Foule (Crowd), by the duo of photographers Atwood, is a multidisciplinary project combining photography, wall intervention, videoprojection and digital technology to explore the ties between a theatre and its community. Unraveling outdoors on the whole building of the Théâtre de La Bordée (on a 2, 880 square feet surface), at the heart of Québec City, the installation will light up night after night from October 2020 to May 2021.
By day, the gigantic wall installation featuring 20 portraits of citizens of La Cité-Limoilou celebrates the diversity and resilience of the community. By night, quotes from plays are superimposed on each face in an evolutive projection that reveals everyday life’s share of theatre.
The material installation is completed by a web platform where one can learn more about each citizen, through Éric LeBlanc’s literary essays highlighting their inner stakes and humanity.
In addition to the outdoor exhibit in the city, a podcast will present encounters between these citizens from the public and artists who were part of the plays to which they are linked. It will bring together personal and artistic perspectives on the same topics.
To rally the whole district around the artwork, Atwood and La Bordée have partnered with many Québec City organizations.
This citizen, collective, eco-responsible project will lead to multiple collaborations over its eight-month course, bringing together art, words, and community.
Ultimately, Foule is looking to light up the links between daily life and art. This sprawling project strives to show that each person is part of the crowd in their own way, enriching our society.
ARTISTS IN RESIDENCY
For a second year in a row, La Bordée offers a visual arts residency to an artist or group of artists, inviting them to reflect on the relationship between their practice and theater. In that context, Foule was born, directed by the Atwood duo in residency for the year 2020-21.
Jean-François Bolduc
A graduate from the Académie des beaux-arts de Québec, the École de design and the Faculté de médecine at Université Laval, Jean-François Bolduc takes a particular interest in portraits, whether in the form of photographs or illustrations. His work focusses on the relationship between the social and the artistic, through series featuring little-known realities (people living with HIV, LGBTQIA2+ realities, etc.). His series Being in the right place at the right time (2014) has revealed his work to more than twenty countries.
Jean-François Bolduc
Éric Leblanc
Éric LeBlanc is a photographer, writer, and cultural worker. Many of his projects have taken place in the public space, bringing art to meet daily life. For the Québec en toutes lettres 2017 festival, he codirected the projection #taville on the outdoor wall of the bibliothèque Gabrielle-Roy, as well as the theatrical bus ride Et si… that offered a reinvention of the city’s history. He has worked with the Bureau des affaires poétiques and the Maison de la littérature, to produce various artistic projects. His first book, Le bleu des garçons, published by Hamac, was released in the winter of 2020.
Éric LeBlanc | Credits: Hélène Bouffard
Atwood
Together they are Atwood, a duo of visual artists making use of the photographic medium. Since 2016, they have collaborated with many artistic and cultural institutions in Québec City (Violons du Roy, École de danse de Québec, Maison des métiers d’arts de Québec, Nous sommes ici, Théâtre Périscope, Juste pour rire).
Over 5,600 people have discovered their exhibit IGAnne, gathering 12 portraits of a drag-queen, in January 2019. The photographic series challenging the notions of beauty, perfection, and gender has toured several regions in the province. Foule is their visual arts residency project at the Théâtre La Bordée.
ARTISTIC STATEMENT
Atwood creates solo portraits in stripped decors to direct the focus on the singular beauty of each person. Their stark aesthetics, plain backgrounds and monochrome processing minimize visual distractions to highlight their subject’s face and the story it tells. Their research is aimed at capturing the genuine emotion of those in front of their objective, so that in a single frame, one can grasp a good part of their personality. Atwood’s projects are also tied to diverse and atypical realities that they highlight in a tribute to the richness of the community. They wish to remind us that, regardless of our lifepaths, we all have more in common than we know.
As a counterpoint to their need for authenticity, Atwood’s works often require careful, thoughtful staging, to exacerbate the share of fiction that each person builds to adapt in society. Their projects stem from the impulse to link an imaginary element to a tangible reality and study their interaction. Whether by questioning gender representativity (IGAnne) or evoking familiar beings underneath theatrical matters (Foule), Atwood wants to dissect social constructs and try to understand how they contribute to the architecture of identity. From a formal standpoint, the minimalist background of the photographs reduces the reference to reality, taking the subjects
out of their context to present them as characters. This matching of humans and archetypes strives to debunk prejudices fictionalized in the collective unconsciousness by giving it a complex, multiple face.
The choice of photography as a way of expression has imposed itself, as it captures elements of reality through the subjective framing of the photographer. Atwood’s process also takes into consideration the size of the works, defying the visitors’ expectations towards a photo to makes them look more attentively and deeper into each detail. The Bolduc-LeBlanc duo stands against the contemporary tendency to consume images like fast-food instead of taking the time to reflect on them.
FOULE
IGANNE
