Category Archives: How Do You Spell Holiday?

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How Do You Spell Holiday?

Luxury Communism

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

I am not a happy camper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cover image: LUMI at SonoLux photographed for NicheMTL.

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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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How Do You Spell Holiday?

Practically Magic: in conversation with Myriam Bleau

“What one man calls God, another calls the laws of physics.”
—Nikola Tesla

The visual artist and Montreal-based musician Myriam Bleau, stone-faced until this moment, grins mischievously, lighting up the screen of a Zoom call from Barcelona. She is talking about the gamut between science and magic and recalls an aphorism that she cannot quite properly attribute.

“Don’t quote me on this because I can’t remember who said it, but it’s something like, if you see cool technology for the first time,” she paraphrases, “it feels like magic.”

Tech companies, our new Gods in the 21st century, have leaned heavily upon this rhetoric. When Steve Jobs first introduced the iPhone at the MacWorld conference on 9 January 2007, he proclaimed that the device “works like magic.” The Fortune magazine contributor Shawn Tully in 2025 coined the phrase “Musk Magic Premium” to explain why that particular billionaire’s valuation is based more upon future speculation than current performance.

Truly, so much innovation is entwined nowadays with magical mythology — which is overtly masculine, the purview of the visionary bro-genius. But Bleau’s work eviscerates all of this narcissistic machismo.

“A lot of people don’t know because I don’t advertise it,” she declares, “but I’m very radical, politically. I’m always trying to trace a line between a lot of different thoughts that I have about technology. And I’ve become such a radical feminist over the years. I really look for integrity in the work that I do. Not to sell away what’s really important. That to me is political.”

A DJ performing on stage with vibrant laser lights projecting the word 'hypmbioty' above.
“There was always a tech development part to my projects.” Myriam Bleau photographed by Bruno Destombes.

Myriam Bleau will inaugurate Montreal’s traditional Tech Spring season this Friday with a double bill performance alongside Alva Noto, co-presented by MUTEK and the Society for Arts and Technology. Entitled Hypermobility, the show deploys lasers that her electronic sounds trigger to create shapes and words which are projected overhead in sync with the music.

“Don’t worry,” Bleau says reassuringly, “a few years ago, I did a laser safety officer course. A lot of people are scared of lasers, but I don’t scan the audience. It’s really rare that there’s any problems happening.”

Hypermobility, Bleau informs me, is more an audio-visually formalist study than a laser lightshow spectacle. “It’s meant to feel like you visualize the sound,” she says. “The way that I do it is really angular. It’s kind of like a sculpting exercise for me. I always try to approach it like an étude. Not that I always manage to have that purity of intention. But that’s what I’m looking for.”

The concept behind Hypermobility probes the politics inherent in the circulation of bodies for tourism and trade. A hierarchy exists to the perceived necessity of certain individuals to move around the globe, and it seldom favours artists.

“Right now, the arts are trying to push against travelling,” Bleau laments.

“There is this push towards being environmentally friendly, which is nice in theory. Now, festivals in Europe are asking me to prove that I have a tour around that date because they don’t want to encourage people just going for one show. But sometimes I need to survive by going to do that one show. There’s this whole system of guilt-tripping people. In theory, it is a lot of carbon footprint when I travel. But there are a lot of other people who don’t actually need to travel, and artists physically need to. So, the question of hypermobility has many different aspects to it.”

A DJ performing on stage with vibrant blue and purple laser lights projecting from the back.
“The literature aspect of it was a part of the conceptual part of my project.” Myriam Bleau photographed by Bruno Destombes.

Bleau, 38, grew up in Montreal with a distinct inkling that she would pursue a creative path.

“From a very young age, I wanted to do music,” she recalls. “I also studied literature, so the literature aspect of it was a part of the conceptual part of my project. At first I thought I was going to be more of a musician. I studied jazz guitar as an undergrad. I was into weird free jazz experimental stuff. Then I did my master’s in electroacoustics at Université de Montréal, and then I got more into electronics. But I don’t operate in academia,” she says. “I’m a freelance artist.”

Solidarity with the DIY movement has served as a guiding principle to Bleau, who recently collaborated with the interdisciplinary dance choreographer Nien Tzu Weng, and is in Barcelona to work with Mónica Rekić, an artist who makes miniature robots and handmade electronics, some of which are visible on the Zoom call just over Bleau’s shoulder.

