Author Archives: Ryan Alexander Diduck

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How You Remind Me

HRT with Zom Zom Illegal and Kay-Fayb, Distorsion Festival, Mario Park, 28 August 2026

Kirby Lees of HRT performs at Mario Park for the 2026 Distorsion Festival. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Very logically, and inexorably, the increase in the power of power heightens the will to destroy it. But there is more: somewhere, it was party to its own destruction.”
—Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism

The approaching silver anniversary of the September 11th attacks, which the destruction of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in New York City signifies most visibly, offers the occasion to reevaluate just what was under attack that day, and why.

If it is true that Osama bin Laden and a faction of terrorists called al-Qaeda perpetrated those events, then we might conclude that Western power, symbolized by American economic and sociopolitical dominance, was the target. And the reason for attacking the Twin Towers was essentially envy that the global West possessed this dominance and the global East did not.

But if we allow that there was a suicidal gesture implicit in the felling of the Twin Towers, which their own vertical descent represented, as if incapable of enduring the affront, then we might concede that global economic interdependence was the target, and rather, the West had declared war on itself because a Western-led integrated world economy was nearing perfection.

If it was not “America” and all it stood for that was under attack that day, but instead a much less abstract enemy — world trade — then it is easier to thread together the events of September 11th, 2001, with those acts of self-harm that the current American administration is inflicting in its deliberate yet desperate assaults on America’s international trade partners.

Hraïr Hratchian with Sarah Pagé and Kaitlyn Clark, ÉCHOS XIV, Ateliers Belleville, 21 August 2026

Sarah Pagé performs at Ateliers Belleville for ÉCHOES XIV. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Remember, in the immediate wake of 9/11, all those po-faced Adornoite proclamations that there would be ‘no more triviality’ in American popular culture after the Twin Towers fell?”
—Mark Fisher, “Choose Your Weapons”

Of the pop music albums released on September 11th, 2001, three particularly stand out in my memory: Nickelback’s Silver Side Up; Is This It? by The Strokes; and Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft.

Reading popular culture as a harbinger of catastrophe is a tempting but tenuous proposition, like dream interpretation: there is no way to prove or disprove any available theory. Not to mention, American dreams are nearly too nightmarish to attempt to decode. Still, it is impossible to resist an analysis of concurrent events, for there is no such thing as a meaningless coincidence.

The opening song on Bob Dylan’s album is entitled “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum” and begins with the lyrics:

Tweedle-dee Dum and Tweedle-dee Dee
They’re throwing knives into the tree
Two big bags of dead man’s bones
Got their noses to the grindstones

Dylan’s titular characters are most famously associated with the dramatis personae of Lewis Caroll’s 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, a story in which Alice enters a mirror world where, among other fantastical incongruities, logic is reversed. The Twin Towers were more than mere reverse images of one another; they embodied replication, reiteration, and automatonlike accumulation — the core logics of late capitalism.

In the traditional English nursery rhyme, Tweedledum and Tweedledee appear as identical yet opposing characters who clash over a broken rattle. Unexpectedly, the childish pair is attacked from above by a “monstrous crow” that frightens and distracts them from their original quarrel.

Was the monstrous crow actually a hijacked jetliner? Are the Twin Towers Tweedledum and Tweedledee, or a nation divided against itself? Did Bob Dylan, America’s honorary poet laureate, somehow portent that the Towers would ultimately befit “two big bags of dead man’s bones?”

Kali Malone with Kara-Lis Coverdale, X/Visions 1, MUTEK Festival, Maison Symphonique, 27 August 2026

Kali Malone performs at Maison Symphonique for MUTEK’s X/Visions 1. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Sameness is not mastered, only approached.”
—K Hole, Youth Mode

Within similarity, subtle forms of variation emerge. Those who cannot remember history, as the adage goes, are condemned to repeat it. But no repetition is an exact duplicate. Duration always introduces surplus deviations.

As well, the commemoration of history continually revises it. Therefore, history’s routine remembrance, rather than guarding against its reprisal, ensures its reiteration. Time is the struggle that churns cream into butter.

Paracetamol Overclock, Diego Behncke, EISODE, 21 August – 1 October 2026

Installation view of Paracetamol Overclock by Diego Behncke at EISODE. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Significant differences in agency arise from the involutions and distributions of relations in code.”
—Adrian Mackenzie, Cutting Code

More than a dozen young people in the spring of 2021 in Calgary, Alberta, suffered from what came to be known colloquially as “TikTok tics” — dramatic and seemingly involuntary physical spasms like swinging arms or head twitches, often accompanied by vocal whoops and chirps.

Over the following 12 months, with which the second year of the Coronavirus pandemic coincided, thousands of teenagers — mostly girls or nonbinary adolescents, though nobody knows why — were treated worldwide for experiencing this strain of sudden physiological explosions. Of these individuals, the overwhelming majority began suffering from functional tic-like behaviours after watching TikTok videos of other teenagers claiming to have Tourette’s syndrome.

The meme is the form of utterance proper to contemporary digital culture. Each digital utterance is enfolded into code and circulates according to binary protocols. Recipients of utterances, however, are not the same as recipients of code. The language of memes, which humans interpret, is conveyed through the language of code, which computers interpret.

It may be through this non-human step of language translation, from binary to nonbinary, that twitches manifest in human beings as glitches manifest in autonomous technologies.

