Author Archives: Ryan Alexander Diduck

999 Words

One Weird Trick

“A cool tool is …
Anything useful that increases learning, empowers individuals, does work that matters, is either the best, or the cheapest, or the only thing that works.”
—Cool Tools: A Catalogue of Possibilities, Kevin Kelly

The 2013 directory entitled Cool Tools is a compendium of technological objects that promises to help its readers, for example, put on a house concert, design a logo, rear an optimistic child, replace bulbs with LEDs, bypass real estate agents, and scores more apparently useful activities.

The tools clearly do not accomplish the tasks themselves. But they facilitate the work with machinery designed to economize jobs that have become commonplace time occupiers in modern life. According to Kelly, machines like the pineapple slicer/corer, the pocket chainsaw, the TUSA hyperdry snorkel, and the Matterform 3D scanner are the coolest tools.

Intelligent machines don’t just surround us. We seamlessly integrate them, most often unconsciously, into our daily lives. From the mobile phones to which we are eternally tethered, to the terminals that dispense and take our money, to the vehicles that transport us, to the boxes in our homes that we use to keep our food frozen, wash our clothes, warm our soup, condition our air, watch movies, and listen to music, technology is everywhere, ubiquitous, invisible. We really only notice technology when it doesn’t work as intended.

An illuminated projection on a curved surface displaying text about vibrant user experiences and sound elements, with a light point in the background.
Rough realtime translation of Lucas Paris’s Q&A following Vibrant User.Online at the Satosphère, 16 June 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

A spate of recent musico-technological events including the ELEKTRA biennale and the Society for Arts and Technology’s 30th anniversary has again placed technology at the focal center of local cultural production. Montreal is known for its techno-predilection. The MUTEK festival in particular has since 2003 positioned Montreal as a vital international destination for digital arts. The LUMINO festival, Cité Mémoire, Oasis Immersion, and current and past public artworks like Utopie by Jonathan Villeneuve and 21 Balançoires by Daily tous les jours signal Montreal’s municipal commitment to technological innovation in the service of art.

This begs the question: does technology make better art? Does it make our artists better? The tools artists use no doubt shape the works they create. But do modern technological advancements actually stimulate creativity?

Currently, the hottest debate revolves around creative Artificial Intelligence. Should artists use A.I.? And if so, does this toolbox simplify art-making processes like, say, a pineapple slicer/corer might simplify making fruit salad? Should art be innovative, as if it were a technology?

It is helpful to recall Joseph Weizenbaum’s influential 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason in which the computer scientist and ELIZA programmer proclaimed that computers lack the capacity for moral judgement. Computer Power’s most famous anecdote recounts how Weizenbaum’s secretary became so engaged with ELIZA, his benign computer programme designed to mimic a psychoanalyst’s routine, that his secretary asked him to vacate the room.

It might be tempting to maintain that machines don’t require moral judgement when human users can steer and, when necessary, override A.I.’s deficiencies. Yet, ELIZA’s inability to judge seemingly interfered with Weizenbaum’s secretary’s judgement, as if the evolution of the machine precipitated the devolution of our own. The fact that his secretary knew full-well how ELIZA worked is what prompted Weizenbaum to issue dire warnings about A.I.’s dangerously seductive allure.

A performer in a stylish outfit singing into a microphone on stage, with blue lighting and a DJ behind a covered table.
Xela Edna performs at Espace SAT 11 June 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The intelligent tool that still fascinates me most is MIDI, or the Musical Instrument Digital Interface — so much so that I wrote a book, Mad Skills, about its cultural history. Ostensibly, MIDI is the protocol that enables digital musical instruments to “talk” to one another, as if exercising judgement. But what it really is, is a mechanism for technological control, not only of one technology over another, but also of music technology over analogue music making, of corporate control over maker culture — ultimately, the tyranny of the binary.

Circuitry is not the technology most essential to MIDI. Curiously, MIDI’s intelligence has nothing to do with computers. It goes much further back than that. Indeed, the clock may be the first artificial intelligence.

“The clock,” wrote Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilization, “is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but of synchronizing the actions of men.” There would be no techno music were it not for clocks. The clock measures and regulates and quantifies and values time, the medium within which all of existence unfolds.

Like ELIZA, the clock itself is incapable of moral judgement. Rather, the clock reshaped the erratic immorality of chaos into a strict moral code of stability: “under the rule of the order,” Mumford contended, “surprise and doubt and caprice and irregularity were put at bay.” Clocks did not just produce synchronization. They also created the concept of asynchrony.

A performer interacts with electronic equipment on a table while a visual projection of circular patterns is displayed behind them in a dimly lit space.
Myriam Bleau performs with the ELEKTRA festival at Centre PHI, 18 June 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The MIDI clock was always off by a hair’s breadth. And this reintroduced a degree of chaos into the digital musical order, kicking events, in a manner of speaking, off the grid. Montreal artists — like Myriam Bleau, who performed a skittering set on 19 June at Centre PHI with a collection of illuminated spinning tops, or Xela Edna’s unexpected technical glitches on the night of her album launch at the SAT for My Data Cannot Rot — consciously or subconsciously intervene in the clock’s domination and trouble the notion that technological tools are unquestionably cool.

Fluorescent lights flicker rhythmically. Data indeed rots. Anyone who has ever relied on Montreal’s Métro system understands that time is just a suggestion here. If the train is running late, more time is simply added to the clock. The Métro’s turnstiles are locked from forward motion. But everyone knows that if you spin them backwards half a turn, you can slide right through.

Technological innovation doesn’t de facto produce better art. It is arguably in the ethics and aesthetics of technological failure that creative revolutions are incubated. If intelligent machines encourage our moral stagnation, then winding the clock back might be the most promising strategy to push us forward. Sometimes, what works best is that which evidently doesn’t.

As tech-savvy as Montreal presents itself, our cutting-edge technologies seldom function as advertised. And so, we exploit weird tricks, cool tools to navigate our social spaces, our culture.◼︎

Cover image: Public Appeal performs at Espace SAT 11 June 2026. Rory Creelman for NicheMTL.

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All Dressed

Animal Instinct: in conversation with Dana Gingras

“All radical engagements are inventions in some sense: unthought, untried, extraordinary.”
—Erin Manning, Politics of Touch

Movement is the body’s only constant. And movement implies uncertainty, change, risk. We never know when we move precisely where we will end up. So, a degree of belief is necessary.