“I have a group of friends that do similar things and I feel like we inspire each other,” Bleau says. “I guess it’s most of the people who are doing weird audiovisual performance things.”

The prosumer turn in the early 2000s ushered in a groundbreaking new era where it became more accessible to incorporate novel technologies in the arts.

“There was always a tech development part to my projects,” Bleau explains.

“But now, what’s happening with technology? Everything is about A.I. The technology is more complicated and the resources that you need to feel like you’re doing anything innovative is just unattainable. So, I think around the pandemic, I shifted towards not wanting my projects to feel innovative, and more towards being critical of technology. I use technology in a subversive way, and that subversion is also feminist. It brings the attention away from the tech and more toward what it represents, socially.”

The social construction of technology is the theory that, for Bleau, perforates the tech-bro bubble. But she is less interested in theory than practice, teasing out corporeal liveness from within the electronic pre-programming.

“In my performances, I kind of embrace the glitch everywhere,” Bleau says. “It’s always something that interests me. But I don’t exploit the glitch of the machines. I am inspired in a very literary way. I draw words, and for me, it’s more about the visual energy. The words are glitching out during different letters, and you can see subliminal words in what is written. And what is written is political.”

The political allegories implicit in Bleau’s work may not be immediately discernible. But they are alive and present in each and every gesture, pixel, and waveform.

“I like using metaphors,” she tells me. “I try to have all these little things that connect together. Sometimes I will sneak in little messages. But I still want the work to operate as a work of art. I don’t want the political message or the agenda to be what makes it a great piece.”

For Bleau, it seems that demystifying the magic around performing with technology — making God physical — is paramount to transporting tech back down to earth. There is no product launch-style hyperbolic hype to Bleau’s pieces, no sleight of hand intended to cast a spell upon her audience.

“Do we need to create a sense of authenticity about what we’re actually doing?” Bleau asks rhetorically.

“I try to create this contract where you understand what’s going on. And I’m not going to mess up this contract. You can always see very clearly what’s going on. That’s how I approach my projects these days.”◼︎

Myriam Bleau performs with Alva Noto 8 May 2026 at Espace SAT, 1201 Boulevard Saint-Laurent.

Cover image: Myriam Bleau photographed by Bruno Destombes.

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How Do You Spell Holiday?

Torching the Record: notes on Montreal’s Olympic Legacy

“In 1977, Mayor Drapeau gave birth to a beautiful baby boy.”
—Mike Meyers, Canada

On 5 February 1976, the front page of Montréal-Matin featured the grisly story of three men, Yvon Duchesne, Guy Montreuil, and his brother Jean-Pierre, who were found criminally responsible for a double murder that took place at Le Dôme nightclub on Sherbrooke Street on 10 January.

The killings were framed as part of a larger violent crime spree that began plaguing Montreal in the mid-1970s and was often associated with the city’s nighttime culture. Montreal’s reputation was growing internationally as a disco-dancing destination, second only to New York City. But the city’s vibrant nightlife also implicated drugs and sexual deviance, antagonisms to a squeaky-clean civic image.

Two trans women employed in nightclubs as “female impersonators” were stabbed to death in a St. Leonard apartment on New Year’s Eve, swelling Montreal’s 1975 murder toll to a record 110. And Jean-Pierre Montreuil had apparently been canvassing Le Dôme’s clientele for rolling papers prior to shooting Ronald Turcol, the doorman, and a 28-year-old customer, Nelson Dodier, who had attempted to prevent him from leaving after Montreuil smoked a joint in the bathroom.

Also visible on Montréal-Matin’s front page is the iconic M-for-Montreal Olympic logo designed by the graphic artist Georges Huel, a personal friend of then-mayor Jean Drapeau. Doubtless, Drapeau begrudged the juxtaposition of gruesome headlines alongside the forthcoming Olympic Games that he viewed as part of his legacy to vault Montreal onto the podium of prestigious cosmopolitan cities. Increased policing of the city’s nightlife ensued with especially harsh suppression of Montreal’s queer and unhoused populations.

A cartoon depicting an Olympic security guard with a helmet and weapon, speaking to a police officer. The guard has a humorous expression, and above them are the words 'OLYMPIC SECURITY' and 'BE DISCREET'.
Aislin, Olympic Security: Be Discreet, The Montreal Gazette, 6 May 1976. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Still, subduing the underground is just one of the underlying currents of Montreal 1976: An Olympic Feat, an impressive exhibition that opened this week at the McCord Stewart Museum.