Ida Toninato with Pick a Piper and Barket, Expérience 1, MUTEK Festival, Esplanade Tranquile, 25 August 2026

Ido Toninato performs at Esplanade Tranquile for MUTEK’s Expérience 1. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Man always dies before he is fully born.”
—Erich Fromm, Man for Himself

The notion of living up to one’s potential is an inherently capitalistic idea, although one that is usually coupled with idealism rather than nihilism. The Protestant work ethic which defined American exceptionalism encouraged social subjects to continually strive for improvement. A distortion arose when the object of desire became degradation rather than perfection.

The American ethic in the 21st century is still locked into striving for some measure of improvement. Although what it is improving now is its own demise. The proof of an America in decline is that American exceptionalism extends to a perverse pride in perfecting disgrace. Imagine a conversation between two co-conspirators in a race to the bottom.

“Are we the worst that we can possibly be?” asks one.

“No,” replies the other, “I think we can still be better at being worse.”◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Plush twin teddy bears on display at Sky Fleurs, Palais des congrès de Montréal. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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All Dressed

Technology of Tradition: in conversation with Caroline Monnet

The contemporary notion of technology is commonly of electronics, mechanics, science. Technology nowadays is considered first and foremost to be efficient, digital, infallible. “Tech” is modern not archaic, big not diminutive, masculine not feminine, binary not polyadic, and ultimately, a colonial utility for capital’s production and accumulation.

But various civilisations have various understandings of what constitutes a technology. The ancient Trypillian culture of present-day Western Ukraine, for instance, decorated eggs with wax and dyes in complex symbolic imagery. Similarly, North American Indigenous knowledge keepers wove and carved technological wisdom into embroidery and artifacts given freely down through generations. For these non-Christian traditions, technology is neither synonymous nor equivalent with commodity.

“It’s interesting,” says the Anishinaabe-French multidisciplinary artist Caroline Monnet, “to use technology to create a space where a spirit can exist.”

Monnet gives an artist talk on 26 August 2026 around her most recent film, called Pidikwe, as part of MUTEK Montreal’s discourse forum. Yet, she is a curious choice for a festival that centres on high technology, given that Monnet’s practice is explicitly low-tech — at least in terms of current definitions.

Monnet does not operate in the world of augmented reality or Artificial Intelligence. As a filmmaker, she embraces analogue celluloid. Combinations of synthetic and organic materials characterize her visual art. Nonetheless, Monnet succeeds in transforming those comparatively traditional media into a poetic form of futurity. “Using technology to evoke spirits is different from what we might expect,” she tells me.

At only 41, Caroline Monnet has attained admirable accolades in both the cinematic and contemporary art scenes. She has been nominated twice at the Canadian Screen Awards; she is a recipient of the prestigious Prix Pierre-Ayot; in 2023, she was named Compagne des arts et des lettres du Québec; and she is a finalist in this year’s Sobey’s Arts Award, for which she was also shortlisted in 2020.

Her works have been exhibited at the Musée d’art contemporain and the National Gallery of Canada, and she was the subject of a solo show entitled Ninga Mìnèh, meaning “promise” in Anishinaabemowin, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2021. The title was apt, given Monnet’s prodigious potential and her wide array of achievements.

“Every medium is a way to grow my practice as an artist and as a person. I like to branch out into areas I haven’t explored before. But I think the themes and curiosity and the messages I want to convey remain the same,” Monnet explains. “It’s the same artist behind all the artworks.”

Through assorted media, Monnet’s work is always rooted in bringing awareness and education around Indigenous lived realities. But it is not solely of interest or importance to First Nations, Inuit, or Métis audiences. “I’m hoping to touch people of all backgrounds on a more universal level,” says Monnet. “We all share a common space, which is the earth. We all have a common responsibility for generations to come. These are universal concepts that I’m trying to bring into the work. It’s about creating an emotional space for people to live their own experience.”

Caroline Monnet, Man-made Land, 2025, ICA Boston Installation view. Photographed by Mel Taing.

Hailing originally from the Outaouais region of Quebec, Monnet is the daughter of a French father and an Anishinaabe mother. She came of age in a small village in Brittany where she first had an emotional encounter with cinema.

“When I was 12 years old, I saw Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance by Alanis Obomsawin,” Monnet recalls, “and that was kind of when it clicked in my mind. Alanis was there to present the film. I saw Indigenous people for the first time onscreen. And I also realized the power of media for education and empowerment.”

She initially resolved to pursue journalism, “to pick up a camera and tell stories,” she says, working for a short time at Radio-Canada and other T.V. production companies. But Monnet realized that she was drawn more to experimental filmmaking, creating video installations, and later, visual arts.

“One experience leads to another experience. It’s a snowball effect,” Monnet observes, “it’s not planned. I didn’t have a grandiose idea of what I wanted to do in life. It happened through exploration and experimentation — and opportunities. You’ve got to trust the process.”

Every artist has their own unique path, and Monnet’s quickly exposed an exploration of habitat, territory, and the impact that we as human beings have upon our environment. She frequently incorporates construction materials into her works to demonstrate how the economic wealth of western societies is made through the exploitation of natural resources.

“There are habitats in the land that we occupy, the homes that we live in,” says Monnet. “But also, there are habitats that are around us that we don’t really see, or that we’ve lost our capacities to see and have gratitude for.”

These habitats will be the subject of a new exhibition at Galerie Blouin | Division, opening 10 September. “It’s a big show,” she tells me. “I’ve been working very hard on that show all summer.”