A general sense of disembodiment has emerged in the digital age, as if the virtual is immaterial. We tend to get lulled into thinking that data is invisible. And free. We forget that it requires tremendous natural resources to produce and store and move information around. The digital world always returns to the physical.

“Bodies have a certain kind of weight, a certain kind of history,” the filmmaker and choreographer Dana Gingras says. “Just through the weight of our bones, we have this connection to the earth.”

Gingras has invited me round to her studio not far from the Rosemont metro on a particularly rainy afternoon, my soaking clothing a reminder of my own bodily weight. Weeks earlier, I had met Gingras at Cinéma Moderne for the first public screening of Jump Cut, a series of eight late-night cable access-style short films that Gingras had produced in association with the CTM Festival and Goethe-Institut.

Jump Cut began as a pandemic project when Gingras and her collaborator, the contemporary dancer and video artist Sonya Stefan, found themselves under the coronavirus restrictions and itching for a creative outlet.

“We thought we’d be back in the fall,” Gingras recalls. “It’s just a three-month blip, we thought. But by the latter part of 2020, I was like, ‘what are we going to do here?’”

That February, Gingras and her dance company, Animals of Distinction, were mid-stride with the Montreal post-rock band Fly Pan Am touring Frontera, a production that combines the band’s stark music and her troupe’s acrobatic performance. “We had all sorts of invitations that year,” Gingras says. “And then we all know what happened.”

In a tragic twist of irony, Frontera, a meditation on borders and mobility with a 33-member cast and crew, was reduced by covid protocols from travelling internationally to sheltering in place in the Mile End. Not content to sit still, Gingras and Stefan began inventing scenarios and sharing them via email.

“We started making up these characters — Max Clown and Dirty Ghost,” Gingras tells me. “We were going a little stir-crazy. And the building across the street at the time was completely abandoned, and I had a key. So, we were going over there to explore, and we just ended up doing it there.”

Gingras and Stefan shot and edited the first episode of Jump Cut that autumn and enlisted other co-conspirators including the video artist Sabrina Ratté, provocateur Peaches, Hotel2Tango proprietor Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, Fly Pan Am’s Roger Tellier-Craig, and the electronic musician Marie Davidson to contribute to an ongoing series that would occupy their time throughout the depths of the pandemic.

“We didn’t think we would make it into anything. And then CTM came on board as a co-producer,” Gingras explains, “and we were able to do a whole series.”

A surreal digital artwork featuring a translucent waterfall effect, with abstract shapes and a figure partially obscured by flowing material, set against a gradient background.
“We talk all the time about the glitch.” Still image from Jump Cut #2 with Marie Davidson, Sabrina Ratté, and Dana Gingras.

A serial collaborator, Gingras is a rare artist who is able to immediately inspire trust and respect in her colleagues.

“She has a strong vision,” Marie Davidson tells me, “but also great intuition. Working with her was a real pleasure. She gave me a lot of space to explore, and doing a project with her brought back energy into my own practice afterwards.”

Tellier-Craig’s connection with Gingras dates back more than two decades when she commissioned him in 2005 to work on the original version of Monumental, the choreographic piece for which Godspeed You! Black Emperor ended up performing the live score.

“She really trusts people,” reveals Tellier-Craig. “She gives you a lot of freedom. It’s very fluid. I’ve seen her work with dancers, and she has this calmness and openness which is really surprising when the stakes are so high. There are so many people involved and there’s a lot of money being spent. She’s very together,” Tellier-Craig says. “I admire her.”

I note a thematic thread of glitchy aesthetics running through almost every Jump Cut episode. The author and professor Laura U. Marks writes in her essay entitled Loving a Disappearing Image that decaying media that flaunt their tenuous connection to reality “all appeal to a look of love and loss.” The materiality of the medium comes to the fore in each Jump Cut when the image is interfered with, and during the screening at Cinéma Moderne, even the Vimeo platform co-operates by dropping out at times and displaying just the spinning “throbber” icon.

“We talk all the time about the glitch,” says Gingras. “It is absolutely fundamental to my choreographic work. I’m not interested in perfection. I’m interested in how dissonance can create discomfort — but also discomfort because it decenters ideas of perfection, or standards of beauty. Those standards are so oppressive that you want to mess with them. I want to be reminded that there are other possibilities. Glitch is that,” she grins. “It’s the pearl. It’s the grit.”

A woman in a stylish gray shirt and black leather pants is sitting on the floor, posing with a calm expression against a plain backdrop.
“Sometimes things don’t go the way we want them to.” Dana Gingras photographed by Justine Latour.

Dana Gingras was born in a small northern British Columbia town and moved with her family to South America before ending up in Scotland in her teens, just in time for the post-punk scene to explode. “Music was really part of the water I swam in,” Gingras says.

“I saw Siouxsie and the Banshees when I was 13, the night that the original lineup broke up, and there was a huge riot in the theatre. Robert Smith of The Cure stepped in. They did a 20-minute version of ‘The Lord’s Prayer.’ I was like, ‘this is so amazing.’ It was chaos and cathartic energy and that’s what I was drawn to. I was like, ‘Aha, this is what I want to do.’ But what form it was going to take, I had no idea. I didn’t know it was called dance or choreography. I just knew that putting ideas together into some kind of cohesive structure and making something political, something that delivered some impact, I was like, ‘This is it.’ Just seeing what could be expressed through the body that wasn’t necessarily language-based. Or that the meaning could stay open enough that everyone could have their own emotional experience with it. I was very interested in that.”

Gingras eventually returned to Canada and studied dance, “probably to stay sane,” she deadpans. “Like, I feel much better now that I’ve thrown myself at the floor a hundred times,” she laughs.

Gingras started out and has since remained outside of institutional pedagogy, having taken technical classes but never studying formally. “It’s given me a lot of freedom to make it up as I go along, instead of feeling like because I’ve done that training, that’s how I need to express myself.”

In 1993, Gingras launched the contemporary dance company The Holy Body Tattoo in Vancouver with Noam Gagnon and composer-musician and co-founder of Voivod, Jean-Yves Thériault.

A performer in a sleek black outfit is dancing with dynamic movements, illuminated by blue lighting amidst a backdrop of vintage television screens displaying distorted images.
“I start from a very pedestrian place: how does the body move in space?” Still image from anOther by Dana Gingras/Animals Of Distinction. Dana Gingras, Sonya Stefan, and Group A.

