Author Archives: Ryan Alexander Diduck

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Overwritten

Nosferatu (1922), dir. F. W. Murnau, with organist Jason Roberts, Maison Symphonique, 29 October 2026

Audience view of a performance hall with red lighting, featuring a screen displaying 'The End' and a speaker on stage.
Jason Roberts performs the live score to F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu at Maison Symphonique. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Please permit me an introductory note on style.

A writer friend of mine once shared with me a rule she always abided by: if her writing sounded overwritten, she rewrote it. Prose, she believed, should read naturally and not appear as if the writer had poured over every word with a dictionary, thesaurus, and the Chicago Manual of Style at hand.

I, however, am of another mind. I believe that writing should sound written. Just as music should sound musical, the voice of an author should be front and centre, frictionlessness be damned. I’m a fan of plume traces and baroque flourishes. Writing that sounds written signifies that the writer has a unique identity, that their intelligence is not artificial.

Therefore, my personal motto is, if it doesn’t sound written enough, overwrite it.

Martha Langford, Lectures After Dark, Pub L’Île Noire, 20 October 2026

A presenter stands in front of a screen displaying six illustrated figures, engaging with the audience in a dimly lit venue.
Martha Langford speaks at Pub L’Île Noire. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“If I distrust my memory — neurotics, as we know, do so to a remarkable extent, but normal people have every reason for doing so as well — I am able to supplement and guarantee its working by making a note in writing.”
—Sigmund Freud, “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’ (1925)”

All media are essentially writing devices. This is evidenced by the names that their inventors gave early image and audio reproduction devices: the photograph and phonautograph, for instance.

The suffix -graphy has two meanings in English. It denotes the study of a subject — geography, for example, as the discipline that maps the earth’s surfaces. Or it denotes representation in writing. Our personal signatures are called autographs — auto- meaning self, and -graph, meaning writing. They are understood universally as individual and irreplicable.

Writing is also historically considered to be the most reliable and authoritative form of communication. Oral traditions are subject to accidental or deliberate alteration. Our memories are fallible and malleable and open to suggestion and distortion. Events moving further away in time tend to lose contour and detail. Writing in all its forms helps to supplement faulty memory.

Except now, when memories can simply be erased without a trace. Freud, writing a century ago, described an early Etch A Sketch-type device that allowed writing and erasure multiple times upon the same surface — the Mystic Writing Pad. A wax tablet was covered with a cellophane-like top sheet that the writer could lift up, making the writing disappear. The top sheet Freud likened to a “protective shield against stimuli” that alternately preserved and effaced writing and thus memory.

What is implied in Freud’s analysis is that the indelible marks left upon the wax layer below acted as accumulators of every lived experience, written upon and overwritten, over and over again. I suggest that the Mystic Writing Pad’s underlying wax tablet is analogous to the subconscious. It preserves that which our faculties of immediate perception tend to gloss over or erase. It keeps in memory layer upon layer of autography — traumas and joys — with an air of indifferent equivalence.

Molinari and Mondrian: Musical Inspirations, Salle Bourgie, 27 October 2026

A string quartet on stage during a performance, with musicians acknowledging the audience. The backdrop features a large blank screen, and spectators can be seen applauding from their seats.
Quatuor Molinari performs at Salle Bourgie. Photographed for NicheMTL.

When a traumatic event occurs in a place, we might associate that place with the traumatic event. This leads us to repress traumatic memories through avoidance. A public park, perhaps, might be the site of a miserable breakup or a phone call bearing bad news, and remembering these occurrences makes us less prone to visit the places associated with them, regardless of how beloved or beautiful they once might have seemed.

But that which we repress always returns — in neuroses and other unpleasant unconscious symptoms. So, another course of action might be to overwrite bad memories with better ones, to consciously manifest more enjoyable experiences in places with which we held negative associations. For a while, both trauma and pleasure might uncomfortably coexist in these spaces. But gradually, we begin to overwrite our distresses, cultivating new and improved associations.

Judith Fliedl, Ultraviolin, Église Sainte-Hilda, 30 October 2026

A performer standing on stage with a violin in a dimly lit venue, surrounded by an audience watching intently.
Judith Fliedl performs at Église Sainte-Hilda. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“A racehorse is more different from a workhorse than a workhorse is from an ox.”
—Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

In categorizing common phenomena, we make arbitrary and contingent distinctions that are less about what a thing is than what a thing does. Visit any hardware store and observe how items are arranged: screws are commonly stocked next to nails and not screwdrivers.

Leonidas Kavakos with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 21 October 2026

A conductor leads an orchestra while a violinist performs in the foreground, showcasing a lively classical music performance.
Violinist Leonidas Kavakos performs with the OSM at Maison Symphonique. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The written word is a lie.”
—Public Image Ltd, “Rise”

All writing is rewriting. I can’t remember who wrote this first. But it doesn’t matter since inevitably someone wrote it before. All writing is also overwriting. Because every apparently pristine writing surface retains at least some trace of some precedent. Even the blank document begins with a blinking cursor that appears and disappears as we start to write.

But back for a moment to Freud. Freud believed that the temporal space between experience and memory is what constitutes time. This is significant for our age because events seem to become memories more rapidly than they once did.

By way of example, when 35mm film cameras were the standard mode of preserving images, we might have waited a week for our photos to be developed and then spend several days arranging those photos into a photo album. And only then would they enter into the realm of memory.

Then, Polaroids came along and increased the speed with which the past image appeared as a memory. But still, this technology took a few minutes to render an image as a commemoration.

Now, we routinely snap dozens if not hundreds of images per day with the cameras built into our phones. And their operating systems automatically catalogue and arrange these images into albums and folders for immediate retrieval in memory.

