#coms324

A PARADOXICAL REFUGE: REPRESENTATIONS OF THE SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED UNITED CHURCH by Lisa Suliteanu

Menstrual Memories Zine by Gabrielle Allain and Evan Smith

Using the practice of photo-weaving to blur the lines between myself (the dancer) and the studio space, my project aims to present the relationship between the dancer and their studio as one of symbiosis: an embodied pas de deux rather than strict spatial practice.

We approached this project with both a primary and secondary methodology. We wanted to capture our experience of the bed from two predominant theoretical frameworks: communicating personal embodied experiences (inspired by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jason Farman), and exploring how we produce spaces through patterns of social activity (inspired by Henri Lefebvre).

I decided to do a creative project about the area of the Plateau-Mont Royal with a specific focus on Mont-Royal Avenue. The project is focusing on the history of the space and how it has developed from a working class borough to the multicultural neighborhood that it is today. The project is showing a photo series of old pictures of the avenue from the beginning of the 20thcentury. To re-create the experience of the space I went to the same exact locations and took new pictures of the spaces. The project aims to illustrate and describe how the street has changed.

The practices online in relation to death and the archiving of a deceased person’s digital identity is mirrored in the practices that date before the invention of the internet and before the conception of the term cyberspace coined by fiction writer William Gibson in 1982 (Badulescu, 2011). In light of this fact, we conclude that it is not reasonable to see the two spaces as separate; cemeteries and cyberspace not only both represent heterotopias but also lead to near identical behaviour in relation to the mourning of the dead. More importantly than that, the point that we have insisted on is that they both serve as archives that have recorded lived experiences in varying ways, but that both wind up containing an immense amount of data the deceased. The tombstone, size of plot, location and items left by visitors are similar to the online presence that an identify possesses. If an identity is being lived out through one or several accounts after the passing away of an individual, then the amount of friends, posts to wall and the creation of a memorial page is the equivalent of all that is found on a tomb. The main difference between the online space and the cemetery is the physical versus digital aspect; meaning that the physical may reveal less at first sight than the digital. In addition to this, digital conservation of identity and data after death has come makes it so that the archives are more widely accessible and can be accessed an infinite amount of times. This is a phenomenon that is not witnessed in a cemetery which has closing hours, regulations and private plots and tombs. An issue that is brought up in relation to the creation and preservation of online identity is the authenticity of the information that the individual chose to reveal: what is the real self, what is more authentic? The marks on the body, the embodied, neurological, biological experience; or the online accounts, the selected photos and tidbits, the mini autobiographies, reposts, etc.? This is near impossible to answer, almost as hard as it is to say what happens after death – all that we can be sure of is that it all definitely relates to the individuals identity, seeing as what they choose to post or not says a lot about them same as our actions and words in the physical world say a lot about us.

The project Aéroportraits (translated as “Airportraits” in English) aims to explore Montreal-Trudeau Airport through its various components, such as its design and its people. Indeed, airports are not simply a dot on a geographical map; they are also well thought constructions that come alive thanks to humans. In order to justify the valuable humans’ presence in that space, I decided to lead a discussion with strangers and collect a myriad of airport stories. The conversations were triggered by asking them to tell me about a moment they either experienced or witnessed at the airport and that they would never forget. Thanks to the photographic technique of double exposure, I completed the stories by combining portraits of interviewees with the various surrounding décors. The idea was to create confusion between body and space, two fundamental terms of the course. Moreover, some contradictions seem necessary to airports’ performance. As architect and engineer Daniel Estevez writes, “The airport is often shown as a milieu in tension. […] It is closed but opened, public but private, delimited but proliferating, in operation but under construction, coercive but fun” (23); such contradictions thus constituted the basis to my project. The hoped-for and final objectives were to perceive airports with a more human perspective, or more specifically, as thirdspaces, and to expose how dualism is intrinsic to that space, by, in the meantime, exploring notions of surveillance.

In “Discipline and Punish” (1975), Foucault focuses on the regulation of bodies and the question of power within particular institutions, using Bentham’s idea of the panopticon. Drawing upon Foucault’s interpretation of technologies of power, as well as Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological understanding of the environment, and Lefebvre’s idea from which politics and ideologies are embedded within spaces, this research project will focus on the commuter train as a disciplinary device, therefore adding an additional layer to Foucault’s argument. We believe that commuter trains tend to reinforce existing discourses around the orientation of our bodies within this particular space, therefore acting as a disciplinary device similar to the panopticon. We hope to arrive at a better understanding of this space by unpacking the different ways it forces us to behave, as well as the ways discipline is displayed. We believe that this research paper will fit within the greater discourse of this class about how our bodies relate to particular spaces and also about what kind of ideologies are at stake within such spaces. The commuter train doesn’t only help us to go from point A to point B; it is tightly related with old ideologies and follows important paradigmatic assumptions that have been perpetuated throughout the years about acceptable ways to behave within a public space.