“Our first work had a huge video component,” Gingras says. “William Gibson actually wrote the text for it. So, already then, there was this idea of bringing people from different artforms together. To make a performance for the body was at the center, but I’m not that inspired by straight traditional dance. I was much more interested in film and art. I wanted to speak to these other artforms, but with the body being central to choreography.”

While she was performing with The Holy Body Tattoo, Gingras suffered a torn anterior cruciate ligament which led to her first forced hiatus from dance and eight months of rehabilitation. “That was one of those moments of huge change in my life,” says Gingras. “But it ended up being a gift, so there was something in that and I tried to embrace it. Sometimes things don’t go the way we want them to. What’s on the other side of it?”

Gingras studied film in Vancouver and Los Angeles and relocated in the early aughts to Montreal. “The language here is very fluid, back and forth. Spanish is actually my first fluent language. But that’s what I love about Montreal is that you can respond in English and have someone speak to you in French and have a whole conversation in two languages. I love that.”

Nonverbal communication in many respects is by far the most effective form. Our bodies speak even when our languages are misunderstood. Gingras recognizes this crucial truth.

“There are obviously aesthetic languages that come with dance,” she says. “And I’ve always been interested in stripping that back. I start from a very pedestrian place: how does the body move in space? Stand up, sit down. What are the gestures, what are the tics? I like to strip it down, so I don’t see the dance in it, to start. To me, the dance is the game of the rhythm of these things, the repetition of these things.”

Gingras is currently working on two new projects. One is a solo performance for the dance artist Caroline Gravel, with a score by Sophie Trudeau and the visual artist Caroline Monnet’s scenography. The other is a larger undertaking called Trance Fiction, which Gingras is working on with Sabrina Ratté.

Digital art displaying abstract forms in blue and white, resembling fluid movement with dynamic, flowing patterns against a black background.
“Remember that you have a body.” Still image from Trance Fiction by Dana Gingras/Animals of Distinction and Sabrina Ratté.

“It’s a three-part project,” Gingras explains. “It’s a live performance with my dancers. It’s also an installation with performance. And it’s also video mapping for a building. So, it has different iterations of the same content.”

Without prompting, Gingras seems to confess: “I take a long time to make stuff. I like to work on things and leave them and come back and see how the world has changed, and how we’ve changed.”

We talk for over an hour about how to survive financially as an artist (she recommends that dancers have some kind of parallel career), about A.I. (Gingras promises that she does not use it for final iterations of her work), about augmenting the body with technology (she is also a Gyrotonic master trainer), and about the mechanics of the human body.

“I’ve been involved in cadaver dissection classes,” Gingras divulges. “Now, talk about a technology that’s mind-blowing, absolutely mind-blowing: the body.”

I suddenly become very aware of my own physicality: my damp garments, the way I am seated, my hand gently clenching the armrest. I relax and come back into the present moment to pet Gingras’s dog who throughout our conversation has been quietly seated at my feet. I glance down at my phone and notice the waveform of my Voice Memos app dancing in real time to the sound of our voices. I mention that technology deludes us into disregarding our bodies, mindlessly scrolling, passively consuming.

“First of all, remember that you have a body,” Gingras advises. “There is something about the body now that’s more important than it has ever been.”◼︎

Cover image: courtesy of the artist.

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Play Recent

Heroes & Villains

Heroes of Greece: The Age of Troy, Pointe-à-Callière, Until 7 March 2027

A white statue of a female figure with a fish tail, holding a large fish in her right hand, displayed on a blue pedestal in an art exhibit.
Statue of a Siren, 370 BCE, Pentelic Marble, National Archaeology Museum, Athens. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“And you too, your fate awaits you too, godlike as you are, Achilles — to die in battle beneath the proud rich Trojans’ walls!”
—The Ghost of Patroclus, The Iliad

When the mythological figure and fast runner Achilles decides of his own free will to oppose Agamemnon, his mother, Thetis, a powerful sea nymph who was known to metamorphose into fire, water, lions, and snakes, warns her son that it will spell his demise. And so, Achilles retreats. But Achilles’s fury will eventually twist fate and lead to the fulfillment of his wretched destiny.

“Fate,” says Anastasia Balaska, scientific coordinator of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, “is something different than the will of the Gods. And also, there is free will. Even though fate has been written, people are responsible for their actions. Achilles knew that his fate was to die. He knew that he was a tragic person. But his actions were his. He could be a hero, or he could stay at home.”

This is in contrast to the Christian notion of choice — which is what separates humans from beasts — and the connection between free will and salvation. “Christians believe that we have free will and we get what we deserve in the afterlife,” Balaska says. “The Greeks had a hero code.”

Alexei Kolakis-Landon & Tomas Dessureault, Ceremony, 6595 St. Urbain, 4-7 June 2026

A person stands in front of a large abstract painting with shades of red and dark lines, in an art gallery setting. The individual is wearing a black top and a patterned skirt, and has a crochet bag slung over their shoulder.
Installation view of a work by Alexei Kolakis-Landon. Photographed for NicheMTL

“The vague is a positive state of intensive activity enveloping all possible varieties of experience. The tendency to take form may be suspended and held in intensity.”
—Brian Massumi, Not Determinately Nothing

When you first see a new painting, the world of possibilities is open and endless. It is pure potential. There is nothing yet determined. This is the most exciting moment for an onlooker: to see without regarding, to experience in advance of identification.

When you first encounter a new face, an analogous world opens up, and every interpersonal possibility is potentially an option. This is the most exciting moment for a lover: to be overwhelmed with beauty, to resist and then settle into recognition.

The opposite of memory is pure anticipation.

William Basinski with Kathryn Mohr, Théâtre Fairmount, 2 June 2026

A performer on stage with a computer and equipment, illuminated by blue and white lights, in front of an audience at a music venue.
William Basinski performs at Théâtre Fairmount. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“There is no ‘substantial’ difference between the God of Love and the God of excessive arbitrary cruelty, lo ’mperador del doloroso regno, it is one and the same God who appears in a different light only due to a parallax shift of our perspective.”
—Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View

The sole concept that is allowed to be infinite in Western culture, albeit begrudgingly, is God. Perhaps this is because both infinity and God are unknowable to the Western mind, inconceivable to our contemporary and technocratic and increasingly binary consciousness.