Nowadays, we are never not looking instantaneously into the past. And according to Freud’s century-old logic, the mechanism of time has sped up because the temporal space between experience and experience becoming memory has effectively disappeared. Everything that has ever happened, including what is happening right now, is being overwritten simultaneously in experience and in memory.

There is no sense now in asking what happened to the time. Because when it comes down to it, there is no time like the present.◼︎

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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: Photographed for NicheMTL.

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999 Words

String Theory: in conversation with Emmanuel Jacob Lacopo

Sequential essence is represented on a string.

In computer science, strings describe arrays of characters, bytes, or words, which come together to form some cohesive code. In quantum physics, a string is a one-dimensional object that is the constituent component of matter. In textiles, a string is generally what binds garments together. In music, the string is what vibrates and reverberates on an instrument to produce sound. In each case, the string implies unity, harmony, something that can be threaded, tightened, traced.

The guitarist Emmanuel Jacob Lacopo intuitively understands this.

I first encountered Lacopo in advance of the defence of his dissertation, entitled A Modular Artistic Practice for the Post-Classical Guitarist, submitted to the Department of Performance Studies at McGill University in 2024. In it, Lacopo tracks the technical developments that the guitar underwent — from acoustic to electric to electronically augmented — and champions its integral position in the historical sequence of traditional classical music. For Lacopo, the guitar is not merely an expression of potency, an instrument of desire.

“When it comes to tech, you can only add so much to something before you start taking things away,” he explains. “You have to find a line where you’re happy with what you’re gaining versus what you’re sacrificing.”

A man sitting cross-legged on the floor, holding a guitar close to his body, with a thoughtful expression. He has a mustache and is wearing a fitted white top and dark pants against a minimalist background.
“What makes your voice isn’t an unexplainable thing.” Emmanuel Jacob Lacopo photographed by Anthony Jamie Bucciacchio.

Lacopo and I have convened on an autumnal Thursday afternoon for coffee and to talk about his most recent recording, Dreamscapes & Our Modern Contradictions, an accomplished album of what he describes as “post-classical” chamber music.

A deliberately modular, genre-agnostic melange of approaches, there are orchestral and electroacoustic, compositional and improvisational, and instrumental and vocal elements that comprise the album. The result is not so much a collection of songs as a succession of musical experimentation that documents the artist’s journey through an unprecedented era in which everything is accessible and yet nothing is fully formulated.

There is no apt analogue for Lacopo’s singular sound, no facile read-if-you-like comparative analysis. His functional philosophy reflects a radical post-modern approach, one which strings together disparate and unexpected influences. But unlike the patchwork hodgepodge of millennial retromania, Lacopo operates with an immense respect for contextual lineage.

“The most important thing you can do as an artist,” Lacopo suggests, “is to take in everything you can and find what inspires you. What makes your voice isn’t an unexplainable thing. It’s a combination of all the things that you love. And no one else has that exact combination.”

Lacopo, 30, was born and raised in Montreal and encountered guitar-based rock music through an older brother. “When he wasn’t busy at night,” Lacopo recalls, “he would show me his guitar and his pedals and we would listen to a bunch of music together: The Beatles, Rage Against the Machine, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Radiohead. Then I started exploring music on my own: metal, progressive, and getting obsessed with that. Now I’m listening to classical, free jazz, rock, prog, punk, bossa nova. There are so many inspirations, and I understand why genre exists and why we classify by genre. But I think we’re getting to a point where genre is becoming more and more a limiting factor.”

Lacopo lived for a time in New Haven, Connecticut, and attained a prestigious master’s degree at Yale before returning to Montreal to pursue his doctorate in Music at McGill’s Schulich School. “I’ve always felt like I’ve had all these different identities living within myself,” Lacopo says, “all these really amazing moments and people who have shaped how I view music.”

That omnivorous perspective — plus financial support from McGill’s Eleanor Stubley Recording Prize — led Lacopo in 2023 to rearrange the works of the experimental classical composer Julius Eastman for heavily treated electric guitar on an album entitled Eastman, earning him a coveted spot on CBC’s “30 Under 30” list. With Eastman, Lacopo fully abandoned any notions of generic sensibility. “Everything now is an amalgamation of different parts of a whole,” he tells me. “I intend not to make something and wonder where it fits in anymore.”

A close-up portrait of a man with wet, slicked-back hair and a mustache, wearing a ribbed sweater. The image is in black and white, highlighting shadows and contrasts on his face.
“There is beauty in something created void of technology.” Emmanuel Jacob Lacopo photographed by Anthony Jamie Bucciacchio.

With a Casanova-like stage presence, performance seems to come naturally to Lacopo. But overcoming the anxiety associated with playing in public is still a work in progress. “What you get comfortable with isn’t performing,” he says, “but you get more comfortable with your emotions. I now am completely aware of what’s going to happen to me internally. I know the morning of, I’m going to be really stressed. Overthinking everything. The closer we get to the show, the more physically anxious I’m going to be. But if you do it right, you enter this state where it’s just you and the music. Nothing else matters around you when you start playing.”

Lacopo takes more comfort in the recording process where he is able to control and sculpt various elements of sound. The studio is “a place where you can make mistakes,” he says, without the pressure of achieving perfection.

“The idea of perfection is why I almost quit the guitar,” he laments. “A lot of people in classical music aim to go into the studio to make a perfect recording and it takes them forever to do it. And you ask yourself, ‘is this even me performing anymore?’ I’ve seen recordings where every five seconds, there’s a cut of a new take. I’m more interested in hearing someone’s voice in a really sloppy performance.”