Superficially, the show marks the 50th anniversary of Montreal hosting the Olympic Games. But the McCord Stewart’s assemblage of remarkable objects speaks less to nostalgia, metropolitan jingoism, or sport, and focusses more upon the aesthetic and political aspects of mounting the Olympics here — which is the far more interesting story. And neither does it pull any punches in its criticism of the hypocrisy, corruption, and cultural violence that swirled around the city at the time, and their reverberations today.

An extensive editorial cartoon collection from contemporaneous newspapers anchors Montreal 1976 and acts as an instructive historical throughline. While the topical humour is not immediately obvious to a generation that was not yet born in 1976, the sheer volume and acridity of satire that the Olympics produced is evidence of concurrent popular sentiment toward the Games.

A black and white photograph featuring a man and a woman standing in the street, each holding Olympic torches pointing towards each other. Both are dressed in casual athletic outfits, and there are buildings and cars in the background.
Exhibition view of Montreal 1976: An Olympic Feat. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The Oxford Olympics Study of 2016 found that Montreal’s was the highest cost overrun — at a staggering 720 percent — for any Olympic Games in modern history. “The Montreal Olympics can no more have a deficit than a man can have a baby,” Drapeau told the CBC in 1973. But by 1974, a full two years before any medals would be awarded, The Montreal Gazette’s Aislin was parodying what the city already knew with a caricature of a pregnant Drapeau on the phone to the abortion rights activist Henry Morgentaler.

According to the Oxford study, the Games cost about $6.1 billion adjusted for 2016 inflation, an average of $1 million per athlete. It would take Montreal more than 30 years to pay off the debt incurred, lending the Olympic Stadium its “Big Owe” nickname and inspiring some questionable strategies to raise the funds.

Among them was the extension and increase in the late 1980s of a special tax on cigarettes, capitalizing on Montreal’s repute as North America’s ashtray. It is toxic irony that encouraging tobacco consumption mitigated the government’s fiscal hangover for the advancement of sport.

A monochromatic illustration depicting two hands: one holding a cigarette and the other poised above an architectural model resembling a stadium.
R. Pier, Quebec Government extends and increases special tobacco tax to continue paying off deficit from 1976 Montreal Olympic Games, Le Journal de Montreal, 1988. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The McCord Stewart exhibition also highlights the sartorial and graphic elements that helped to identify the Olympics, featuring posters designed by Michael Snow, François Dallaire and Clermont Malenfant, and the famous marijuana button-emblazoned jean jacket conceived by Raymond Bellemare.

A display of costumes that the officials wore, as well as Radio-Canada’s loud outerwear, is a rich time capsule of kitschy mid-1970s trends and offers a yardstick against which to measure fashion’s cyclical inclinations. A blue t-shirt and white wide-legged rainbow-belted pant combination would not look out of place on today’s runway.

A display of a blue Olympics-themed t-shirt and white flared pants, showcased on a mannequin in a museum setting, with colorful garments in the background.
Exhibition view of Montreal 1976: An Olympic Feat. Photographed for NicheMTL.

While visual art was lauded for branding the Games, another scandal that would come to be considered the worst occurrence of art censorship in Canadian history tarnished the Olympics. The Corridart dans la rue Sherbrooke, a public installation of 22 juried artworks stretching from Atwater to Pie IX, was organized by the artist-architect Melvin Charney and coordinated by André Ménard of the Arts and Culture program of the Comité organisateur des jeux olympiques. A grant for $386,000 from the Ministère des Affaires culturelles du Québec provided funding.

Corridart was conceived to showcase works from prominent local artists including Françoise Sullivan and Pierre Ayot, and an open call to all Quebec artists received more than 300 submissions. A vernissage at the UQAM gallery was held on 7 July 1976 to celebrate Corridart’s opening, and the installation was scheduled to be on display until the 31st.

However, a number of the artworks were vandalized and several artists whose works were not included in the exhibition staged public protests against the granting process. Mayor Drapeau on 13 July ordered the exhibition to be dismantled and most of the pieces were damaged or destroyed.

A pair of old-fashioned phone booths next to a street, with hiking backpacks placed on the ground nearby. A sign on a pole is partially visible, and a gas station can be seen in the background under a cloudy sky.
The Teletron, Michael Haslam, 1976. Archives de la Ville de Montréal / VM94-EM0750-001.

