JEAN-FRANÇOIS PROST: CHANTIER

Jean-François Prost is an artist with an academic background in architecture. He has a keen interest in new urban research territories and he approaches art as an act of resistance, a state of mind, a medium for enunciating and exchanging ideas. His artistic actions, workshops and books address the issues of urban diversity, the rights to the city and active citizen participation through a (co)definition of the living environment. He is the founder of Adaptive Actions (AA), co-founder of L’atelier SYN- and is currently undertaking his doctoral studies on transformable architectures at l’UQAM. Since 1998, his individual and collaborative work has been shown at: 2006 Liverpool Biennial, at the Canadian Center for Architecture, Dare Dare, Madrid Abierto Art Biennial and Musagetes Art Foundation. After the publication of the Heteropolis and Stopping – Arrêts books, the AA Platform was the subject of a series of actions and exhibitions including those at the Montreal Art Biennial / MAC museum, MUAC (MX), Tokyo Wonder Site Gallery and at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery. His upcoming projects comprise an exhibition at La Maison de la culture de Longueuil in collaboration with Agrégat and the curation of 2023 edition of Art Souterrain.

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Les désoeuvré.e.s is an open, multi-purpose collective in constant transformation. It resists the colonization of life by capitalism and takes pleasure in exploring the world outside the ideologies of work, performance, productivity and consumption. It stands for cooperation between individuals, sharing and the freedom to live on one’s own terms. Faced with these imperatives, Les désoeuvré.e.s prefers degrowth, contemplation, solidarity, living together, social and environmental justice and love.

Etienne Issa is a multidisciplinary researcher, architectural designer and scenographer. Their doctoral research takes place between the Institut de recherche en biologie végétale (IRBV) at the Université de Montréal and the Department of Biology and Architectural Engineering at the Vrije Universteit Brussel (VUB). Their project explores the valorization of construction waste streams using fungal microorganisms as organic binders for the creation of regenerative biomaterials towards circular cities and resilient communities. Etienne has worked in architectural offices in Montreal and Berlin and transitional urbanism cooperatives in Paris; notably on projects linked to culture, education, social housing and the adaptation of buildings for inclusive community spaces.

Rebecca Ladida is a transdisciplinary artist based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Through mixed media installation, video performance work, research and DIY curating, Rebecca’s solo and collaborative practice provides modals of intimacy, hospitality and ecological co-habitation. They are currently working on a long-term project about plants, scent & healing from extractive and carceral structures of existence called Carceral Ecologies. Ladida’s work has been shown at the Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, Downtown Player’s Club in Atlanta, Dfbrl8r Gallery and Siblings in Chicago, The Situation Room and LACE: Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in L.A., Raizvanguarda Associação Cultural in Bordeiro (Portugal), La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse, Festival HTMlles & dpi.23, Ada X, in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. They have also guest lectured at The School of the Art Institute Chicago, University of Illinois in Chicago (USA), as well as Ottawa University and Concordia University in Montreal

As a multidisciplinary artist and independent curator, Martín Rodríguez’s work emerges from his Chicanx upbringing along the Arizona-Mexico border. His practice mixes performance with interventions and installations, investigating radio as a transformative medium. 

After a surgery to remove a brain tumor left him temporarily paralyzed Rodríguez searched for new meaning.  When radio signals trapped in his guitar began to sing, he seized on the phenomena and began exploring the cracks of the radio spectrum as a material for making art. Notably, his work has been presented by the Musée d’art contemporain Montréal (CA), MUAC (MX), Darling Foundry (CA), Spektrum (DE), as well as various festivals and performance venues across Canada, and the US.

Martin Dufrasne carries out projects as an author and as a curator. Co-founder of the TouTTouT artists’ workshops in Chicoutimi, Martin Dufrasne has been active in the community of artists’ centres in Quebec for more than twenty years. He has been a coordinator of artistic programming at DARE-DARE since 2010. Martin Dufrasne has a background in art history, environmental design and interdisciplinary art. His works (installation, photography, art action) question the notions of value, transformation and commitment. Since 1998, he has been working in parallel with his individual practice in duo with the artist Carl Bouchard and he collaborates punctually in projects initiated by fellow artists: Sylvie Cotton, Charles Guilbert, Daniel Danis, Jennifer Alleyn. His work has been presented in various groups and individual exhibitions, at biennials and performance festivals; in Quebec, in Canada and abroad.

Born in North Macedonia (former Yugoslavia), Sonja Zlatanova is a graduate of the École nationale supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy. She lived in Europe before settling in Montreal in 2012. Her work has been exhibited in Lausanne, Paris, Istanbul, Berlin, Sarajevo, Skopje and Bitola, as well as in Montreal. Inspired by the plant world, anatomy and natural history, Zlatanova focuses on the transformation of living beings. She expresses herself through sculptures in clay and porcelain, drawings and watercolours, and installations composed of organic elements such as plants, animal fragments, and insects, which she subjects to various conservation processes, including press-drying and taxidermy. At once reminiscences and ruins, metaphors for an event and a phenomenon – that of the acceleration of natural history and the entropy provoked by the human species – her works explore the ambiguous link between aesthetics and a fascination with destruction. She is also interested in the various aspects of plant cultivation through displacement and migration. She is currently experimenting with the transplantation of plants and seeds from the Montreal area, Switzerland and Northern Macedonia. Her work explores a space shaped by the migratory movements of all forms of life and attempts to imagine a common space between cultures and ecosystems. (traduit par Jean-François Prost)

Marie Sommer (1984) is a photographer and videographer. She is currently a member of the international and interdisciplinary research group Archiver le Présent, at UQAM in Montréal, which explores the imaginative dimension of exhaustion in contemporary cultural productions. Her recent work concerns the environments and development of pre-digital surveillance systems during the Cold War, which have generated operational images, mass data, and obsolete artefacts.

Sommer’s work focuses on the history of specific places and on processes of sight and spatial representation. Her productions in photography and film reveal anachronistic arrangements and reused vestiges of material that is then archived, exhibited, or made invisible. She assembles various documents to create a layered archive akin to sedimentary strata.

Octavio Rüest is a self-taught and neuroatypical visual artist born in Montpellier (France) in 1987. He has lived and worked in Montréal since 2003. He has a profound experience of social inequalities. A slow immigration process forced him to work illegally in construction sites and factories. These five years mark a turning point whose impact is evident in his current work. Nevertheless, he continued to refine his drawing practice and diversified his interventions in the public space for over twenty years. He also studied decorative painting with a master of the Flemish school, Van Der Kelen. He currently presents his work in the form of prints, artist’s books and murals. In addition, his drawings are published in the magazine Liberté. While presently studying Printed Arts at Concordia University, he continues to produce public art and works as an art mediator with various local organizations.