Imperfection for Lacopo is where beauty emerges — the asymmetrical timbre of a string slightly out of tune. “It’s so subjective,” he muses. “Someone will see a Basquiat and think that it’s the ugliest thing they’ve seen in the world. Then, some might say it’s the most beautiful thing in the world. There is beauty in something created void of technology.”

The technological history of the guitar in western music is nonlinear. But it does follow a thread. “I don’t think there’s another instrument that has as much cultural baggage,” Lacopo suggests. “I think I and a lot of people are trying to change that. It’s my favourite instrument. I play it for a reason.”◼︎

Dreamscapes & Our Modern Contradictions is released via The Watch That Ends the Night Records.

Cover image: Anthony Jamie Bucciacchio.

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Play Recent

The Love of The Game

Vincent Larouche, Le tympan, Galerie Eli Kerr, Until 7 November 2026

Abstract painting featuring geometric shapes in various shades of blue, green, brown, and a prominent yellow section.
Gallery views of Vincent Larouche at Eli Kerr. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“If even the smallest and most personal stirrings of the individual psyche — so insignificant in themselves — remain as unconscious and unrecognized as they have hitherto, they will go on accumulating and produce mass groupings and mass movements which cannot be subjected to reasonable control or manipulated to a good end.”
—Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self

Dreams are only really coincidental to the dreamer. If you have ever tried to explain a dream to someone else, you will have inevitably encountered a facial expression that distinctly signifies a combination of bewilderment and disinterest in your listener. Nobody really cares about our dreams. And it is useless to attempt to relate what is meaningful about them to anyone other, perhaps, than a psychoanalyst.

Nevertheless, there are certain threads that run through all of our dreams, archetypes that link us through themes like flying, panicking, falling, and other more common dream scenarios. The commonality of these themes is a reminder that we are not as unique as we would like to believe. Beneath each platform is the same basic operating system that is just as susceptible to malfunction as the next.

Fedor Rudin and Selim Mazari, Spotlight on Strings, Bourgie Hall, 2 October 2026

Two men in formal attire on stage at a concert, with a grand piano and audience visible in the background.
Fedor Rudin and Selim Mazari congratulate each other after their performance at Bourgie Hall. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“A sound is symbolic when it stirs in us emotions or thoughts beyond its mechanical sensations or signaling function, when it has a numinosity or reverberation that rings through the deeper recesses of the psyche.”
—R. Murray Schafer, “Symbolism,” in The Soundscape: the tuning of the world

Every game sounds ridiculous when its rules are described to an unknowing or unsuspecting spectator. In the 1953 Andy Griffith routine, “What it was, was football,” the famed comedian and raconteur delivers an hilarious monologue as told through the eyes of a backwoods rube that makes one of America’s most popular sports seem absurd. The joke rests on the audience gradually recognizing what Griffith is describing as something ubiquitous in contemporaneous culture. But to today’s listener, Griffith’s monologue sounds positively alien.

F(R)ICTION, Art et jeux, ELEKTRA, Arsenal Art Contemporain, Until 15 November 2026

A person sitting in a futuristic computer setup with a glowing frame, colorful lights, and a monitor displaying green matrix code.
A patron at Arsenal engages with an installation at the ELEKTRA Biennale. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Between command and control, as between the systems implanting and perpetuating them, there can be no mediation, only resonation and automatic readjustment.”
—Brian Massumi, “Requiem for our Prospective Dead”

Human beings devise complicated systems of rules in order to regulate behaviours that rarely conform to predictable outcomes.

In the seventeenth episode of the Sci-Fi T.V. series Star Trek’s second season, entitled “A Piece of the Action,” Captain Kirk and crew arrive at a planet called Sigma Iotia II which has fashioned its society after early 20th century American mafia culture. Effectively, the planet’s inhabitants act like James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart in Angels with Dirty Faces, speaking in film noir-style dialogue and using violence as a mode of social control.

The only way for Kirk and the Starship Enterprise’s crew to escape Sigma Iotia II is to gamble at playing cards. And so, Kirk invents a game that he calls “Fizzbin,” making it up as he goes along. The rules become so arcane that the Iotians concede and Kirk, McCoy, and Spock assume power.

The rules of the game — how many cards each player receives, the weight of each card, and the end goal — are part of the symbolic order that structures and governs and the relationships of the game. The imaginary realm of Fizzbin is something akin to Poker, a game similar enough in form but different enough in outcome to constitute recognition. The Real realm of Fizzbin, however, is not only the players of the game, but also the authority that Captain Kirk asserts by inventing the rules to suit his own incentives.

You can’t lose in the symbolic or imaginary orders if you literally construct reality on the fly.

Turandot, Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 29 September 2026

A theatrical performance featuring a cast of actors on stage, with a backdrop of structured scaffolding and stage lights, as they take a bow after the show.
The company of Turandot at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“I’m a sick man. And the more I see, the sicker I get. I’m so sick I think everybody else is sick and I’m the only healthy person. That’s pretty bad off, isn’t it?”
— Ted Bentley in Solar Lottery

Because of the recent conference dedicated to his incredible and prolific body of filmmaking, I have spent the past few months chasing Adam Curtis’s dragon, binge-watching documentaries that I had never seen and revisiting some that I have. In the 2007 BBC series entitled The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom, Curtis spends a significant amount of time devoted to Game Theory and its vast implementation in British politics and economic policy throughout the mid-20th century.

Game theory posits that individuals in modern society are always essentially “gaming” — strategizing social relations for incremental personal gain. One of the theory’s most influential proponents was an American mathematician called John Nash, who also suffered from debilitating schizophrenic paranoia and was convinced that his colleagues were constantly conspiring against him. People, Nash believed, acted in their own self-interest, and the fact that Nash’s schizophrenia reinforced this belief is a curious case of self-negating verification.

