queer communities of our generation and those before us? Can we transform our experiences, failures, and disillusionments into knowledge to preserve and transmit? How can we live, work, and thrive together against poverty, exclusion, and exhaustion?
During this pause and activation period offered by the residency at AXENÉO7, we will have the opportunity to come together as a trio to advance different aspects of the project, such as ideation (arranging a multitude of small pieces of paper on the walls), visual research (watching a series of documentary films as a group), scriptwriting (squeezing content into a container), and historical exploration (getting lost in archival collections). To this end, we will take advantage of our presence in the Outaouais region to conduct research on feminist and queer intentional communities in rural Quebec and Ontario from the 1970s to the present day. This inquiry will be conducted through consultations at the Women's Archives at the University of Ottawa, the Library and Archives Canada, as well as the Canadian Museum of History, with a detour to the Museum of Agriculture and Food. During the residency, we will also conduct filmed interviews with members of various local ecological, queer, and feminist collective projects to gather their personal experiences and the emotions they experience.
Sarah Chouinard-Poirier
Sarah Chouinard-Poirier is an artist based in Tiohtiá:ke (Montréal) who approaches performance, film, digital art and writing in a transdisciplinary manner. They create performative scripts rooted in self-writing and oral history that reveal the links between gender, work, class and somatic manifestations. Their work, which focuses on agency and the valuing of lived experiences, ideas and knowledge of the involved people and communities, has been presented in several artist-run centres, festivals and spaces. Sarah is also a frontline worker, organizer and trainer in harm reduction.
Kinga Michalska
Kinga Michalska is a Polish visual artist who lives in Tiohtiá:ke (Montréal). Their work examines issues of identity, memory, displacement and haunting, using the mediums of photography and video to question the documentary stance and the function of the documentary image in the post-truth era. Their approach focuses on shared cultural spaces such as the home, territory, memory, and kinship networks through a queer feminist perspective. They are interested in the periphery of what is and what makes history: amateur historians, geological processes, queer intimacies, personal archives, oral history and speculative fiction. Their work has been presented in Montréal, Poland, England, Germany and Switzerland.
AM Trépanier
Originally from Gatineau, AM Trépanier lives and works in Tiohtiá:ke (Montréal). Her activities interweave research and creation to propose interventions informed by social movements and struggles, community archives, alternative media, popular education and oral history. AM has participated in residencies and presented work at AXENÉO7 (Gatineau), DAÏMÔN (Gatineau), Villa Réflexive (online), Eastern Bloc (Montréal), Gold Saucer Studio (Vancouver) and Suoni Per Il Popolo (Montréal), among others. Since 2018, AM has been co-editing, with Laure Bourgault, the editorial project Cicada, dedicated to the publication and translation of writings by contemporary artists. Her writings on art and culture have been published in various cultural journals and magazines such as Sabir, Termes, Espace art actuel, OEI, esse and Spirale.
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