An eternal existence simply does not compute in modern civilization. The de facto teleological trajectory that we recognize is from indeterminate to determined. The infinite cannot be a starting point because infinity has no beginning. Nor, for the same reason, can God be the end.

Leonard Cohen sang in his 1992 song entitled “The Future” of a deficiency in quantification — “won’t be nothing,” Cohen growled, “you can measure anymore.”

However, the reverse is proving to be true. Everything is measurable, quantifiable, either off or on, never neither.

Quatuor Molinari plays Dmitri Shostakovich, Conservatoire de musique de Montréal, 31 May 2026

A string quartet performing on stage in a venue with bright yellow walls, featuring four musicians in white shirts holding their instruments. There are empty chairs on stage, and an audience is visible in the foreground.
Quatuor Molinari performs at Conservatoire de musique de Montréal. Photographed for NicheMTL.

I’ve been in this town so long
So long to the city
I’m fit with the stuff
To ride in the rough
And sunny down snuff, I’m alright
By the heroes and villains.
—Brian Wilson, “Heroes and Villains”

That heroism is so often associated with war, and victory in war, is what Karl Marx or Sigmund Freud would have likely diagnosed as the impediment to the growth of culture. Still, in today’s wars, there is no victory. Or rather, victory is expressed in the ability to sustain ambient engagement rather than to prevail in any given battle.

In order to transcend capitalism, which we must now acknowledge is commensurate with war and the decline of culture, it is necessary to devolve to a state of persistent vagueness, for incongruity and indeterminacy to endure. We should redefine heroism, then, not as victory or defeat but as resistance to the tendency to take form.

Lynda Gaudreau, Romances, VOX, centre de l’image contemporaine, Until 20 June 2026

A collage of vintage newspaper clippings featuring headlines about crime, scandals, and various incidents, displayed on a wall.
Installation view of Romances at Centre VOX. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The hatred directed against war is perhaps like the mania that alone has the strength to free the subject from the tyrant.”
—Judith Butler, The Force of Non-Violence

There is a segment of any crowd that will cheer for the bad guy. At the movies or in the boxing ring, or even in the American presidency, villains are charismatic and command transgressive attention.

Strength is a quality of both heroism and villainy. The evil force flexes its muscle, and the hero overpowers this force with superior strength. There is built-in drama in this conflict, a familiar narrative arc along which we can plot our progress. The further we are away from victory, the closer we must be to the beginning of the narrative, and the more the necessity to build strength.

But cultivating weakness, what is currently understood as “soft power,” refusing the narrative arc of conflict, posits an alternative story to the might-is-right barbarism that dominates global affairs, from politics to music and art and everything between.

The dominant narrative is that if a narrative doesn’t represent the victims of domination, invent a stronger narrative. But reinforcing strength, whether through militarism or through the stories that we tell each other, only further entrenches the universal notion of an arms race.

A call to action is no longer the appropriate response to violence when “CTA” also describes effective marketing copywriting. Strength is inherently capitalistic. Strength is a virtue of the God of Love and the God of excessive arbitrary cruelty.

I propose a call to inaction. Inaction is not interesting. It is not productive. It is not a compelling narrative. Inaction can be neither good nor evil. Inaction neither wins nor loses. It is neither perpetrator nor victim, neither villain nor hero.

Inaction is indirection. It has no subject nor object. It has no aim nor purpose. But neither is it purposeless.

Inaction at once acknowledges and disregards God’s will, our will, and fate.◼︎

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Cover image: Statue of Zeus, the arbiter of fate, 2nd century BCE, Marble, National Archaeology Museum, Athens. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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How Do You Spell Holiday?

The Dislocation of Culture: notes on Art Speaks with Homi K. Bhabha and Glenn D. Lowry

Beginning about a decade ago on the social network formerly known as Twitter, anonymous accounts began cropping up posting out-of-context screen grabs from popular television shows.

Feeds dedicated to the most-watched programmes, like The Sopranos and The Simpsons, attracted followers in the hundreds of thousands, and before long, almost every T.V. series had its own viral no-context Twitter account. The Guardian expressly singled out @oocsopranos as “a shibboleth of sorts,” an inside joke for the initiated.

Part of the thrill of these feeds was the simultaneous randomness and hyper-specificity of orphan images that would every now and then coincide with concurrent events or appear to shed new light upon some aspect of pop culture.

Another pleasure was their ability to resuscitate, recirculate, and remediate one form into another, in this case transplanting conventional television into the online realm and generating an exhilaration around the juxtapositional currency of it all.

The Harvard University professor Homi K. Bhabha might have identified in no-context Twitter feeds “the process of reinscription and negotiation,” where surplus meaning is produced in the time-lag between the originary text and its variant reiteration. But in 1994, when Bhabha was writing his seminal tome, The Location of Culture, Twitter did not yet exist, and it would take until just now to place these disparate notions, like a Ringgold alongside a Picasso, side by side.

I couldn’t help but think of out-of-context Twitter accounts as Bhabha and The Museum of Modern Art’s director emeritus Glenn D. Lowry engaged in conversation last Wednesday at la Grande Bibliothèque for the most recent Art Speaks event. Specifically, I couldn’t help but recall the thin sliver of time during which presenting no-context content seemed radical and new — those halcyon days between Twitter as a space for niche memes and the completion of its transformation into a river of fundament.

If Lowry and Bhabha’s discussion was any indication of the museum’s imminent trajectory, we are currently witnessing the art institution’s analogous swirling into the sewers of mass culture. It was less worrisome that this talk advanced no new ideas than that even the old ideas were defanged.

Like a number of attendees, the superficiality and lack of spontaneity in Bhabha and Lowry’s dialogue disappointed me. I was furthermore disappointed by the self-congratulatory mansplaining to questions from some very smart women around how to make contemporary art engaging to young people, A.I.’s propensity to misinform, and the MMFA’s chief curator Mary-Dailey Desmarais’s inquiry about the museum’s pedagogical responsibility.

But what was most disappointing was the insistence that destabilization is the most productive way for museums to meet this present moment of profound and cascading crises. Amongst the game of Buzzword Bingo that this pair played onstage — Immersion! Activation! Agency! — the notion of deliberately destabilizing historicity came off at best as antiquated, and at worst, reckless.

Wednesday’s discussion opens with MoMA founding director Alfred H. Barr Jr.’s diagrammatic metaphor of the museum acting as a “torpedo moving through time,” going on to challenge the linearity of art history’s course and suggesting instead a rhizomatic organizational structure.