Caroline Monnet, Papakinede, 2024, ceramic, cement, grout, wood. 43 1/2 x 43 1/2 x 35 in. Photographed by Nik Massey.

Monnet currently employs eight interns in her studio who work as we speak to complete the exhibition on schedule. “That’s not something to take for granted,” she says. “As an artist, to be able to have a studio, to have a team working with me, these are real things that make a huge difference.” And although Montreal has endured jumps in cost of living and the evaporation of affordable ateliers, Monnet praises Mooniyang as her beloved home base.

“It’s big enough to have the qualities of a major city, but also small enough to feel like a village. I wouldn’t be able to live in a city like New York,” she admits. “Even though it’s very exhilarating, and there is access to so much culture there, on a daily basis, you need to sustain as an artist. You need to focus, and sleep, and rest. You have to be in a place where what is surrounding the practice is healthy and welcoming. I think Montreal is a pretty special place.”

Though Monnet sees an alarming trend emerging everywhere with the advent of A.I. One of technology’s most revealing features is that it always reflects the culture from which it emerged. And there is no denying that Artificial Intelligence is a product of an accelerationist and hyper-capitalist ethos.

Monnet frets for future generations. “To think that maybe A.I. is going to be the end of us because we’ll have no drinking water in a couple of years, for me, that’s the really scary part,” she says. “There’s a real lack of responsibility and it frustrates me. And from a creative standpoint, also. It will never be able to replace us, really. But it’s just taking away from the creativity of artists. I think it’s used in a very bad way. It’s kind of worrisome that people are not thinking for themselves as much anymore. Art is about fighting ignorance.”

Still, of all the arcane technologies that demand our attention and innovation today, spirituality may be the most urgent. “I do believe that I’m able to bring spirituality and spirit into the work,” Monnet claims.

“I think that the spirit is coming from human interaction and energy. In the studio I always tell my assistants that I want good thoughts to travel through their hands — from mind to hands. That’s something that I value very much for myself when I’m weaving or working on something with my hands. We have such a responsibility when we put artwork into the world. For people to see them and live with them in their homes, it has to be filled with good intentions.”

Monnet pauses momentarily.

“Maybe,” she adds, “machines don’t have the intention part.”◼︎

Caroline Monnet speaks at MUTEK Forum on 26 August 2026. Her forthcoming solo exhibition runs 10 September – 6 November at Galerie Blouin | Division, 2020 Rue William.

Cover image: Caroline Monnet photographed by Eva Maude.

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Simulations

Automatisme, Mirage Centers

Clickable screenshot of Automatisme’s Mirage Centers, 2026.

The screenwriter Bob Gale put speculation to rest in 2015 when he revealed to The Daily Beast that Biff Tannen’s character in Back to the Future II was indeed based upon Donald Trump.

What is uncanny about this revelation is that that film, which predicted the nightmarish rise of a vulgar and dystopian strain of hyper-capitalism, was released in 1989, a full 25 years before Trump would seek election for president of the United States.

Donald Trump in easily the most fan fiction-inspired story of the summer was widely reported last week to have used a catering container to spirit himself from Air Force One and onto an unmarked military jet to leave the NATO summit in Turkey on 8 July. The story seemed tailor made for well-placed jabs from late-night talk show hosts. Still, Trump is impervious to satire because the truth in Trump’s case is invariably stranger than fiction.

Subterfuge, decoys, and body doubles are frequent themes of conspiracy theorists on all sides of the political spectrum. Social media sleuths following a CNBC interview with Joe Biden on 5 December 2019 claimed to detect a “skin tone mismatch” between the then-president’s face and neck, leading to suspicions that the individual in question was a ringer in a rubber mask. And theories that body doubles often replaced Melania Trump at public events date back to 2017. Trump himself decried these theories as “fake news,” one of his favourite deflections.

Fake news in the modern broadcast media age might have originated on 30 October 1938 with Orson Welles’s notorious CBS radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, which sparked widespread panic that a Martian invasion was actually taking place on a farm near Grovers Mill, New Jersey. At that time, Welles, among America’s busier celebrities, was also reputed to have hired ambulances to rush him both swiftly and anonymously between gigs in New York City.

Is this where Trump got the catering cart idea? God forbid anyone interfere with the president’s dessert.

Though of all the celebrity doppelgangers that Donald Trump resembles, Andy Kaufman’s alter ego, Tony Clifton, the foul-mouthed crooner and troll extraordinaire, fits the bill better than real-life Orson Welles or fictional Biff Tannen. Clifton, with his mismatched skin tones between jowl and jaw, seems in retrospect like the ultimate Trump prototype, the matinee villain that audiences jeer and boo and love to hate, and yet, for whom their appetite appears insatiable.

MUTEK 27 launch, Société des arts technologiques, 11 August 2026

Alain Mongeau introduces the 27th edition of MUTEK at the SAT. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Simulation is one of the military’s most effective and frequently used forms of training. Think of the 1983 film WarGames, which depicts a computer hacker, portrayed by Matthew Broderick, who accidentally gains access to a supercomputer programmed to continuously run war simulations against the former Soviet Union. Broderick’s character, David Lightman, believes that “Global Thermonuclear War” is only a video game, until he realizes that World War III is about to become a reality.

The film is not just a simulation; it is a simulation of a simulation, twice removing the narrative from the order of the real. In other words, WarGames is not even a real simulation.

