As part of the Underground Art Festival, TOPO presents the digital installation Paysage de la catastrophe – Fukushima by French artist Philippe Boisnard, from February 29 to March 22, 2020, at Château Dufresne, 2929 Jeanne-d'Arc Avenue, Montreal.
Following this collaboration with Art souterrain, Michel Lefebvre will host a roundtable discussion for TOPO with artists Adam Basanta, Mehryl Levisse, Sean Mundy, and Ariane Plante on Thursday, March 5, from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., on the theme of “Utopias, Mirages, and Catastrophes.” The panelists will compare their utopias with the catastrophes of the present day, in relation to their work presented at Art souterrain. This discussion will be preceded at 6 p.m. by a performance staged by artist Mehryl Levisse inside her installation. The cost of admission is $8 and also includes access to Château Dufresne, so don't hesitate to come and explore the venue before 6 p.m.
Presented in TOPO's exhibition window in 2018, Philippe Boisnard's poetic, generative, and participatory installation offers a landscape generated from a database of approximately 12 million tweets containing the hashtag “Fukushima,” created by Jacques Urbanska. Black or white letters, through the computer program, form the mountains, valleys, and plains of a constantly changing landscape*.
* This excerpt is taken from analytical text by Paule Mackrous written in 2018.
ARTIST'S APPROACH
A landscape devoid of humanity is continuously being created. It is a poetic reflection of a land that no longer bears witness to any consciousness. Destruction has taken place. This land is Fukushima. It is desolate. All that remains is a bleak landscape; without humans, without fauna, and without flora. Only a few vestiges of buildings can be seen. For this new creation, the artist has teamed up with Jacques Urbanska and his Twitter feed (@fukushima_actu) to generate the media landscape of the disaster that occurred in 2011.
This landscape changes automatically based on an analysis of information flows concerning Fukushima posted online. Its color texture is created from images that have been or are still being posted on Twitter (@fukushima_actu).
This landscape is post-historical; it no longer writes history. It reflects a world where humans have disappeared and only traces remain, in the form of archives. An automatic camera explores this landscape: we are confronted with its solitude. The term “solitude” is an old one; it refers to the 17th century, to a wasteland, to a no man's land.
