photo credit Martine Doyon

Montreal in the summer shows its best colours and lures its residents and visitors into the great outdoors. Terrasses spring up on the street, skirts and bare shoulders appear from under the layers of winter wear and suddenly every area of green grass is covered with bodies lolling in the sun. Downtown is abuzz as people take to the streets to renew their love affair with their city, and everything on its streets belongs to the masses.

In this way the newest installation at the Quartier des Spectacles is perfectly suited to Montreal and its new summer sun. For months the promenade at the Place des Festivals was littered with Spheres Polaires, the giant orbs glowing like Christmas lights. That is past. Instead the newest installation, 21 Balancoires, is an interactive art and music experience installed on the strip of land between President Kennedy and Maisonneuve, a new installation space named the Promenades des Artists.

“The Quartier des Spectacles is a laboratory for artists,” says Pierre Fortin, the General Director at Quartier. “A showcase for Montreal’s creativity. We want to reveal a new kind of animations that creates the surprise.”

The artists, Mouna Andraos and Melissa Mongiat, knew that the Quartier des Spectacle and UQAM, who were overseeing the site, were looking for interactive ways to involve people in the art and in the space. 6 concrete structures were already installed and the artists looked to address how to use these structures in an new an interesting way, as well as how to bridge the space from UQAM to the Quartier des Spectacles, and bridge the metaphorical space of the urban passerby to art.

According to Mouna Andraos, the idea of using swings to reimagine an urban space is not a new idea, on a global scale, and they were happy to appropriate it in this context, installing 6 large sets of swings along the walkway. These swings, however, create music when in motion. Therefore, the simple summertime pleasure becomes an interactive musical collaboration, changing depending on how many swings are in use, which ones and how fast people are moving.

“From the beginning [the musical element] was to be an entry point for the audience into the piece,” says Andraos. “to create more than swings.”

The involvement of UQAM also led to the involvement of Luc-Alain Girardeau, a professor of animal behaviour at the UQAM Faculté des Sciences. The artists quickly realized that the professor’s specialties in animal communication and cooperation was exactly what they were looking into.

“Are people willing or not to cooperate?” Andraos muses from her home in Montreal. The work allows people to either make their own music or collaborate with friends and strangers to create musical pieces together. With a minimum of information at the site the work is intuitive for its participants, like much of the artists works. As the artists’ state on their website “Our projects bring magic to everyday places, behaviors and objects, inviting the public to become active contributors in the process and surrounding environments.”

I wandered across the installation of the first truly summery weekend in Montreal, and there was not an empty swing to be seen. In the center of busy street on a little island of pedestrian safety Montrealers and visitors alike were taking advantage of the weather and the installation to revisit a simple pleasure in a new way. I came back the next day without any luck, as every empty swing was quickly grabbed. However, the swings will be open to the public until May 23rd, from 10a.m. to 11p.m. every day, so I will be trying my luck again at the first sign of sun in Montreal.

#installation #urban #swings #Quartier des Spectacles #Melissa Mongiat #Montreal #art #Music #Christina Gunn #Canada Arts Connect #21 Balancoires #Mouna Andraos Music, Visual Arts