Nonetheless, the film was credited by some of the world’s top computer scientists as a big inspiration. Sergey Brin told the audience at a Google-sponsored 25th anniversary screening in 2008 that WarGames was the “key movie” of the generation that pioneered computing.

WarGames is an instance of Jean Baudrillard’s notion of “precession of simulacra,” where a simulation of a simulation paradoxically produces the reality — where the map effectively manufactures and tatters the territory.

L’OSM à l’Esplanade du Parc Olympique, 12 August 2026

Maestro Rafael Payare conducts the OSM at Parc Olympique. Antoine Saito for Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

In the concluding season of Lars von Trier’s cult miniseries The Kingdom, doppelgangers of Bulder and Karen manifest spontaneously to thwart their efforts to return all of the hospital’s troubled spirits to their rightful resting place. Where the real Bulder and Karen constantly lumber around the Rigshospitalet looking forlorn and anxious, their malevolent counterparts have permanent grins pasted upon their faces, happy in their work transforming angels into demons, good into evil. Willem Dafoe’s Grand Duc character, too, demonstrates the pure joy of performing wickedness.

Like its closest T.V. relative, Twin Peaks, The Kingdom delights in representing evil as an inversion of virtue. Important symbols appear upside down, maps and diagrams are reversed, and doppelgangers are not merely simulations but rather mirror images of their referent selves.

Naomi Klein in her 2023 book Doppelganger describes in exhaustive detail her own experience tumbling into what she terms the “Mirror World,” wrestling with “Other Naomi,” the conservative social commentator Naomi Wolf, and coming to grips with the doubling and multiplying selves that we actively create every day through online personas, social media accounts, avatars, icons, and other digital incarnations. Klein paints a stark portrait of the unheimlich in which neither mirrored identity is objectively authentic.

“The point is,” Klein writes, “that on either side of the reflective glass, we are not having disagreements about differing interpretations of reality — we are having disagreements about who is in reality and who is in a simulation.”

Nightshift, Blouin | Division, 31 July — 29 August 2026

Installation view of a work by Harrison Pearce at Galerie Blouin | Division. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or there is nothing present when there should be something.”
—Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie

It is not the presence but rather the absence of a double self that now evokes the eerie sense. We expect to see ourselves reflected in media — it’s simply called “representation.” If we are not represented, our very existence is called into question, like a ghost that fails to see its own countenance reflected in the mirror.

Ilisattaugialik: Something That Needs to be Learned, La Guilde, 30 July ­— 12 September 2026

Thomas Whiteley, The Eternal Battle Between Dog and Raven, 17/20, 2026, woodcut print on Japanese paper, 16″ x 27″. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Local natures are thrown out of joint not by monsters but by disequilibria…”
—Lorraine Daston, Against Nature

It is difficult for us not to interpret the changing climate — the devastating wildfires and floods that characterize a warming planet — as nature’s revenge. And yet this posits humans in opposition to nature, the mirror-image artifice to some idealized notion of a natural order.

In fact, there is nothing, whether synthetic or organic, that is unnatural. The sooner that we recognize ourselves as an integral part of nature, the sooner we will make peace with our simulated selves.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Thomas Whiteley, Uirniik 3/5 (detail) 2025, woodcut print on Japanese paper, 48″ x 168″. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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999 Words

Word Virus: notes on post-literacy and crowd control

If you are reading this, congratulations. You are part of a shrinking segment of the population.

According to the cover story in this month’s issue of The Atlantic, which warns that we are entering not so much an illiterate but “post-literate” era, fewer than 16 percent of Americans queried in 2023 for a Time Use survey reported reading for pleasure.

The 2025 Canadian Leisure and Reading study estimates that that number is closer to one quarter of Canadians. Still, the trajectory is clear: fewer of us are spending sustained time with the written word. Engaging with books, magazines, newspapers, eBooks, even websites, is in rapid decline.

The Atlantic article’s author, Rose Horowitch, claims that people instead are bombarded nowadays with an “explosion of textual fragments” — texts, emails, social media captions, threads. And of course, video — in the form of television, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and the like — has been supplanting reading for decades. In other words, fewer of us are “on the same page,” as the old saying goes, with wide-ranging implications.

This doesn’t mean that we behave more individualistically. Far from it. Mass control is arguably easier in a moment when we are splintered into ever-smaller media niches, cobbling together information from modular combinations of more or less authoritative sources and forms.

We now know that algorithms are digital gateways that restrain us unless we pay our way out with some form of capital. Keenan Alboshi for Orchestre Metropolitain.

Alexander R. Galloway’s book Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization, was written in 2004, at the dawn of social media as we now know it. We thought of social networks at that time as community configurations that were built and maintained largely through real-world connections.

In the ensuing 22 years, that notion has shifted significantly as we increasingly measure our social circles by our friend and follower counts on digital profiles and social apps. Galloway contended that the protocological character of computer code would replace the requisite for state force: “Protocol is to control societies as the panopticon is to disciplinary societies,” Galloway claimed.

Galloway wrote his book in the tradition of Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” The personal computer, Deleuze argued, had ushered in a new generation of Control society to follow the Foucauldian Disciplinary society. Older institutions like school, church, prison, hospital, and factory, were being substituted by digital simulations of these that at first appeared to express new freedoms but ultimately represented mechanisms of control that were “equal to the harshest of confinements.” We now know that algorithms are digital gateways that restrain us unless we pay our way out with some form of capital: labour; credit; currency; desire.

