The arrival of summer is often synonymous with travel. To mark the occasion, TOPO is offering a little trip back in time with a new hypermedia web work by artist Isabelle Gagné, CYMX, the 4-letter acronym for the infamous Mirabel airport, north of Montreal.
In 1969, the Canadian government expropriated 97,000 acres of farmland and forcibly displaced 10,000 people from their homes to build the airport of the future. The sheer size of the confiscated area, made up of excellent farmland, testifies to disproportionate ambitions and a clear disregard for the people who lived there. The steamroller of the 1960s mercilessly rolled over the achievements of the past. Inaugurated in the 1970s, Mirabel airport never achieved the success it had hoped for. Too far from Montreal and difficult to access, the airport was for a long time reserved for international flights before its terminal was finally demolished in 2014.
Fifty years later, artist Isabelle Gagné, a Mirabel resident herself, proposes a (re)interpretation based on archives of what remains of the memory of these places through digital means, of what remains today of the evacuated land and of this airport now dedicated to commercial aviation.
*
This project was supported in part by the digital publishing experimentation laboratory set up by TOPO as part of the MUTATIONS — Le livre à l’ère numériquefunded by the Canada Council's Digital Strategies Fund.
Unconquering Mirabel, one scar at a time
By Paule Mackrous
On 4 October 1975, Mirabel airport was inaugurated. Not only was it to be the largest airport in the region, it was also to be the largest in the world, according to the projected surface area. After more than 10,000 people were expropriated, nearly a hundred acres deserted and an oil crisis, the white elephant is now used for private flights and freight transport. Some of the scars are still visible in the landscape, while others, more discreet, are inscribed in the intimate history of those whose homes were to be transformed into a landing strip. These are the scars that are retraced, revived and finely woven into Isabelle Gagné's poetic, polyphonic hypermedia narrative CYMX.
Des maisons brûlées, des forêts dévastées, des champs "some of the richest agricultural land in Quebec1‘This is what has been done to satisfy the ambition of a handful of megalomaniacs who have little regard for anything that stands in the way of their own horizons. Archival photographs and videos, some of them reminiscent of scenes from a war or natural disaster, newspaper cuttings, historical data and Isabelle L Bédard's soundtrack - the sounds of children playing, chickens cackling - reveal the different facets of the event.
From the political vision to the intimacy of the home, from the design plans for the terminal to the landscapes reduced to ashes, the story unfolds vertically, like a timeline. It deepens to the rhythm of Marie-Ève Bouchard's poems, which combine intimate and universal concerns:
est-ce que la terre hurle
quand on l’abandonne
The many effects of glitchs The images are reminiscent of heat maps, which show the heat islands created by the destruction of nature and human construction. And so, CYMX The film depicts a human tragedy, but also an ecological disaster that the handover of land, which began in the 1980s, will not be enough to repair. The planes taking off from Mirabel, represented by flight number, geographical coordinates and destination, cross the screen in real time. They leave a thin line on the images as they pass, evoking scars that are still vivid.
There are few digital documents concerning what is claimed to be ‘Canada's most important expropriation story’.2. And yet, as Jaimie Baron, a specialist in the appropriation of archives, writes, ‘what does not exist in digital format and cannot easily be found via a search engine could easily cease to be part of history’.3‘. The artist not only offers a unique update of the archives, but also makes them available in an ordered fashion in a space dedicated to them on the website. Art can act as a duty to remember against ‘the violence of forgetting’.4‘and the ‘rapid erasure of places and people5‘As art philosopher Patricia Touboul writes about post-war works.
It's hard not to spontaneously think of the fate of the many indigenous communities and their unceded lands. Were they not the first to be uprooted from these very lands? The Mirabel terminal project is another example of a greedy relationship with the world that can only be resisted by the persistent transmission of an intimate and collective memory.
1 - ‘La longue lutte pour les expropriés de Mirabel’, Radio-Canada Archives, 3 May 2019.
2 - ‘Le triste sort de l'aéroport Mirabel’, Radio-Canada Archives, September 15, 2017
3 – Jaimie Baron, The Archive Effect. Find Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History. New York : Routledge, 2014 : p.187 (Traduction de l’autrice).
4 – Patricia Touboul, « Ce que l’art fait à la mémoire : le renouvellement éthique de l’appropriation du temps humain » Nouvelle revue d’esthétique, 2016, no.18, vol.2 : p.104.
5 – Idem
The artist's approach
Through her reflections on archives and the transformation of the landscape, Isabelle Gagné is interested in residual vestiges and their perspective on the future. Fascinated by the space where ‘Then, Now and Tomorrow’ meet, her works seek to bring to light what remains of our presence and our passage through different territories, and what our subsequent reading of it will be.
Her artistic approach examines the notion of memory and its alteration over time, leading to the creation of projects that look at human interaction with the virtual and real environment, as well as the shared heritage of a community and the memories that remain of it. His practice extends as much to the photographic gesture of screen capture, with the connected hybrid camera or the smartphone, as to various digital languages such as augmented reality, internet BOTS and machine learning. And it is through glitch and other digital accidents that she invests the notion of imperfection and reminiscence inherent in memories. Her experiments, based on sampling and documentation from her real and virtual travels, cut-outs, scans, superimpositions and juxtapositions, give form to digital assemblages that reinterpret the reality observed.
