Transposed for online distribution with TOPO, De la frontière is a proposal by artist Michel Huneault that documents and narrates a segment of the Canada-U.S. border.
With each visit, the user has a unique experience of the body of work: 60 images and 60 oral histories are paired and sequenced randomly in an infinite chain of associations. In addition to the social and political issues raised by the work, this project offers the viewer a participatory experience in the critical act of editing and constructing different meanings from the same visual and textual elements.
A word from the author
From April to August 2020, compared to the same period in 2019, there was a 95% drop in land entries into Canada—all types of travelers combined. As a result of COVID-19, the border was closed. In the country's modern history, the border has never been so closed and so little used, for everyone and certainly for vulnerable people. It is an invisible wall, yet very real.
Not so long ago, Canadian and American neighbors knew each other by their first names, had drinks together, shared land, and crossed the border by waving to the customs officer without even stopping the car. Not anymore. Already in 2001, after September 11, the relationship quickly eroded with a change in security measures at border crossings. In 2010, the new requirement to carry a passport to cross the border further complicated coexistence. Trump's arrival in 2016 accelerated the territorial and ideological divide. The pandemic has almost ended the isolation of the two neighbors: essential goods cross the border, as do businesspeople and hockey players, and then there are those snowbirds Nothing can stop them... but above all, asylum seekers can no longer cross.
In March 2020, before Covid, 930 individuals requested asylum between two ports of entry at the border in Quebec, such as at Roxham Road. In April 2020, only one person crossed. Through the end of August 2020, a total of 90 people crossed between ports of entry in Quebec (126 total for all of Canada). Moreover, since April 2020, Canada has been sending asylum seekers back to the United States, which goes against the right of asylum and sets a worrying precedent.
In the fall of 2020, while in residence at the Adélard Center in Frelighsburg, I began documenting a short section of the border that runs along the 45th parallel, between Lake Memphremagog and Lake Champlain, in the traditional unceded territory of the Abenaki people. Here, the border is arbitrary, unannounced, inconspicuous, often barely visible or invisible: roads that become dead ends, soybean fields, residents' backyards, forests and orchards, unruly waterways. We grope our way forward to find it, with a strange feeling of guilt, nervously searching for the subtle signs of the change of country.
Every time I returned to the studio, I had to hurry to draw a black square on the photograph to remind myself where the border was, like a Post-it Three-dimensional. This simple, precise gesture—repetitive and administrative—accidentally but significantly transforms the document. The sanitary, political, social, and humanitarian screen stands stoically in the tranquil landscape. How will we have changed when the border reopens?
Michel Huneault
Michel Huneault is a documentary photographer and visual artist. His work focuses on development issues, trauma, migration and complex geographical realities, including the impacts of climate change. His artistic practice combines still images, oral histories, video and immersive elements, giving his projects both a humanistic and aesthetic dimension. Her works inform while questioning the act of documentation and representation.
Michel Huneault holds a master's degree from the University of California at Berkeley, where he was a Rotary Peace Fellow, studying the role of collective memory in the aftermath of major trauma. Before devoting himself to photography in 2008, he worked for over a decade in international development.
In 2015, his work on the Lac-Mégantic tragedy was awarded the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize, and published the following year under the title La longue nuit de Mégantic by the Dutch publisher Schilt. In 2016, the Travers Fellowship enabled him to further his research into migration issues across five countries, in collaboration with their diasporas in Canada and their families in their countries of origin. In 2018, he adapted Roxham - his visual and sound project about the passages of asylum seekers from the United States to Canada - into a virtual reality experience with the National Film Board of Canada. In spring-summer 2020, he was commissioned by the McCord Museum to document the impacts of Covid-19 in Montreal.