The circulation of information and the way we collectively behave based upon that information began to be conceived of differently in the wake of the 21st century’s digital social networks. Groups started to arrange and act less like humans and more like viruses. Clay Shirky, who now holds the post of Vice Provost for A.I. and Technology in Education at New York University, wrote in his 2008 book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, that with the rise of newly powerful online social networks, people were “willing and even eager to come together and affect the world.” Digital social tools, Shirky maintained, “remove the obstacles” to collective action.

Whether that action, or the obstacles to it, are detrimental or beneficial is irrelevant to its protocological formation. Freedom or bondage are understood contrarily when protocol rather than physical force is authority’s governing mechanism. Individuals and groups behave fundamentally differently when the fear of physical violence is abstracted. We might, for instance, carefully watch our words in a public space when we could get punched in the nose for saying something offensive. But that same offensive remark is effectively managed online because of the algorithmic regulation of protocological code. Friction produces engagement.

Maybe Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s baton has the power to conduct not only the orchestra but its listeners as well. Tam Photography for Orchestre Metropolitain.

It is interesting to observe anecdotally that real-world social organization seems to have attained new levels of efficiency and effectiveness in the years since digital tools “removed the obstacles” to collective conduct. It is as if protocol has trained us en masse to behave all the more orderly offline, too.

I noticed this phenomenon this week at the Orchestre Metropolitain’s annual outdoor concert held in Montreal each summer. In previous years, I have observed far more chaos from the crowd of fifty or so thousand people that congregate at the foot of Parc Mont Royal. This year, it almost appeared as though people acted like bits of data defragmenting on a hard drive, self-organizing and compartmentalizing discretely like some unseen social algorithm governed them. It was possibly the most orderly case of crowd control that I had ever seen.

Maybe this could be put down to the type of mass activity — unity around classical music rather than, say, a sporting event that tends to divide its audiences. Maybe Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s baton has the power to conduct not only the orchestra but its listeners as well. But this is magical thinking. What I actually believe is that mass control has gone viral in protocol’s wake. Fear of state discipline has not been removed like some obstacle to collective action. Rather, protocological discipline has shored up and reinforced it.

“We have created an infinity of variety at the information level,” wrote William S. Burroughs in The Third Mind, “sufficient to keep so-called scientists busy forever exploring the ‘richness of nature.’” Burroughs’s “routines,” living on the border of science-fiction and revelation, were the inspiration behind Deleuze’s conception of Control society. Burroughs also imagined technical code as a virus, a “word virus” that when released would infect every individual imperceptibly. “Universal literacy with a concomitant control of word and image,” Burroughs noted, “is now the instrument of control.”

Our digital social tools, which train us to envision ourselves as immaterial, and that encourage us to read less deeply, less collectively, paradoxically fortify our social corporeality with explosions of textual shards embedding into our consciousness like shrapnel from a cluster bomb, virally infecting us and making us mutually susceptible to the subtlest forms of social control.

The post-literate age lives and dies by the word.◼︎

Cover image: Yannick Nézet-Séguin by Tam Photography for Orchestre Metropolitain.

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Between Two Worlds: in conversation with Emna Mâaref

“The more one is able to leave one’s cultural home, the more easily is one able to judge it, and the whole world as well…”
—Edward W. Said, Orientalism

“Do you come here?” I ask the Tunisian musician Emna Mâaref as we sit down together at a table for two at Caffè Italia. (I invite everyone to meet here. It is Montreal’s interzone.)

“All the time,” Mâaref says, telling me that there is a natural affinity between Tunisia and Italy. Only a sliver of the Mediterranean Sea divides these two nations, on two distinct continents.

“When you feel lost, you just go eat something from your home country,” she explains. “When you deeply feel alone, when there is no sun, there is no sea, just a sandwich helps.”

Mâaref, 31, is dressed in a black baseball cap and black t-shirt, the sleeve of which she rolls up, rubbing her bicep like an amateur boxer as she sips from her coffee cup and settles in. Her countenance connotes a gravitas. She is undoubtedly atypical, an individual with a rich backstory that she alternately guards and reveals in rounds of dialogue that feel both precious and carefree.

Mâaref has lived in Montreal for only three years, having immigrated to Canada to complete a master’s degree in political science at UQAM. But she is also an accomplished Oud player, the fretless stringed instrument that signifies Orientalism to the Western ear.

And she has already established herself in fewer than 36 months as an integral member of Montreal’s music community, collaborating with some of the city’s most beloved artists, including Jessica Moss, Patrick Watson, and Radwan Ghazhi Moumneh, who recorded Mâaref’s first long-player, Ama Lel Hawa / أَما لِلهَوى, at his renowned studio, Hotel2Tango.

The album, released through the local collective Interzone Editions, is comprised of ten largely improvised compositions for solo Oud. “The instrument is not like playing guitar or playing piano,” says Mâaref. “Oud is so specific — it’s really so specific.”

Notes exist between the 12-tone scale and outside the regular time signatures that regulate western classical music. Nâaref’s in a double sense is truly a non-binary mode of music making. Although it doesn’t intend to be, Ama Lel Hawa / أَما لِلهَوى is an anachronism in Montreal’s cultural scene. Within its contemporary context, it serves as an antidote to all the algorithmic artifice and dubious slop typical of practically every genre of modern music today.

There are a few overdubs, Mâaref concedes, but the bulk of the album was committed to tape in one day with Moumneh serving as producer and “big brother” to the virtuoso musician. “This was a dream, to record this kind of record,” Mâaref tells me. “This is what I needed to express certain emotions.”