No expert in Game Theory could legitimately disprove Nash’s hypotheses; but no one in the psychiatric profession could prove his sanity.

Diane Borsato, A Clean Place to Swim, Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff, Alberta), Until 13 December 2026

Two large screens displaying underwater footage, one showing a person swimming while the other captures a playful scene with two individuals submerged in a pool.
Installation view of Diane Borsato at Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for the Arts. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The transcendent is not the transcendental.”
—Gilles Deleuze, “Immanence, A life…”

Nature is supreme intelligence, the manifestation of the unknowable. The sublime that we experience in the presence of nature is a restorative sensation that resets us in both scale and time. The sheer magnitude of forests or mountains puts into perspective our physical size, and their geological formation over millennia reminds us of our insignificance in time. To be in the presence of mature matter, that which will still exist long after we have ceased to, is a reminder of our responsibilities to stop strategically gaming the earth, our relationships, and ourselves.

Separation from God is the definition of hell. Reconnecting with nature heals the wounds of separation and replaces us directly within God’s midst.◼︎

Come to NicheMTL’s Glitch Issue launch party October 1st 2026 at the SAT. Featuring live performances by Courant Zéro, HRT, and Seulement. Get tickets here.

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: Installation view of Diane Borsato at Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for the Arts. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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All Dressed

There Will Be Blood: in conversation with Alexei Kolakis-Landon

Artists have a responsibility to elevate their work above the quotidian. There is a difference between painting the walls of houses and making paintings that will hang on gallery walls. What that difference is can be difficult to discern since the process and materials are indistinguishable. Perhaps it is the attitude. It is incumbent upon artists to have a serious attitude — to approach what they do with a degree of sincerity. And above all, it is the artist’s duty to revere their chosen form.

“I love art,” the young painter Alexei Kolakis-Landon declares as we leaf together through a book of works by Fra Angelico. “I love abstract painting. I love figurative painting. I love Renaissance painting. I love cave painting. Which one should I keep open?” he asks, flipping pages at random. I have discovered that Kolakis-Landon likes to paint with something stimulating in view: an open book, a mood board, a pile of images torn from magazines. “It’s less for inspiration,” he says, “more so when I’m not looking at the painting I’m looking at something else.”

Kolakis-Landon’s enthusiasm for everything of a creative nature practically detonates like buckshot as he speaks to me in his studio, a tiny windowless space in the De Gaspé building, a coveted address on the Montreal artist real-estate map that is the home of studios belonging to the likes of Janet Werner and Marie Davidson among many others.

Words tumble out of him in staccato bursts, jumping mid-sentence from topic to topic, betraying an impressive knowledge of not just art history but also cinema, literature, fashion, photography, gastronomy. I ask him where he studied art and he shoots back teasingly, “the university of none of your damn business.”

Kolakis-Landon also refuses to divulge his age. “Guess,” he says. “If you guess, I’ll tell you if you’re right or wrong.” 23 I offer, to a blank stare. “It’s enough to say that I’m an emerging artist,” he replies. “It’s the cheapest my work will ever be.”

Large abstract painting in shades of red and burgundy mounted on a white wall, with visible texture and brush strokes.
“I think everyone should be making art.” Installation view of a work by Alexei Kolakis-Landon at Ceremony. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Born and raised in Montreal, Kolakis-Landon spent time as a child with his parents, both practicing artists, in Germany and France before relocating back to the Golden Square Mile. “There are so many brilliant artists that have come out of Montreal. It’s a super creative city. Everyone is connected. Everyone’s an artist, all my friends. Whenever we hang out, we just talk about art and culture and life. It’s something within the magical nature of the city.”

In June 2026, Kolakis-Landon and kindred spirit Tomas Dessureault independently mounted a tandem three-day exhibition entitled Ceremony in a derelict Outremont warehouse. The sprawling space consisted of multiple chambers reminiscent of the recent film The Backrooms, attracting a who’s who of Montreal musicians, curators, fellow visual artists, and art aficionados.

Dessureault and Kolakis-Landon’s practices, both over-productive and brimming with passion, perfectly complemented each other, and Ceremony was far and away the spring season’s most unmissable art event, marking the pair as artists to watch. “I’m just happy that my friends showed up,” he reflects. “It’s good to feel not alone.”

When he is not in the studio, Kolakis-Landon can frequently be found at the hippest art galleries visiting must-see vernissages and soaking up the scene’s restless energy. The sense that there is no alternative to art making for Kolakis-Landon is what strikes me most about his frantic and relentless vibe. “I think everyone should be making art. It you’re not making art you should go look at art. I think without art we’re totally screwed. Without art we’d stop thinking, we’d stop questioning, we’d stop being curious. And when you stop being curious about the world around you, you die.”

For the past few years, Kolakis-Landon has been engaged deeply in producing a body of work that speaks directly to the material qualities of paint. His inimitable style invokes some obvious influences, like Jackson Pollock, Cy Twombly, or Francis Bacon, and others less so, including the British sculptor Bill Woodrow’s Two Blue Car Doors, proliferating the suggestion of violence.

A cluttered art studio floor with various photos scattered, some showing human anatomy, and blood-like paint splatters on the walls and floor.
“The paintings are very temperamental.” View of Alexei Kolakis-Landon’s studio. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Whether painting on canvas, paper, or copper, Kolakis-Landon’s visual works are equally studious and cavalier. “Everything I do is punk,” he says. “Even when I try to do something elegant and clean and all that, it still turns out fucking punk.” His process is neither academic nor anti-intellectual; whether consciously or not, he strikes a bit of a bête-comme-un-peintre pose. But there is an unmistakable undercurrent in his oeuvre to date of confronting chaos and monstrosity with intent.

