Playground

Invited by Galerie B-312, Rachel Echenberg, a multidisciplinary Montreal artist working in public spaces and in the field of performance and video, invited Sylvie Cotton, Adad Hannah, Flutura and Besnik Haxhillari, Alana Riley and Victoria Stanton to intervene in Alphonse-Télesphore-Lépine Park located at the corner of Fairmount and de Gaspé Streets. -The park, which is attached to a school and set between recently constructed buildings, offers neighbourhood residents a green space, a kiosk, two play areas and a water playground where the children can cool off on hot summer days. Rachel Echenberg's guests will be particularly active in the play areas, where the adults are virtually only the parents of the children who play there. -A video of Adad Hannah will be shown continuously throughout the event. It will show a tableau vivant filmed in the park with the complicity of young people. Alana Riley will invite people who frequent the park to hug each other, the pressure of the bodies will trigger the taking of a photograph. Victoria Stanton will perform a number of gestures with toy cars as props, all of which are replicas of SUVs. Flutura and Besnik Haxhillari, who still work as a couple, will continue their work where art and family life know no boundaries. Sylvie Cotton will speak accompanied by her father, Roger Cotton ; a girl will have invited her father to the park, and where we usually play, they will talk.-The actions will take place between 7:30 and 9:00 p.m. in different parts of the park and will coexist without necessarily starting and ending at the same time. And no doubt, as night falls and the incongruity of the moment, you will feel the place act differently on you.

—Translated from a text by Jean-Émile Verdier