Aching sentiments of displacement and longing anchor the weight of these arresting songs. Our world is one that has collapsed distance and time by virtue of telecommunications and technology. But the human soul has yet to catch up to the speed with which people and ideas circulate around the globe. Ama Lel Hawa / أَما لِلهَوى speaks precisely to that lag.

“I’m feeling all the time that I’m not here, but also not there,” Mâaref confesses, torn between a new phase in Montreal and her preceding chapters lived in Tunisia.

“Sometimes when I walk on the street here, I’m experiencing a whole life, a new direction — buildings and people and everything. And at the same time, I keep thinking about everything there. I keep thinking about what’s happening, and the past, and imagining the future. It’s so heavy. I imagine I have the possibility to go home anytime. But I imagine refugees, people who don’t have the right or access to their homeland. All those feelings come together on this album.”

“Sustainability is for real artists.” Emna Mâaref photographed by Nick Jewell for Interzone Editions.

Mâaref was raised in the Sousse Governorate of Tunisia and moved to Tunis at age 18 to study law. Her first impressions of music were of Umm Kulthum, the Egyptian diva. “My family was obsessed with her,” Mâaref says. “This is why I started playing Oud — so I could play Umm Kalthum songs. This was my childhood.”

As a teenager, along with more traditional Middle Eastern artists like Kulthum and Fairuz, hip-hop and electronic music began to influence Mâaref’s aesthetic sensibilities. “I had a metal phase in my life, of course,” she laughs. “But pop music was internationally available. I looked for jazz and blues to know how it started, this evolution. We had a lot of vinyl from the ’70s, and my parents were so supportive of everything I was doing.”

Mâaref began producing and DJing dance music, giving up the Oud for periods because of its cultural connotations. “I was hating the sound and hating all this heavy moral value, and the heritage,” she recalls. “But when I came here, I had a totally different feeling because the Oud was the only thing I had a memory of — this world, the past. It changed somehow. The album is reflecting all of that. Reflecting how much I’m not there and not here either.”

Composing music for film and soundtracking contemporary art installations also interests Mâaref, having worked previously with Milton Riaño, the Columbian new media artist, on an installation at OBORO entitled Eclosions.

“My experience is more with sound design than composition,” she says. “I love cinema. It’s one of the arts that inspires me so much. Hopefully I can work on future films. I would be so happy. It’s an amazing experience, when you work in the cinema. It’s an unbelievable feeling.”

“It’s given me a lot, so I am grateful to this city.” Emna Mâaref photographed by Nick Jewell for Interzone Editions.

While electronic music is still vital to Mâaref, it represents another form of political expression. “It is democratic as a tool,” she contends. “Everyone can play electronic music on a mobile app or something. But what is important is what you’re going to play with this kind of music — what you bring, what’s your touch, what’s your colour, how to recognize you from all this world, what is specific, and aesthetically, what your voice is. Sustainability,” she argues, “is for real artists. You have to have patience. And be patient.”

I notice that Mâaref and I don’t so much converse as study one another. Her character is compelling and betrays remarkable wisdom and intelligence. We talk at length about technology and innovation, improvisation, composition, what stimulates creativity, the limits of political economy, and the fundamental constituents of national identity.

“Do you feel at home here?” I inquire.

“Wow, such deep questions,” she says, pausing to consider her response.

“I’m starting to feel at home here. When you start having your people around, real people who share everything and support you in every situation, you start to feel at home. It’s given me a lot, so I am grateful to this city. This is what I’m looking for at this moment in my life. I found it here.”◼︎

Ama Lel Hawa / أَما لِلهَوى is released via Interzone Editions.

Cover image: Nick Jewell for Interzone Editions.

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Be True to Your School

An Evening with David Letterman and Special Guest Will Arnett, Just for Laughs, Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 21 July 2026

David Letterman waves to the audience at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“I got a letterman’s sweater
With a letter in front
I got for football and track
I’m proud to wear it now.”
—Beach Boys, “Be True to Your School”

David Letterman created a new genre of comedy in which catchphrases stood in for punchlines. Letterman coined so many of them throughout his career as a late-night talk show host, spanning 33 years and two television networks, that websites have been dedicated to cataloguing them, somewhat unsuccessfully, in my estimation, because there is at least one that is markedly absent: “Tonight’s show is so good, one day it will be a rerun.”

Memory is the mind’s recording medium. Memories are enregistered, played, replayed, slowed down, sped up, fundamentally altered over time, and eventually erased with the giant magnet of death. But seriously, there is an alternate universe in which Donald Trump is actually Andy Kauffman in a wig and a fat suit and David Letterman is President of the United States singing to the tune of a popular Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, “Midnight, and the kitties are sleeping.” There’s your catchphrase right there.

Shunk, Pointe-à-Callière, 23 July 2026

Shunk perform for a Pop Montreal afternoon event at Pointe-à-Callière. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“I have to stay functional until my mission is complete. Then it doesn’t matter.”
—The Terminator

The problem with Artificial Intelligence is not that it is getting smarter, but that it is profoundly reshaping what constitutes intelligence. Because A.I. was conceived under capitalism, like a baby born under an inauspicious star sign, its aptitude is for productivity. And so, A.I. will overvalue its utility to us until it convinces us that techno-synthetic intelligence is superior to our own and replaces our intellectual capacities altogether.

Just as duration measured in scalable temporal increments is vulnerable to perceptual distortion, intelligence that we quantify in terms of efficiency is subject to extreme exploitation.