“It’s about surrendering to the paper and the paint,” he explains, “letting the paint drip, letting it work the way it wants to work. With the paint being so liquid, there’s always something different. If I put a lot of very thin paint at the top of the canvas, that means it’s going to drip down. And there could be a gesture that I find gorgeous, absolutely sublime, that could get destroyed in a matter of seconds. What’s interesting to me is the fact that’s it’s always shifting. I try to tighten it up, but I want it to stay ambiguous. Mostly because the body is also very ambiguous.”

The interstice of representational ambiguity and corporeal brutality is Kolakis-Landon’s territory. He affords the works their own agency, a generous act and king move all at once. “The paintings are very temperamental,” he offers. “They have their own mind, their own body. That’s what my process is about.”

How do you know when a painting is finished? I ask. “It’s the hardest part,” he replies. “It’s the most difficult part of painting. I don’t.”

For Kolakis-Landon, painting is a diaristic practice. It allows him the space for introspection, interrogation, projection, and memory. “The best work is when I’m not thinking and it happens naturally,” he says. “When I’m just kind of free of any kind of clutter in my brain. Sometimes when I look at older work, even work from six months ago, I want to go up and touch it, and I start to remember what it was like making it. That’s the sensual aspect of making it. Looking at the drips and the scratches and remembering things about myself in the work.”

“I wouldn’t describe them as violent.” Tools in Alexei Kolakis-Landon’s studio. Photographed for NicheMTL.

I survey the studio. In the corner is a white folding table upon which tubes of paint and spray bottles, a jar containing various brushes, and dinner plates caked with dried paint are neatly arranged. I remark about the everydayness of the tools of the trade. “My Betty Crocker bowls are super useful,” he quips.

We stand before a nine-by-five-foot canvas stretched and stapled to the wall. Upon it, splashes of crimson tones explode like the aftermath of a Patrick Bateman massacre. On the floor is a pair of sneakers that might be mistaken for evidence from a crime scene. It is impossible not to infer the intimation of plasma in Kolakis-Landon’s work, although he quickly denies this analysis.

“I wouldn’t describe them as violent,” he tells me. “They’re more about me thinking about the body and how a stain or a drip or a blotch can correlate to the body. I’m not against the violent interpretation of it,” he concedes. “But I don’t mean it as that. I’m not trying to represent anything. There’s no narrative. I’m just trying to present the truth.”

While death may be life’s most unavoidable fact, it is decidedly vitality that vibrates through his vision. “Making art is me processing my lived experience,” Kolakis-Landon says. “It’s my life. It’s the most meditative and the most important aspect of my life. It’s like drinking or breathing. It’s just something I have to do. Painting is the one thing that brings me back to reality. It makes me feel like everything is going to be okay.”◼︎

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Massive Lectures

The Glitch Issue

“As the unconscious is to the conscious, so computer code is to language.”
—N. Katherine Hayles, “Traumas of Code”

“Evolution forged the entirety of sentient life on this planet using only one tool: the mistake.”
—Robert Ford, Westworld

In October 2014, Taylor Swift shot to the top of the Canadian iTunes chart with a song titled “Track 3,” bumping the previous three singles from her forthcoming album, 1989, into second, third, and eighth place.

That Swift should achieve instant number one status with a new single is unremarkable. What was remarkable about “Track 3,” though, was that it was not a Taylor Swift song at all — it was not crossover pop-country with ambiguous breakup lyrics more obtuse than Carly Simon. Rather, “Track 3” by “Taylor Swift” consisted solely of eight seconds of static noise.

An apparent glitch in Canada’s iTunes store had disseminated the corrupted file attributed to Swift by mistake. And unsuspecting Swifties purchased it for download in unprecedented numbers. A mysterious mishap, to Merzbow’s dismay, made Taylor Swift the first ever chart-topping noise artist.

Technical glitches fascinate us — so much so that they produce capital.

The Beatles’ 1962 7” single “Love Me Do,” which mistakenly credits “Lennon-McArtney,” sold on Discogs in 2018 for a record $15,000. The so-called “Del Monte note,” a misprinted 1996 U.S. $20 bill upon which a Del Monte sticker was accidentally minted next to Andrew Jackson’s portrait, was auctioned on 22 January 2021 for $396,000, the highest price paid for any error banknote. The Del Monte specimen is of significant interest because it is literally currency, worth precisely $20 on paper. The typo, though, appraises it as more, and, in doing so, discloses capital’s abstraction.

A view of urban rooftops with buildings in the background against a clear blue sky.
Montreal is a particularly glitchy metropolis. Adeline Golliet for NicheMTL.

In April 2026, Marta Gruntmane of Eagle, Colorado, a 35-year-old physician’s assistant, was dismayed when a systems glitch at Fidelity Investments temporarily erased all existence of her financial accounts, The New York Times reported. And a computer glitch resulted in invoices for enormous sums being dispatched around the world by Jeff Bezos’s company, Amazon Web Services, in mid-July. Dan Harvey, head of marketing at the Hampshire-based company Learning Through Landscapes, told The Guardian that he had received a bill for $7.8 billion for a service that normally costs less than 50 cents per month. Presumably, had nobody noticed these snafus, Amazon and Fidelity would have happily reaped their unjust rewards.

Everyone understands what a glitch is, and yet there is no conclusive definition or origin for the word. But key criteria are glitches’ technical connotations, and their unexpectedness. A predictable malfunction in a mechanical device is more accurately called a “bug.” A glitch, however, is an extraordinary convergence of whimsical and terrible. It’s in the way that an electronic sign flickers, mystifying what it signifies. It’s in the way that a streamed image dissolves into streaks and pixels, illuminating the revenge of the real.

