"On March 2, 1988, along the St. Lawrence River, the Vickers shipbuilding factory officially closed its doors. After working there for 38 years as a machinist, my grandfather was the last employee to leave the premises. Marcel spent his final months at the factory building wooden crates to house the dismantled machines, ready to be shipped down the river to their next home.
At the intersection of our disciplines, Marcel first took the form of a video-performance-documentary, telling the story of my grandfather, his technical knowledge, and his deep respect for machines—his collaborators. In the work, our bodies are connected through our shared love for words, the analog, gestures, and, above all, transmission of technical knowledge.
In 2021, he retraced the border of the factory from memory. These images marked the beginning of the exhibition, where video, moving sculpture, and poetry are intertwined to recount this vanished place and the gestures of collaboration between machinists, machines, and generations."
Pascale Tétrault
Pascale Tétrault is a pluridisciplinary artist and poet based in Montreal, whose work unfolds at the intersection of writing and electronic art. With a background in literature and interactive media, she then completed a Master’s in Studio Arts at Concordia University in 2024, where she explored through the creation of machine-sculptures themes related to language, memory, and technological craftsmanship. Since 2019, she parallelly has collaborated as a creative technologist and programmer, developing interactive systems for and with various artists and designers. Also an educator, she has been teaching programming and digital creation for the past seven years in various artist-run centers and schools such as SAT, Eastern Bloc, and AdaX. Pascale’s works take the form of hybrid objects that merge materiality, poetry, and electronics to recount stories in the physical space. Her practices as an artist, collaborator, educator, and technologist are now inseparable, continuously informing and nourishing one another.
