EXHIBITION

Gabrielle Harnois-Blouin’s project focuses on the creation of a performative choral work, developed in collaboration with Olivier Ostiguy’s third-grade class at Saint-Barthélémy School. Through this piece, the artist explored with the children their relationship to the world through the lens of porosity, engaging their voices, gestures, and ideas.

Throughout the process, Gabrielle guided them through various questions: What affects them the most—clouds, darkness, raspberries, a thunderstorm, a caress, something else? Why, and how do these things pass through them? What do they feel in their bodies? In the same spirit, she sought to understand how they, in turn, affect the world around them.

The sponge and the speaker have become conceptual anchors for the artist's project. While the sponge, a reactive, living being, alludes to our capacity to absorbe what surrounds us, the speaker symbolises expression, transmission and resonance of lived experience. Coupled, they act as a probing metaphor for the complexity of our rapport to the world.

This work culminates in a series of live shows held at the school and at PHI, during which the children experience and share a fully developed performance—with all its variations, magic, confusion, fears, and joys.