INSTALLATION

Reflexive Constructions is a public engagement project by artist Natacha Clitandre taking place in the PHI Foundation’s Education Room from May 3 and September 8, 2024, in parallel with the exhibitions Sonia Boyce: FEELING HER WAY and Rajni Perera and Marigold Santos: Efflorescence/The Way We Wake.

Although Natacha Clitandre’s practice has always involved technology, she has managed to resist the imperatives of the spectacular or the sublime that often guide the creation and presentation of digital art, preferring instead to foreground open, participative processes inspired by our everyday use of technology. Informed by the proximity, exchange, and combination of subjective experiences, Clitandre’s projects allow audiences to reflect on their surrounding environments, their uses, and how they could potentially be improved. While they represent the cities many of us live in, these projects don’t present urban spaces as fixed representations, but rather as objects that move and in which we have a defining role.

Reflexive Constructions continues to explore this theme of great importance to the artist by looking at urban development in Montréal. Using data from a mirror photogrammetry of Québec, the project features two facing video projections that show fragments of Montréal neighbourhoods. Within these moving images of the city, participants are invited to work collaboratively to manipulate, assemble, and juxtapose fragments of urban elements in a series of exercises led by the Foundation’s Education team. The project will also be the focus of creative activities led by the artist in dialogue with community groups.

Clitandre invites us to consider how urban space is constantly reorganized—an exercise that is usually entrusted to highly specialized professionals, but that must consider a range of perspectives and urban experiences. Much like the model of a charette in which architects and designers collaborate on a development plan, this project aims to recognize each individual as an expert and their contribution as equal to everyone else’s. Reflexive Constructions strongly emphasizes cooperation and improvisation, values that also guide the work of Sonia Boyce, Rajni Perera, and Marigold Santos. Spontaneously carried out and open to change, each of these artists’ works depends on the pooling of each participant’s acquired knowledge while celebrating the beauty of potential encounters.

The artist would like to thank software developers Shawn Laptiste and Christian Bélanger, as well as Loïc Messal and the entire team at Jakarto.

Curator: Daniel Fiset