We might imagine that the battle against A.I. will look like a Terminator movie, with artillery and explosions everywhere. The reality is that this war will resemble more a round of bureaucratic layoffs, the banality of being made redundant, outsmarted by maximization.

Rivalled Envy with HRT, Belly Hatcher, and Pulsum, 137 Avenue Président-Kennedy, 24 July 2026

HRT perform at Red Roof Church at an event organized by Nights of Worship. Olympia Dairaine Grimaux for NicheMTL.

“Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit.”
—Samuel Beckett, Proust

Synthesis, according to Brian Massumi, is defined as, “the joining of separate elements through chance encounters into an enduring, apparently stable, more or less reproducible conglomerate capable of being taken in by its own objective illusion of identity.” Massumi is describing Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of humanity here, and specifically, the coldness of their portrayals: humanoid bodies, husbands, wives, zombies, but never just “folks.”

Subjectivity is synthesized in the same way that electronic music is. Two or more elements combine to produce an illusion — or in the case of sound, an audition — of unity. What is implicit in both subjectivity and electronic sound is its synthetic nature. Subjects as much as synthesizer music are at best replications with varying degrees of fidelity to an originary referent. The DX-7 piano preset is as artificial as you and I.

I have recently overheard random snippets of subjective conversation pertaining to The Backrooms, the cinematic phenomenon that is coming to serve as this generation’s The Shining, albeit a crude and un-self-reflexive iteration. Like Biblical parables, the movie is explainable on multiple levels and to a certain extent misses its own point.

There is the superficial interpretation that the film gives its audience as a freebee — that habit constructs self-replicating mazes of consciousness that ensnare and addict us into repetitive and often destructive patterns. And then there is the deeper level of interpretation that the film seems unaware of, which is that capitalism is a fractal that self-similarly reproduces regardless of the degree of magnification, and from which there is no escape.

However, the key to transcending both addiction and capitalism is to kick.

Essaimer Inside Out, Text by Michèle St-Amand, Centre Skol, Until 29 August 2026

Gallery view of De quoi a-t-on besoin pour guérir?, 2026, by Fenyx Florentiny & Eva-Loan. Photographed for NicheMTL

“It is neither possible to accept uncritically the concept of culture, long permeated by ideas of departmentalization, nor to continue to shake one’s head conservatively about what is being done to culture in the age of integral organization.”
Theodor Adorno, “Culture and Administration”

There are competing schools of thought on the concept of culture. Some people believe that culture is something of a scientific experiment that needs to be cultivated as if in a laboratory, like culture growing inside of a petri dish, protected, isolated, nurtured. Others think that culture forms best when it is unrestrained and fully integrated into its surrounding ecosystems, inseparable and unbound from categorization and circumscription.

The paradox is that culture left unfettered is always incapable of sustaining itself for long enough to establish itself as culture without radically changing form. And it is uncertain whether culture that we refine and stimulate can really be called “culture” at all. A debate persists in Quebec, for instance, about governmental and institutional granting structures in effect fabricating artists and artworks that specifically cater to them and which wouldn’t exist without them.

We commonly agree that click-bait is not real news. So, is grant-bait real culture?

Preserving culture, something that people like me unanimously accept and unquestionably defend, is in fact impossible. The impetus to preserve culture is, like any executive impulse, inevitably misdirected. We cannot simply designate or administer culture as if it were a wetland that needed protection from real-estate speculators. True culture defends itself by adapting and even developing offensive — as opposed to defensive — survival strategies.

The Waiting Room, Curated by Emma Ongman, McBride Contemporain, Until 22 August 2026

Josi Smit, Early Morning in Late April, 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“If there is a strategic lesson from tragedy, it is not opposition, but non-participation.”
—Nick Land, “Nemesis”

The major themes that have obsessed me throughout my life are temporality and control. My first word was not “mama” or “dada” like other normal kids, but “clock.” It’s true. I gestured deliberately toward the clock on the wall, a Regulator with a wild pheasant and ivy motif, and said to my mother, “Five minutes from now, you’re not going to believe what I just told you.”

It is difficult to the point of being painful for punctual control freaks to accept that some things rest beyond their control and must sort themselves out in their own time. Politics is the antithesis of fate.◼︎

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NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Masha Granich, Neither Here nor There, 2024, (detail). Photographed for NicheMTL.

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How Do You Spell Holiday?

Luxury Communism

“Don’t stay in a bad place where they don’t care how you are.”
—David Bowie, “Everyone Says ‘Hi’”

I am not a happy camper.

My earliest memories of being on holiday as a child are of camping with my mom and dad, the three of us crammed into a six-man army tent made of heavy olive-green canvas.

Whenever it rained, which was always, there was nowhere else to go but back inside the tent. Hours spent playing Monopoly on a warped board or just staring out into the lack of space. You could easily lose your balance inside the tent, too, accidentally leaving a perfect palm print on the inside wall that would immediately begin leaking rainwater in the shape of your hand, a wet slap in the face.

To me as a kid, there was something haunting about the notion of six soldiers trying to sleep in that tent, maybe somewhere in Vietnam in the ’60s, or Korea a decade earlier, a canvas tarp their only shelter from monsoon season and never-ending artillery fire, nights spent much like their days, in constant discomfort, in constant fear for their lives.

I could imagine nothing worse than that — except, of course, for us piled together in the pouring rain in the tent the six of them eventually died in. That is not how I spell holiday.

