Last October we were invited by EXMURO Arts Publics to participate in the Passages Insolites Festival in Quebec, with our piece Literature vs Traffic, which we have already performed in many cities around the world.
The idea of this piece has not changed since the first time we carried it out:
“We want literature to take over the streets and to become the conqueror of all public places, offering passersby a traffic-free area that will, for a few hours, surrender to the humble might of the written word.
Thus, a place in the city usually dedicated to speed, pollution, and noise, shall turn, for one night, into a place of peace, quiet, and coexistence, lighted by the soft dim light issued from the book pages.
The books will be available for those who want to take them, so the installation will recycle itself and will last as long as its users decide to make it disappear.
Cars will eventually re-claim their place. However, those who walked by this place that night will hold the memory of how once books took over it, so they will have a better relationship with it.”
To raise the 11,000 books needed to complete the piece, we relied on organisations specialising in used books, libraries and bookshops. Local residents also contributed, donating books that were collected in various mailboxes set up throughout the city.
We also relied on more than 50 volunteers, citizens interested in literature and art in general, who were contacted through a public call. They helped us in the whole process of assembling and placing the books.
The piece was installed for 1 day and a local literature festival organised a participatory literary open mic, in which members of the public were invited to read fragments of books from the installation, or books that they themselves had brought, as well as texts of their own creation.
During the evening, visitors were invited to go inside the piece, enjoy the books and of course take the ones they were most interested in.
Those that were left without owners at the end of the night, were collected and kept by the organisation to give them new uses and the street returned to its normal activities the next day as if nothing had happened.
Many thanks to EXMURO for inviting us to participate in the 2023 edition of Passages Insolites, especially to Michelle and Emmanuelle who personally made sure that everything went exactly as we had planned.
Of course, full thanks to the volunteers who generously gave us their time and to the book lovers who shared their precious treasures with us. And we cannot fail to mention Stéphane Bourgeois who photographed the whole process and what happened during the exhibition of the piece and Rachel Trudeau, Nicolas Lamoureux and Simon Trudeau who shared their videos with us.
https://www.luzinterruptus.com/?p=20781
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