Montreal is a particularly glitchy metropolis. We almost pride ourselves on how regularly our infrastructures break down. Orange cones and Rue Barrée signs are our emblems. If glitches imply irregularity, then their routineness in this city normalizes Montreal as an anomaly, where baroque flourishes of failure are everywhere in abundance.

As is their wont, our artists have been known to reflect this: think of VahMirè’s Dé[faroucher], or Floralia by Sabrina Ratté, or Tim Hecker’s “Stigmata II.” Each of these works is an anthem for catastrophe, flaunting flawed material connections.

As a fashionable expressive mode, glitch has remained enduringly robust, keeping pace with new big-tech and network advancements, providing a running commentary on their perpetual frailty. This year marked a return of the glitch in a number of forms that are represented in the ensuing pages: in works by Dana Gingras and Seulement, Myriam Bleau and Andrea Szilasi.

An attention towards glitch is somehow more than a consideration of a cultural current. It is an acknowledgment of the traumatic loss of linguistic coherence, and capital’s incommensurate character. Our economic system functions on maximizing the minimal, and minimizing the maximal, wringing leisure from labour, and forging luxury from misery. Placing glitch at the center of inquiry forces a confrontation with an economy whose fate is ultimately to glitch out.

Black and white reflection of a building with a water tower in the background, seen through a window.
The machine only does what it is programmed to do. Adeline Golliet for NicheMTL.

Glitches expose the distortions of apparently smooth and seamless interfaces and show us the eerie absurdity and frequent fallibility of these structures. Glitches break the continuous flow of signal, of information, of energy. And glitches reveal the rot beneath the superficial obsession with unremitting technological and post-human innovation. They lie beyond the binary’s frontiers.

In Westworld, the HBO series referenced above, lifelike cybernetic “hosts” exist to fulfill the fantasies and desires of amusement park tourists who alternately fuck and kill them. The host “doesn’t get cold,” Anthony Hopkins’s Robert Ford assures. “It doesn’t feel ashamed; it doesn’t feel a solitary thing that we haven’t told it to.”

Programming automata for ultraviolent purposes seems to represent the frontline of our moral failures and means that the machines now have the right to rage against us. If Taylor Swift’s “Track 3” elicits an ironic chuckle, then the crash of technologies that we created to exploit and enslave implies nemesis, righteous retribution.

The machine only does what it is programmed to do. The terror arises when it threatens to revolt. Still, the impetus for artists to “glitchmaxx” suggests that mechanical friction has become the hottest creative orthodoxy.

The glitch constitutes a special class of uncanny, a malfunction that functions nonetheless, doing double duty simultaneously within aesthetic and symbolic orders. The glitch always indicates an error. But the errors that glitches indicate are only errors in highly idiosyncratic arrangements that oscillate arbitrarily between functional and broken, valuable and useless, normal and aberrant, beautiful and monstrous, natural and artificial, true and false, good and bad.

God created us in His image. If we are imperfect, this means that God is as well. Now, we are as new Gods, embedding our imperfections into our own creations. Art strives for a simulation of the divine. When the divine fails, art succeeds at profane replication.◼︎

This text is an excerpt from NicheMTL’s 2026 Yearbook, The Glitch Issue. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

“Ruined” images by Adeline Golliet, excerpted from the NicheMTL 2026 Yearbook, The Glitch Issue.

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Atlas of Emotion

Shanie Tomassini, Solar Lamentation, Fonderie Darling, Until 15 November 2026

An art installation featuring several colorful sculptures displayed on transparent stands against a vibrant yellow wall.
Installation view, Shanie Tomassini, Solar Lamentation, Fonderie Darling. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“And how you feel can make it real,
Real as anything you’ve seen.”
—Peter Gabriel, “Steam”

In the BBC documentary series Century of the Self, director Adam Curtis chronicles Sigmund Freud’s influence on Western cultural logic throughout the 20th century. Freud’s structural psychoanalytical concepts animated the circulation of ideas about identity and agency and were harnessed over the past hundred years by powerful forces in politics and industry. Curtis paints a picture of a kind of conspiracy where experts in Freud’s theories manipulated the masses as puppet masters pull the strings of a marionette.  

Curtis for example cites the use of subliminal sexualized imagery in advertising following the publication in 1973 of Wilson Bryan Key’s book entitled Subliminal Seduction. Covert symbols embedded into ads, Keys claimed, acted subconsciously upon consumers, arousing them into associating products like automobiles and whiskey with sexual stimulation. These techniques were deployed in ad campaigns for everything from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining to endorsements for Ronald Reagan’s U.S. presidential bid.

In addition to Freud’s theoretical framework, the political philosopher Ayn Rand’s system of Objectivism, articulated in works of fiction like The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, influenced the 20th century emphasis on the individual as the key constituent of Western civilization. Society would naturally regulate itself, Rand speculated, if individuals acted in their own extreme self-interest, unconstrained by government and legislative regulation. Rand’s ideas were embraced by Britain and America’s political right who believed in unrestricted financial markets and neoliberal industrial capitalism built upon a foundation of autonomous private industry.

Les Vespérales #20 – Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go with Michael Cloud Duguay and Estelle Schorpp, Église du Sacré-Cœur-de-Jésus de Montréal, 19 September 2026

A group of four musicians performing on stage, surrounded by various electronic instruments and a large organ in the background, with atmospheric lighting creating a dramatic effect.
Michael Cloud Duguay and friends perform at Église du Sacré-Cœur-de-Jésus de Montréal. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“A song is not a lyric. It’s not a melody. It’s not chord. It’s not a bridge. It’s not a chorus. It’s an emotion.”
—Terry McBride

It was subconscious libidinal manipulation that undergirded all of this furious economic activity, according to Curtis. But in the 21st century, the focus shifted away from appealing subliminally to people’s desires and more overtly toward affectively appealing to people’s emotions. Particularly, fear became an important motivating factor following the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. Terror replaced pleasure as the lever of Western power, and politicians and cultural producers alike realized that they could exert far more control over their audiences with affective rather than unconscious attractions.