Officially, Drapeau cited public safety. But many of the works contained veiled allegations against the government and alluded to outright corruption. Michael Haslam’s installation entitled The Teletron, for instance, consisted of a series of telephone booths that were programmed to play prerecorded messages — among them financial figures for how much the Games cost and speculation over where the money was actually going.

In the wake of the Corridart fracas, a dozen artists filed a civil lawsuit against the City of Montreal for $350,000. Litigation lasted more than a decade and resulted in a settlement in 1988 awarding each artist a paltry $3,000.

A woman in a flowing white dress stands still, holding a bowl, while a blurred figure in red shorts appears to be running past her. The text 'Montréal 1976' is displayed at the top.
Olympic Flame, 1975, François Dallaire & Clermont Malenfant. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The McCord Stewart exhibition ultimately tells a story of the 1976 Summer Olympics in which sport is a supporting actor in the Games’ sociocultural cast. Selling Montreal on the world stage came at an astronomical cost and arguably benefited the political players of the day more than the athletes or the public who cheered them on. A cruel twist is that Canada was shut out of the Gold Medal category for the competition’s entirety, the only host country in the Olympic record to do so.

There are elements to Montreal 1976 that will appeal to sports-lovers and families, tourists and casual cultural observers. But the McCord Stewart collection is delightfully nuanced, paying tribute to our history by offering an unvarnished and still-under-construction Olympic vision that honours Montreal’s complex and contradictory character.

Commemorating a half-century of the city’s Olympic legacy should celebrate both the highs and lows, recounting the crackdowns on nightlife and the destruction of important works of art, the corruption and cronyism, alongside the glory of victory.◼︎

Montreal 1976: An Olympic Feat runs through 7 September 2026 at McCord Stewart Museum, 690 Sherbrooke Street West.

Cover image: Gallery view of Montreal 1976: An Olympic Feat. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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How Do You Spell Holiday?

Porte-parole: in conversation with Elle Barbara

The Montreal-based multidisciplinary artist and community organizer Elle Barbara meets me outside a tiny café at the peak of Montreal’s July heatwave. It is one of those blindingly hot summer afternoons, with pockets of sunlight cresting over the flower beds in a little square just off Maguire Street. She is dressed in light linens, her eyes smiling at me from behind a pair of oversized butterfly-framed glasses as we shake hands.

Word On the Street was released through the Celluloid Lunch label in late June and features collaborations with local names like Markus Floats and Mitch Davis. With influences ranging from Ravel’s Boléro, to Prince’s Purple Rain, to early Public Enemy, and even Celine Dion, Word On the Street is doubtless a generically varied effort. A honeyed brew of ‘80s Pop, Prog, and Classic Funk, with dashes of Jazz and Euro-dance, Barbara’s music resists easy categorization.

“Shout out to Renny Wilson,” she praises the Canadian producer who recorded, engineered, edited, and mixed the record. “The first takes of the album were just skeletal drum, synth, and bass takes that had to be manually quantized, so shout out to him for putting in the time and energy to do that manually.” It is the handmade touch that makes Word On the Street such a singular and honest album.

I ask about the inspiration behind the album, and she reveals an affinity for the work of André Serouille, the Montreal street artist. “I didn’t know his name when I first discovered his writings. I kept running into these little cardboard pieces, like ‘anti-Kraft foods’ and other propaganda pieces, and felt really drawn to them because of how they looked graphically. I was mystified.”

This faceless man, whose paranoid scriptures are strewn throughout the streets of the city, is foundational to the creed of Word On the Street. Barbara has meticulously curated Serouille’s graffiti, which comment on everything from the alleged corporate offences to various crimes committed by the psychiatric community. She pulls a small stack of papers from her purse.

“There’s something clearly conspiratorial about it,” she says, showing me various items that she has collected. “But there’s also something artistic about it. And I use the word ‘artistic’ as a euphemism. I don’t think that his gospel has to be written off on the grounds of him being potentially mentally ill, because there’s also a beauty in what he says.”

The gospel she speaks of is one rooted in anti-surveillance and anti-consumerist attitudes. Barbara believes that the casual introduction of AI into everyday interactions is evidence of a significant overhaul to our collective unconscious. These are the days of pioneering tech-dystopian filmmaker David Cronenberg’s “new flesh” realized, of bodies and desires transformed by cheap access to an infinite content channel. Doubtless, we are indeed witnessing a weakening of our physical senses. As Barbara sings on “Your Favourite Meal,” a track that distills Serouille into song form, “I bet you’ll think to yourself, ‘Oh my why it tastes so good’ / in the end the taste of death will finally taste as it should.” 