This is why I don’t hate a posh hotel. And there are many in Montreal to choose from.

It’s called a ‘staycation’ — when you can’t quite afford a flight to some tropical destination, but you can afford a few nights of hospitality in a place that isn’t your crappy apartment. It might even be just down the street from your crappy apartment. You don’t have to go very far to go on vacation in this city. Especially if you live here, all it takes is a minor shift in perspective and Montreal comes to you.

For regular readers, you may be asking yourself, is this the same Ryan Alexander Diduck who liberally quotes Mark Fisher and habitually hates on capitalism as if it were the devil personified? Yes.

“Montreal, and any major city, is a different place when viewed from above.” Hôtel Birks photographed for NicheMTL.

On my birthday four years ago, I decided to take a room at the Birks Hotel on Square Phillips and Sainte-Catherine Street, overlooking what used to be The Bay. I imagined Leonard Cohen checking into a hotel somewhere exotic in the 1980s, unloading an Underwood typewriter onto the desk and setting a few packs of Benson & Hedges near the ashtrays that used to come standard in hotel rooms back in those days.

I no longer smoked, nor drank, nor did anything fun, and my Underwood was a MacBook Air which I nonetheless set up at the window, proceeding for the next three days and nights to drink Nespresso and sparkling water and write the first few articles that would become NicheMTL. Those rare days at the Birks Hotel restored me more than a week on the beach drinking Singapore Slings in Tahiti — or Tahiti Treats in Singapore.

Montreal, and any major city, is a different place when viewed from above. The quotidian assumes a poetic resonance. At any given moment, you can witness someone making a mess, and someone else cleaning it up. A child dropping an ice cream cone on the pavement; a dog scratching behind its ear; a woman’s hat blowing away in the breeze. These flashes when viewed from the 6th floor of a luxury hotel become events, with everyday life making a more meaningful impression.

The ceiling at Brasserie Henri, the restaurant in the Hôtel Birks, is sculpted with the shining visages of cherubim and seraphim — although I can never remember which are the ones that hang from the roof of the cave. There is a Parisian elegance about the place that only American tourists can ruin. But if you squint your eyes, you can imagine yourself sitting in another era, when people read newspapers instead of scrolling through screens, when Montreal was romantic and new.

“Hotel art is usually an afterthought.” SonoLux photographed for NicheMTL.

Closer to the present time, I was walking down Saint-Jacques Street a few months ago and noticed that an historic edifice that had been under construction for several years was now open. I wandered in and marvelled at the ambiguous surroundings. Not quite a café, a restaurant, or a bar, but neither a traditional hotel lobby, generative videos projected on the walls like the office of Number 2 in The Prisoner, I wondered, ‘what the hell is this place?’

It turned out to be SonoLux, a new hotel/restaurant/lounge/contemporary art gallery that had recently soft-launched in Old Montreal. This is an unlikely but decidedly niche combination of endeavours, ambitious in execution, especially in the post-pandemic era when Airbnb shuttered the nearby St. James Hotel, and conceptual lodging companies like Sonder went bankrupt. SonoLux, though, is doing something different.

36 identical and minimally appointed rooms. LUMI, a gastronomy-lovers paradise with dishes that executive chef Graham Hood designs and prepares. Subterra, a basement bar with a vinyl-centric hi-fi DJ booth that JoJo Flores and Fred Everything programme. Installations on each floor displaying surprisingly interesting works of visual art — the first show curated by Cheryl Sim of Centre PHI and soundtracked by local experimental electronic duo Mue.

Hotel art is usually an afterthought, not much more than royalty-free images stuck in prefab frames found at Bed, Bath & Beyond. It is refreshing, then, that a place of lodging would position art front-and-centre in the traveler’s itinerary. Amidst all the corporate galleries that populate the neighbourhood, SonoLux is actually a destination, along with Centre PHI and Fonderie Darling, on the map of exhibition spaces worth visiting. And you can stay overnight.

Still image from An Inheritance/A Threat/A Haunting by Kosisochukwu Nnebe at SonoLux. Photographed for NicheMTL

SonoLux and the Birks Hotel offer polar opposite but nonetheless very Montreal experiences. Neither is a franchise; they are singular places with unique features. They offer old- and new-world extravagance. They are both ‘immersive’ without feeling as if you’re submerged in a vulgar or generic atmosphere. They both pay incredible attention to detail. And they both are ideal quintessential staycation destinations for discerning Montrealers.

I love my parents for showing me the beauty and serenity of the great outdoors, for instilling in me an admiration of nature nurtured for weeks on end in our nation’s campgrounds. But I don’t miss waking up soggy and smelling of campfire smoke and insect repellant, rainwater dripping into my sleeping bag, a coin-operated shower the only indulgence.

I once asked Slavoj Žižek when we met in 2008 at the Telluride Film Festival how he could justify writing about socialism while essentially travelling from one luxury hotel to another, and in his characteristic lisp, he said, “Ryan, in order to create revolution, you must be comfortable!” The notion of the starving artist is illusory and only benefits the ruling class. Artists create best when they are fed and watered, rested and ready. And nothing rests and readies the creative mind quite like sojourning in a place like the Birks, or SonoLux.

A plush hotel, especially in your own city, for even a night or two, is enough of a vacation to recharge your batteries and give you a fresh perspective on life. There is no place for a holiday quite like home.◼︎

Cover image: LUMI at SonoLux photographed for NicheMTL.

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