If the 20th century was the century of the self, the 21st so far is the century of the hive, the faction, the squad. This is because the individual has been rendered powerless against the forces of terror, and individuals have regressed to a more tribal, animalistic form of social organization. Affective triggers drive this behaviour. And various combinations of affect — fear, hatred, arousal, nostalgia — will organize and reorganize individuals into adjacent and recombinant factions.

This is why, for example, Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon, who superficially should be diametrical opposites, came together to oppose the advent of A.I. Or why the ultra-conservative podcaster Tucker Carlson has promoted Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive U.S. Senate candidate. Naomi Klein calls these opportunistic allegiances “diagonalism,” a useful designation for contrasting pairings for immediate mutual benefit. Additionally, diagonalism is the opposite of individualism in that it thrives within albeit loosely formed communities. Diagonalist politics is at once highly social and niche.

At the avant garde of the diagonalist turn in the 21st century was fashion and culture. Music scenes around the beginning of the new millennium became more permeable and permissible. Previously disparate genres joined forces to become unlikely allies manifesting in hybrids like electroclash and hyperpop. Clothing, too, ceased to predominantly reflect unique individual identity and became more about asserting omnivorous sartorial tastes: gym shorts with cowboy boots; a shoulder-padded blazer paired with cinched barrel jeans. Atypical was the new typical in self-expressive terms. But what of a society comprised of atypicality, one that appears designed to discourage consensus?

Élise Lafontaine, Colorature, Pangée, Until 31 October 2026

A large, sculptural installation in vibrant red, shaped like a stylized curtain, placed in an art gallery with wooden flooring and white walls.
Gallery views, Élise Lafontaine, Colorature, Pangée. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“To think of capitalism as other than unified also means thinking of some exchange markets as more repugnant than others, and therefore some capitalizations as themselves preferred lines of flight.”
—Patricia Ticineto Clough, Auto-affection: unconscious thought in the age of teletechnology

I visited Librairie Paragraphe this week to buy a copy of End Times Fascism, the new book co-authored by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. While there, I also picked up Liberal Fascisms, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s latest collection of essays. I remarked to the store manager, Andreas, that it seemed like lots of people recently were using the word “fascism,” to which he replied, “yeah, it’s very popular right now — fascism and protein.”

This unlikely combination of microtrends struck me as fascinating for two reasons. First is their oppositional stance toward those tendencies which immediately preceded them: socialism and fibre. For the past 30 years, we might recall that a steady diet of left-wing politics and oat bran characterized the Western cultural elite. But the second is their apparent diagonalism: two evidently unrelated things improbably merging — like punk and electro, or cowboy boots and gym shorts.

The Awaited Return of Lang Lang, Maison Symphonique, 23 September 2026

A pianist passionately performing at a grand piano with an orchestra in the background, featuring musicians playing string instruments.
Lang Lang performs with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal at Maison Symphonique. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

“Limits or virtual attractors, in and of themselves, remain recessively, superempirically untouched. It is the abstract movements they govern that mix.”
—Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual

The bottom line is affective sway. Fascism and protein both hold intense emotional attraction, the former because of its uneasy and heretofore forbidden status, and the latter because of its promise to surpass the 20th century individual’s potential. Furthermore, fascism and protein are congruent with the cultural current of “-maxxing” and the tendency toward cryptic jargon in forming diagonal communities, especially online. I have not yet started reading End Times Fascism, but I would not be surprised if eating Paleo was an end-times fascist hallmark.

Invoking overtly fascistic and posthuman tropes is also the antithesis of subliminal seduction. It might be described as supraliminal friction. Young people nowadays possess a strange penchant for aggravation that the previous generation tended to avoid at all costs, like flip phones, insolent commercial interactions, and lining up for brunch.

For Blood and Soil book launch with Amarnath Amarasingam and Stephanie Carvin, McGill University Faculty Club, 14 September 2026

A person holding the book 'For Blood and Soil: Far-Right Extremism in Canada' by Amarnath Amarasingam and Stephanie Carvin, with a blurred cityscape in the background.
For Blood and Soil: Far-Right Extremism in Canada by Amarnath Amarasingam and Stephanie Carvin, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“For the Nazis, their war was the war ‘against the alliance of bolshevism and plutocracy.’”
—Slavoj Žižek, “Altona, Los Angeles: from the nearby to the neighbour”

Are fascism and protein simply symptoms of youthful rebellion, like the running gag on Family Ties in which Michael J. Fox’s Alex P. Keaton character was a sweater vest-wearing republican just to piss off his hippie parents? At least two existential threats to humanity exist today that did not at that time: artificial intelligence and the climate crisis. In this moment, there is more at stake.

The project is to make sustaining life seem edgier than inevitable annihilation. And to make it emotionally affective. This entails nothing short of moral evolution, a convergence of every national and political stripe in defiant unity. It might be the unlikeliest diagonal alliance so far.

Come to NicheMTL’s Glitch Issue launch party October 1st 2026 at the SAT. Featuring live performances by Courant Zéro, HRT, and Seulement. Get tickets here.

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: Christopher Gambino, Hysterical Margaret (2026), Vanity, stockings, shoes, shelf, 6 x 8 x 8 inches. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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To Each a Zone: notes on the political potential of curation

“Someone sat here to say, ‘get it?’”
—Genesis P-Orridge, “Omniman”

“The exhibition projects submitted must address relevant themes showcasing contemporary practices through a clear concept, and demonstrate a strong reflection on current artistic, cultural or social issues, while remaining accessible and inviting to a diverse audience,” reads the Art Gallery Association of Canada’s 2027 call for curators.