Bhabha and Lowry apparently borrowed the rhizome concept from Deleuze and Guattari who wrote in A Thousand Plateaus about the opposition between the One and the multiple: languages, territories, histories. “At the level of theory,” Deleuze and Guattari suggest, “the status of multiplicities is correlative to that of spaces” — presumably, in this instance, the museum space.

Lowry proposes drawing new lines through this archival space in order to encourage new points of accumulation, stoppage, and resonance. The idea is that dislocating artworks from narrow historical or generic lines will trace heterogeneous lines that tease out new connections and possibilities for making meaning.

Lowry invokes the example of hanging a Picasso next to a Faith Rinngold painting, contrasting their respective movements, epochs, and subjectivities, and antagonizing the audience to draw new lines of flight. In these unforeseen lines, Lowry believes, is radical potential.

A live interview event featuring two speakers on stage with a large screen behind them displaying art pieces in a gallery setting.
Glenn D. Lowry and Homi K. Bhabha at la Grande Bibliothèque, 27 May 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

One of the problems with rhizomatic structure is that it also characterizes the virus, the operative mode for the mass circulation of disorder. Releasing ideas from their traditional ecosystems opens up the theoretical space that Fredric Jameson described as the logic of postmodern historiography — “a cultural genre thus generically separated from the other one called historical knowledge.”

The “interesting dissonance” and “garish magic realism” of unexpected juxtapositions, according to Jameson, produces a “bonus of pleasure to be consumed.” This is not radical; this is capital, limiting rather than liberating, restraining instead of redeeming.

Deleuze and Guattari warn, too, that each kind of line has its dangers. “The lines of flight,” they caution, “always risk abandoning their creative potentialities…being turned into a line of destruction pure and simple (fascism).”

As a Canadian of Ukrainian descent, I am constantly reminded in this time of crisis of the cultural annihilation policy that Russia and other violent global powers are bureaucratically enacting in order to rewrite history. Destroying Ukrainian art and iconography, blowing up religious edifices, razing entire swaths of cultural memory — these are destructive strategies, not theoretical abstractions. They are really happening. The Ukrainian people right now would do anything for a sense of cultural stability.

The past is another country. Thus, we must be aware that removing works of art from their chronological context is the equivalent of redrawing maps, dislocating culture, and gerrymandering history.

So, forgive me if destabilizing historicity in an American art museum appears a bit out of step with what international institutions might be doing to face this moment of crisis. Forgive me for saying that I appreciate organization, admire order, respect historical knowledge. On the frontlines, clear communication and accurate timing may win both small battles and wider wars.

Ultimately, Lowry and Bhabha’s conversation confirmed that contemporary art has been entirely subsumed into systems of value, which Jameson hinted at as the “bonus of pleasure.” Jameson’s acolyte, the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher, wrote presciently in 2004: “… the frontier zones of hypercapital do not try to repress so much as absorb the irrational and the illogical.”

Inside capitalism’s infinite confines, there is no such thing as spontaneous surplus value. Every risk is managed, every shock is measurable, every juxtaposition rendered predictable. In the lingo of out-of-context Sopranos: “Every last fucking coffee bean is in the computer and has to be accounted for.”

If time is money, as the old axiom goes, then the time-lag between sign and meaning, utterance and interpretation, is where (or, more accurately, when) excess value emerges. Its harvesting, however, is instantaneous. Therefore, the juxtaposition of Pablo Picasso against Faith Ringgold is less about activating meaning between these two diverse artists than it is about prolonging and monetizing the act of activation. Escape is impossible, not even through the gift shop.

As soon as a system starts benefiting those who protest it, the system ceases to be a structure worth protesting. Since participation time is more valuable than resistance time. Because of this, contemporary art has ceased to advance radical political ideas unless those ideas can be commodified. Even Banksy’s quixotic street art is bought and sold — and curated.

And so, radical order-making has become the avant-garde artform par excellence to oppose instability. The logical counterweight to productivity is non-productivity, just as non-violence is the antithesis of violence.

Curating contemporary art that is impossible to monetize is one radical tactic. Think of Marc-Olivier Hamelin’s recent exhibition at Centre Clark entitled Both of us were dreamers, young love in the sun, or the LODE collective’s show La naissance de l’art currently on at Galerie Eli Kerr. These assemblages of banal and unmarketable objects anticipate their designation and cultivate new configurations of accumulation, stoppage, and resonance.

Text discussing the impact of key exhibitions on qualified artists, referencing 19th and 20th-century bourgeoisie.
Detail, Comment by Nicolas Mavrikakis, 28 May 2026. Screenshot for NicheMTL, 2026-05-30 at 16.33.54.

I was heartened to read a few thoughtful critiques of Lowry and Bhabha’s conversation online, notably one that Le Devoir’s art critic Nicolas Mavrikakis had written. In it, Mavrikakis says:

On aurait pu aussi évoquer le retour en force de la censure (à droite comme à gauche), ainsi que celui de l’autocensure. On aurait pu discuter de la soumission de nos institutions à l’argent et au vedettariat de pacotille, à l’argent de la mode et du commerce parfois sale, à la logique des marques et du spectacle. On peut également évoquer la consommation des artistes par le milieu des arts, qui les jette dès qu’ils ne sont plus assez rentables; l’instrumentalisation de l’art.

We could also have invoked the resurgence of censorship (on both the right and the left), as well as the rise of self-censorship. We could have discussed our institutions’ subservience to money and vulgar celebrity, to the money of fashion and sometimes shady commerce, to the logic of brands and of spectacle. We could also have mentioned the art world’s exploitation of artists, discarding them as soon as they are no longer profitable enough. The instrumentalization of art.

I couldn’t agree more that these pressing topics were conspicuously absent from Bhabha and Lowry’s conversation. If the no-context approach is intended to provide an early clue to the MAC’s new direction, I fear that this institution, as well as all museums of its ilk, are in real trouble.

However, at the very bottom of Mavrikakis’s comment, which a friend sent me on Instagram, was a delicious out-of-context juxtaposition. The collapsable bubble prompts us to click on “Voir moins.”

This, I believe, is paramount and the most poignant advice to impart upon younger generations first encountering contemporary art — or how to confront A.I.’s insidious ascendency, or the responsibility of cultural institutions to retain historical knowledge.

