Performative city

The Performative City Broadcast on video, the participants’ ability (or inability) to live together lays bare the imperfections of an (overcharged) modernity perceived as a living spectacle: though its playfulness is fully developed, it convincingly illustrates the frantic virtualization of a world where the accessibility and speed of information gives one the feeling of travelling the universe while standing still (an impression suggested by the rapport between exhibition space and city space). “The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space,” Michel Foucault said in 1967. “We are in the epoch of simultaneity, [. . .] of juxtaposition, [. . .] of the near and the far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed [. . . .] our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.” Such borderline areas articulating the singularity and plurality of worlds are very present in the performative city. Moreover, this observation recalls Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, the notion of a space of non-space, “[. . .] capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.” Skillfully conjuring these intertwined spaces—like those experimented with in theatre, for instance—, Gilot takes action and assembles various utopian spaces into a single work where they serve as interfaces between reality and fiction, inverting our rapport with the real and imagination while simultaneously compelling us to recognize and trust their functionality in the organization of the city. Text by Marie-Josée Lafortune, Photos by B. Hoffmann. 1 Michel Foucault, «Dits et écrits 1984 , Des espaces autres (conférence au Cercle d'études architecturales, 14 mars 1967)», in Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, no. 5, octobre 1984, pp. 46-49.  2 Ibid, p.46  The inhabitants of the Performative city are the performers : Anne Bérubé, Caroline Boileau, Belinda Campbell, Caroline Dubois, Rachel Echenberg, Mathieu Latulippe, François Morelli, Alisha Piercy, Victoria Stanton, Sylvie Tourangeau et Emma Waltraud Howes.