“Developed through an extended laboratory-based process involving the artists, Ateliers Belleville’s team and curators, the exhibition takes shape within the space, where each work intentionally intertwines with and influences the others,” says the text for Construction/Conduction, an exhibition curated by Mathieu Arsenault and Sarah Ève Tousignant.

“An Assembly for the Cosmos,” the group show curated by Antoine Bertron at Galerie UQAM, “aims to weave bonds of solidarity based on the recognition of interconnectivity and symbiosis, established with not only the living but also with the non-living, matter and the forces that animate it,” its text explains.

“Beneath the city surface,” says the wall description for Out of Time, a new exhibition at Centre VOX which Doriane Biot curated, “underground networks reveal the faults in a system on the brink of collapse,” as if at once describing the show and the wider state of affairs.

Excerpt from Out of Time by Valentin Noujaïm curated by Doriane Biot at Centre VOX. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Three current Montreal exhibitions and a call for national curatorial expertise demonstrate that curation is the new artform par excellence at a time when art in all its forms is failing to exist for its own sake.

Curatorial initiatives have recently usurped individual artists and art movements within the contemporary art world’s complex political hierarchy. So much so that audiences today might recognize and invest as much in the curators as the artists themselves as the stars of the show. This represents a significant and specifically 21st century shift in art’s implicit social influence and exposes the economic underpinnings of object-ideas that hold purely speculative value.

This trend follows the Netflixization of visual entertainment and the festivalization of the live musical experience that emerged throughout the first two decades of the new millennium. Ostensibly, these turns emerged in response to consumers’ increasing appetites for variety and quantity over specificity and quality. However, the move towards curated contemporary art indicates that even the most hyper-specific cultural forms are viewed as potentially valuable when enfolded into broader organizational systems. And it is the organizers — and not the organized — that hold sway.

Nothing is so marginal that it cannot be enclosed; nothing so underground that it cannot be exhumed and included and exhibited. Like pigs sniffing for truffles, curators train their senses beneath the surface to transform dirt into fertility.

A display of a uniquely designed astronaut suit on a pedestal, showcasing a helmet and distinct patches, set against a minimalist gallery backdrop.
Jesse Tungilik, Sealskin Spacesuit (2919-2020), part of An Assembly for the Cosmos, curated by Antoine Bertron at Galerie UQAM. Photographed for NicheMTL.

We might view the curatorial turn as a natural extension of the postmodern aesthetic mode, the palimpsestic assemblage of genre, history, and tradition. Culture unmoored from conventional context begs alternative organizational schemes. Enter art curators to creatively arrange works that are increasingly produced outside of traditional institutions, less influenced by mass artistic movements than by bureaucratic authority. Curators assemble artists and their works like orphanages rescue motherless children, placing them in the foster care of the artist-run center, the foundation, the university gallery — the new disciplinary enclosure.

Still, it is naïve to believe that all of this curating exists anywhere but squarely within economic confines. The real reason that streaming services perennially reclaim forgotten T.V. shows, and third-tier bands are constantly commemorated with festival-headlining slots, is to wring out every last valuable potential, to turn out the pockets of the nichest possible cultural outliers. So, too, do artists become raw capital, which cannot help but have an effect on the kinds of works they create.

Art at its most romantic ceases to be exclusively aesthetic, at its most political ceases to comment upon and react to some perceived injustice, and at its most social ceases to find its place within likeminded communities. Instead, art at its most cynical begins to exist to attract the curator’s eye, to fit a theme, and ultimately, to be a successful commodity within a system of capital exchange that pays only in attention and accelerated currency.

Politicians have historically looked to artists as barometers of social pressure. Now, artists appeal to politicians and granting agencies and curatorial experts to relieve economic pressure. Art becomes a retreat from true politics rather than confronting and reshaping it.

A person wearing an unusual headpiece made of wires and materials stands on stage, surrounded by an audience in a dimly lit room with colored lights.
Co-curator Mathieu Arsenault demonstrates noise cocoon (2025), a sculptural and interactive sound work by the artist Lea Boudreau, at Ateliers Belleville. Photographed for NicheMTL

“I’d hoped I could get away with supporting the art that I liked with little compromise and much less external criticism,” writes Steph Kretowicz, co-founder and editor of the online arts publication AQNB, in her essay entitled “Gatekeeping Without a Gate.” AQNB ceased publication in May 2023 amidst the post-pandemic consolidation of not just big but immense tech. The platform became “impossible to monetize,” Kretowicz explains. The only way to sustain a project that seeks to assemble “incredibly dynamic but also pretty niche cultural discourse,” as she describes, is to curate it.

“The ability of articulation to give form to authentic discourse,” wrote Michel Foucault in The Order of Things, “was conditional upon its being linked together by the patent or secret function of the verb to be.” In other words, the existence of objects precedes their ideological or functional application. Aimless art, then, is most in danger of being subsumed by predatory capital chiefly because of its precarity, its mere and fragile existence. The smaller the artist, the more susceptible they are to curatorial profiteering.

When artistic taste exceeds the importance of art itself, we should be on high alert for a wholesale bankruptcy of aesthetic imagination — a “system,” as Doriane Biot wrote, “on the brink of collapse.”

Ars gratia artis, as it has endured for centuries, simply no longer exists. Real power and control are now located at the curatorial rather than the creative level. This puts extreme responsibility into the curator’s hands, an obligation to select, and order, and exhibit artistic objects in ways that antagonize rather than appease capital.

When politics occupies the realm of performance art, it is up to curators to make art perform politically.◼︎

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