See less. Triangulate better.◼︎

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The Mass Ornament

David Altmejd, Elle, Bradley Ertaskiran, Until 4 July 2026

A metal duct mounted on a concrete block wall, casting a shadow on the surface below.
David Altmejd’s L’etoile casts a shadow on the wall in the bunker at Bradley Ertaskiran. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“An object of art is an honest way of making a living, and this is much a different idea from the fancier notion that art is a scam and a ripoff. The bourgeoisie have, after all, made it a scam. But you could never explain to someone who uses God’s gift to enslave that you have used God’s gift to be free.”
—Rene Ricard, “The Radiant Child”

The dance between artist and observer is as transient as any dance craze that has come and gone before. It used to be fashionable for the critic to try and gain access to the artist and understand their motivations; at one time, critics fancied themselves psychoanalysts who interpreted the inner workings of artists through their art as if they were forensic crime scene investigators or handwriting experts. Artists, too, have perennially shaped their art for their critical audiences, attempting to anticipate their tastes and desires, to comment upon some underlying condition or natural disposition intrinsic in the contemporary public.

Today, when all art is accessible with a click or a tap or a swipe of the screen, and everyone can observe anything and become an instant expert upon it, what is the objective of the critic that the casual viewer cannot achieve?

It is no longer enough to comment upon structure and form and tradition and perceived inspiration, or to speculate on the artist’s inner impetus for making art. The transactional circumstances of this brand-new dance, too, are laid bare. Artists are no less workers than those who toil on assembly lines or suffer through service industry jobs. And critics have infiltrated the ranks of artists, compelled to draw upon some creative zeitgeist and produce novelty.

Artists and critics are each doing The Watusi on opposing sides of a two-way mirror in 1982, displaced in space and dislocated in time, alienated in virtual communities and disconnected by digital technologies that function to enrich their shareholders by exploiting and enslaving us both. Art, as any other productive pursuit in the hyper-capitalist age, pays in attention rather than capital, where wealth is measured in engagement and ignorance is bankruptcy.

All art and its observation, regardless of medium or language or form, teaches these dance moves today. The critic’s business is to reveal the artist’s obscure secrets while enshrouding the obvious ones in labyrinthine layers of mystery.

Wagner and Debussy: From Love to the Sea, Lawrence Power, viola and Elim Chan, conductor, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 14 May 2026

Conductor leading an orchestra, deeply focused, wearing a black outfit, with sheet music in the foreground.
Elim Chan conducts the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal. Eduardus Lee for the OSM.

“Nothing is more compromising than a thought! But the state of mind which precedes thought, the labour of the thought still unborn, the promise of future thought, the world as it was before God created it — a recrudescence of chaos.… Chaos makes people wonder.…”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Case of Wagner”

To watch the mass behaviour of a crowd — at a Habs game or an F1 event or the vernissage for an art star’s latest exhibition — is one of the few activities left in which we are presented with the whole rather than its fragments, or wherein the fragments reveal the whole. It is like reading a book in one sitting or devouring a meal in a single mouthful. It is like looking at an ocean from space and recognizing that all the individual ripples and waves conceal one leviathan. Chaos is merely order uncharted.

LODE, La naissance de l’art, Galerie Eli Kerr, Until 27 June

A partially covered large object leaning against a wall, surrounded by wrapped items and a row of small red cups on a dark mat, with wooden crates nearby in an industrial space.
Installation view of LODE, La naissance de l’art, Galerie Eli Kerr. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Fate is expressionless, it is as cold and alien as the stars into whose galactic configurations men project the entanglements which they subconsciously create themselves.”
—Theodor Adorno, “Fantasia Sopra Carmen”

Adorno, writing on Georges Bizet’s Carmen, suggests that freedom is the antithesis of virtue. We can extrapolate from this suggestion that artistic freedom is the antithesis of artistic virtue, and that freedom for artists to paint what they will betrays a profound decline in character, a lack of faith in the trajectory of art history, or a breach in the hull of the vessel that has buoyed art since the first cave paintings appeared at Lascaux.

It is the artist’s job to be truthful in disclosing this decline. It is necessary for the artist to surrender their free will and their agency, itself such a trendy buzzword, and submit to the vibrancy of things. An honest artist will organize matter in some virtuous manner and factor out freedom from the equation. Casting images back into the world is a reiteration of the chaotic impulse that obliges the reactivation of imagination.

Moin with Sediment Club, Espace SAT, 21 May 2026

A live music performance under blue lighting with musicians playing instruments on stage.
Moin performs at Espace SAT. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“I see the girls walk by
dressed in their summer clothes,
I have to turn my head
until my darkness goes.”
—The Rolling Stones, “Paint it Black”

The record label Blackest Ever Black, which released Moin’s first recordings, as well as those produced under their alter ego, Raime, was the sort of label that inspired obsession. Blackest Ever Black’s output varied widely in genre — from the sludgy punk of Raspberry Bulbs to the oddball lo-fi indie of Officer! to four-to-the-floor stompers by Regis and Tropic of Cancer’s angular new wave. And yet there was a unified aesthetic to everything they released into the world: dark, cool, metropolitan, modern.

Blackest Ever Black label boss Kiran Sande was concurrently a commissioning editor at Fact Magazine, one of the first publications to offer me an audience. Sande was my favourite editor to write for and an enigmatic and ephemeral presence thereafter. Music criticism at that time consisted of snarky love-hate relationships with of-the-moment artists rising and falling on the Boomkat splash page and generating passive-aggressive reviews on corporate websites. Sande was the last of a certain type of visionary, a genuine charlatan, aiming with 100% accuracy.

Insoon Ha, Artist-in-Residence lecture, Fonderie Darling, 21 May 2026

A woman standing in front of a group of people in a bright, industrial-style room, giving a presentation or lesson. Windows with natural light and a variety of plants and materials visible in the background.
Studio view of Insoon Ha in residence at Fonderie Darling. Ana Lucia Londono Flores for Fonderie Darling.

“You know Marx and Lenin were pretty lazy dudes when it came to working for somebody. They looked at toil, working for your necessities, as something of a curse.”
—Huey Newton, Speech Delivered at Boston College, 18 November 1970

The criteria for cultural importance are not popularity, marketability, or influence. Import is weighed in granular increments, accumulative intuition. Mass movement is science. Stirring a single soul is magic.

Art is not the Polio vaccine. It is a compulsion, the need to see, and to be seen, and to see what others see, and to grasp the invisible. Writing about art is even less consequential. Criticism doesn’t save lives. In many instances, it wastes them.

The invention of the wheel was art. Understanding the nature of wheels is essential. The dance steps may have changed, but dance is eternal.◼︎

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: Installation view of David Altmejd, Elle, Bradley Ertaskiran. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell

Meet the artist Maskull Lasserre, Arsenal Contemporary, 13 May 2026

A person wearing a gray sweater and dark pants is seen from behind, standing in an art gallery with modern artwork displayed on the walls.
Gallery view of the artist Maskull Lasserre at Arsenal Contemporary, Montreal, 13 May 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The forest reveals its truth for those who are travelling through it on foot.”
—Werner Herzog, “I Rant Against the Jungle”

Trees comprise forests. Though seldom do we see both at once.

Our human perception is such that it focusses upon orders of magnitude, from minute detail to grand scale. Take a walk through a forest and observe this spectrum of awareness in action. Thus, knowing God is impossible because we either apprehend His individual works or an abstract accumulation thereof.

A forest is comprised of trees just as the Kingdom of Heaven is made up of minor miracles.

Andy Stott with Corporation and William Hayes-Dulude, Espace SAT, 9 May 2026

A crowd of people in a dimly lit venue surrounded by purple haze, with soft light beams coming from above.
Andy Stott performs at Espace SAT. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Those who remain at the surface do so at their own peril
Those who dive beneath the surface glorify the grotesque.”
—Genesis P-Orridge & cEvin Key, “Beauty Is the Enemy”

American Transcendentalists considered truth, righness, and beauty to be self-evident. The philosopher Charles Saunders Peirce in the early 20th century conceived of these virtues as the “Ends” of phenomena, under the purview of normative science, the laws of which to Peirce were both universal and necessary.

The universality of truth, rightness, and beauty is indicative of Peirce’s pragmatic understanding of nature and the specificity of the American interpretation of Idealism. But the notion of their necessity addresses something more profound.

Logically speaking, order could not emerge from chaos without truth, rightness, or beauty. Nor could nature function in absence of these three Ends in divine equilibrium, a sort of contemporary, new-world holy trinity.

“I am going to make a series of assertions which will sound wild,” Peirce proclaimed in his fifth lecture on the subject at Harvard University in 1903, “although I cannot omit them if I am to set the supports of pragmatism in their true light.” For Peirce, truth, rightness, and beauty transcended human taste and were philosophically unquestionable. This left no room for argument from his audience, whom he proceeded to call “undeveloped” nominalists, a bold and patent dig at New England’s intellectual elite.

“Reality consists in regularity,” Peirce proclaimed. “Real regularity is active law.”

Céline in Dior: A Dazzling Moment, Musée McCord Stewart, Until 13 September 2026

Gallery view of Céline Dion’s Dior dress exhibited at Musée McCord Stewart. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Your beauty won’t be anything
When I take off my glasses.”
Leonard Cohen, Death of a Lady’s Man

Beauty activates action. It is impossible to remain passive in the presence of prettiness. And given that beauty is universal and necessary, it is one of the most important motivating forces of nature.

However, aesthetic beauty is not synonymous with truth — often, quite the opposite. We attain beauty through augmentation and perversion and concealment and outright denial of our true nature, polishing, as it were, the brass on the Titanic.

Therefore, deception pragmatically galvanizes nature just as effectively as veracity.

Turandot, Orchestre Philharmonique et Chœur des Mélomanes, Maison Symphonique, 10 May 2026

A dramatic scene featuring a man assisting a woman in a black gown who is holding a sword, conveying intense emotion during a performance on stage.
Andrew Haji (left) and Sydney Baedke perform Turandot at Maison Symphonique. Tam Lan Truong for the Orchestre Philharmonique et Chœur des Mélomanes.

“Beauty, women’s business in this society, is the theatre of their enslavement.”
Susan Sontag, On Women

More than in any other social station, American First Ladies may be the world’s most heavily objectified and endlessly scrutinized women.

Women’s Wear Daily, the tabloid journal that chronicled “microtrends” before they were called microtrends, obsessed over Jacqueline Kennedy’s every purchase: suede skirts, knee socks, Gucci shoes. John Fairchild, WWD’s publisher in the 1960s, called Kennedy “Her Elegance.” In contrast, he dubbed Kennedy’s successor, Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson, “Her Efficiency.”

Women’s Wear Daily treads much more carefully today when writing about Mrs. Trump, restricting its coverage to strict facts without editorializing or judgement. Among the harshest criticism it has published since Trump’s first presidency is of Melania “not being ultrathin,” as well as revealing that Wildes & Weinberg, the immigration firm that represented John Lennon during his deportation hearings, helped secure her citizenship, which she received in 2006.

Eventually, WWD turned on the Kennedy clan, too, writing of the late President’s daughter in their signature all-caps headlines (a style that a certain similarly snarky head of state has adopted), “THERE IS NO QUESTION THAT CAROLINE DRESSES MUCH YOUNGER THAN HER AGE.”

Défilé 2026 de l’École supérieure de mode, Centre de design de l’UQAM, 12 May 2026

A model wearing a unique dress featuring a mix of black, white, and patterned fabrics, designed with a strapless bodice and a voluminous skirt. The model is seated on a stool, showcasing the intricate layers and details of the garment.
Lace of a Jester, Claire Miranda-Goldstein. Photographed for NicheMTL (with thanks to Rory Creelman.)

“The pretty things are going to hell
They wore it out, but they wore it well.”
—David Bowie, “The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell”

If beauty is equivalent with rightness and truth, then there is no cause to damn the righteous and truly beautiful. Deceitful beauty, however, is narcissism — “vexation of spirit,” as it is written in Ecclesiastes 2.

The question of what to do with one’s days is at the root of the Western conception of damnation and salvation. Labour in wisdom, and not for pleasure, is considered goodness before God. Labour in sin condemns the sinner to gather up all she labours for and give it to her that is good.

Labour for true beauty, however, must be righteous. Beauty gladdens the heart and unencumbers the spirit. Labour for true beauty also obscures the nature of God and makes Him unknowable. To conceal God’s work is God’s work.

Ecclesiastes 3 is among the Bible’s most well-known chapters, made famous by Pete Seeger in his song, “Turn! Turn! Turn!” which The Byrds in 1965 turned into an international hit. Fashion is instructive here as it is literally seasonal. There is a time proper to scarves and boots, and another time for shirtsleeves and sandals. To make peace in a time of war, or to acquire in a time of loss, is to disobey the Ecclesiastical calendar, like wearing white after labour day.

“He hath made every thing beautiful in his time,” it is written in verse 11, and so ugliness is also a form of seasonal beauty. There is nothing which does not eventually have its moment and purpose. This philosophy is fundamentally pragmatic because it positions the use value of beauty above its aesthetic appeal.

Beautiful utility is good work. Alternately, futility is vanity.◼︎

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: Suffering Machines, Aude B. Verville. Photographed for NicheMTL (with thanks to Rory Creelman.)

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999 Words

Un Oiseau Rebelle: notes on the location of culture

Culture, like blood and other life forces, circulates around the globe as if through a body.

There are certain locations, like New York or London or Paris, that seem more likely to originate culture, whereas other places, like Chicago or Manchester or Montreal, we might recognize more as receivers or interpreters of culture.

Population plays a part in determining whether a location originates or interprets culture. Larger cities tend to be engines of culture, with sympathetic administrative institutions and cultural infrastructures to incubate it.

Demographics is another indicator of where original cultures are more prone to occur. University cities, for instance, with higher numbers of young and enterprising residents tend to cultivate more unique cultural forms.

A confident and vibrant foundational culture, based upon things like shared language, identity, and history, is another significant condition that a given location might be more apt to originate rather than receive culture.

We frequently assign greater value to original cultures and to the locations that nurture them. Cultural insemination suggests a primary vital élan, whereas a secondary, supporting role is reserved for cultural dissemination. But a different kind of power can be found in locations that receive and reinterpret culture — that of revision, or what Homi K. Bhabha calls, “new and hybrid agencies and articulations.”

A dramatic scene from an opera featuring a man kneeling and reaching for a woman in a bright pink dress with ruffles. The woman appears concerned, while a group of silhouetted figures observes in the background against a blue sky.
Arturo Chacón-Cruz and Rihab Chaieb perform Carmen at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier. Photographed by Vivien Gaumand for Opéra de Montréal.

The time lag inherent in cultural transmission opens up a temporal space for imperative interventions and interpretive interference. As cultural forms travel from New York — or London, or Paris — to wherever they end up, they evolve in significance and transform in transit. In the time it takes for culture to arrive, it both loses and accrues meaning.

Techno music that originated in Detroit or Berlin but now resounds, for example, out of a stereo in a middle-class bedroom in the Montreal suburbs, may become less about representing art’s postmodern mechanical reproduction than about corporeal phenomenology and the body’s rhythmic regulation. The heartbeat during the depths of a Canadian winter is more immediate than the assembly line or the factory floor.

Taken out of context like this, cultural forms may superficially be misinterpreted or misunderstood. But those apparent interpretational deficiencies are themselves acts of agency that insert new cultural knowledge and multiply possible readings and meanings. Reception, then, is also always a new productive act. Reading is rewriting. And rewriting takes place in the time lag of transmission.

Ralph Ellison writes in his novel Invisible Man about the 20th century Black American experience of temporality. “Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time,” Ellison says, “you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead.”

Primary culture seems to set the temporal cultural pace — think of the phrase “New York minute” — whereas feeling behind or outside time is a condition common to receptive cultures. Hence the racist pejorative, “CP time.” The reclamation of the temporal sense, I believe, is the origin of the saying most commonly attributed to the Hip-Hop lexicon, which has now migrated to the MAGA Right in America: to “know what time it is.”

Physical travel still takes time, although much less since the 19th century than it did in every century before. But ideas and information today travel with near instantaneity and require practically no time to be received, read, and rewritten. Therefore, there is no longer any location of original culture, since it is constantly and everywhere being produced, circulated, and reproduced. And yet, there are certain places that still persist as cultural centers.

Is the idea of cultural centrality itself an artifact of time lag, just waiting to be read, rewritten, and understood anew? Are ideas also products, subject to the same regulation as commodities, with a short initial shelf life and increasingly rapid successions of cyclical marketplace revaluation?

The reality is that time arrives in waves, and like waves, time is subject to tides. Time is not a straight line, nor is it a cycle. It is a current, a frequency, a living bandwidth that carries culture on it like a radio frequency carries signal. We are each tuned to slightly different times.

Crowd at a live concert with enthusiastic fans cheering, some people are crowd surfing above them, creating an energetic atmosphere.
A crowd surfer rides the Angine de Poitrine audience at Club Soda 18 April 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

What precipitated this line of thought was Laura Snapes’ interview in The Guardian this week with Angine de Poitrine. First off, culture is not supposed to originate in Saguenay. But it is acceptable when it is a revision of culture that originated elsewhere, like a misreading of Frank Zappa or King Crimson. And for a New York minute, Saguenay becomes a center of culture.

It is ironic that this so of-the-moment band is also, aesthetically speaking, all about timing, frequency, and ambiguity. Now that Angine de Poitrine have arrived in London, they can reset their loop pedals and properly impose upon cultural temporality their own brand of CP (coloured polkadot) time. How long this micro-moment lasts remains to be seen. In a time of TikTok, when everyone wants to know what time it is, the clock is ticking…

I also had time this week to contemplate Bizet’s Carmen, a cultural text with comparatively longer staying power, but one which has undergone a series of re-readings and rewritings through the sands of time.

It is probable that, in its time, Carmen was conceived as a cautionary tale against liberated femininity. The Prosper Mérimée novella from which Bizet’s opera is adapted begins with a quotation from the Greek poet Palladas: “Every woman turns sour, twice she has her hour, one is in bed, the other is dead.”

Theodor Adorno in his essay “Fantasia sopra Carmen” writes that Carmen celebrates “eruptions from civilization into the unknown,” rejecting the bourgeois expectations of work and productivity, adherence to commodified temporality and inevitable domesticity. “The Fate which rules and which nothing can halt,” Adorno asserts, “is the primeval and pre-intellectual force of sexuality itself.”

It took 150 years for these thoughts to migrate from Paris to Frankfurt to Montreal.

You can always escape a place. But you cannot fly faster than time. And you can never overtake an idea.◼︎

Cover image: Rihab Chaieb as Carmen photographed by Vivien Gaumand for Opéra de Montréal.

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