However, the advent of digital technology has had some positive consequences which even ardent technophobes would be remiss to dismiss out-of-hand. The democratization of information through internet access, the rejection of the Western-centric canon and conservative interlocutors, and the growing mainstream interest in intersectionality as a political practice are all revolutionary. The internet has enabled a radical confluence of perspectives. The problem is the medium itself, the form, a tool for the billionaire class.

In such a climate, the decision to include Word On the Street on streaming services rather than limiting its distribution to physical media has been the cause of some trepidation for Barbara. “Our relationship to what we consume has changed significantly because we’re in an attention-driven economy,” she says. “I initially didn’t want to release my album on these platforms, and the label that I partnered with convinced me to do it, and I kind of regret it, to be honest. On the one hand, it certainly allowed me to be exposed to more people than I initially would have. But at the same time, I believe that those people are just as easily probably going to forget about my record because there’s so much music being released.”

A formless, atomless digital archive of music is the graveyard of artistic recognition. This anxiety is treated with laser-like focus in the music video for one of the LP’s standout tracks, “BBQ All Dressed.”

“I’m so proud of that video,” she says. “It really tells a story about the relationship we have with art and music as humans. There’s two queer-dos at the start, outside a club, waiting to ambush me. We get into an altercation. Afterwards, there’s a whole voodoo witchcraft ritual where they dip their masks into a pool of my blood, and it’s basically a metaphor. They kill the artist and connect to my essence. It shows how easily you could do away with the artist. Once you connect yourself to those systems of mass consumption, you don’t have to buy the album anymore. You might as well just kill the artist and connect yourself to the matrix.”

“Pop is not just about music.” —Elle Barbara photographed by Nico Stinghe.

Technology at one time blurred the line between reality and facsimile. To quote Professor Brian O’Blivion of Cronenberg’s film, Videodrome, “The television screen has become the retina of the mind’s eye.” Word On the Street is an exploration of our media-synapsed sense of perception and connection.

Barbara’s relationship with Serouille is one she refers to throughout our conversation as a symbiosis, one person’s work directly inspiring and intertwining with another. Such devotion to probing the cannibalistic practices of AI and urbanity combined with a high degree of respect for the language of queer art is what differentiates Elle Barbara in Montreal’s Pop culture landscape. “I’ve historically been a big fan of Pop music, and I find that Pop is not just about music; it’s about aesthetics; it’s about politics, fashion, and performance. It’s such a holistic artform.”

Barbara is on a strong trajectory, having opened for U.S. Girls at Pop Montreal in September, and sharing the stage with Madonna on the Montreal stop of her Celebration tour. Perhaps this record, which is quickly becoming a niche classic, will provide a defining retrospective on a decade overwhelmed by despotic tech’s simultaneous obsession with content, and contempt for creativity. Heat, in the creative world as in the climate, is determined by the seasonal zeitgeist.

“I know it’s just not going to be a Billboard-charting hit because I don’t have those resources,” she concedes. “It’s just not my socioeconomic reality. But I’m confident that I make music that is unique and will stand the test of time, of that I am sure.”◼︎

Word On the Street is out now via Celluloid Lunch Records.

Cover image: Nico Stinghe

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How Do You Spell Holiday?

Vapours & Spectre: notes on Les Vespérales de l’orgue du Sacré-Cœur

The first things Adrian Foster draws my attention to as he welcomes me into the Église Sacré-Cœur-de-Jésus in Montreal’s Centre-Sud on a late summer evening are the bells.

When the church’s bell tower renovations were deemed unfeasible in 2021, its five bells were lowered. But choir director André Pappathomas had them installed on wooden plinths on either side of the church’s pews.

While the appearance of the bells is striking, they’re not here just for looks. The bells, which vary in size and pitch, and the heaviest of which weighs several tons, have begun a new life as concert instruments for Les Vespérales de l’orgue du Sacré-Cœur, the experimental and ambient concert series Foster launched in Summer 2024.

“Performers have found their own ways to play them and to bring out their textures,” Foster tells me as we approach the largest bell.

He strikes it in various spots to produce different sounds. “When you have all five of these bells going, you can even make melodies,” he says.

“You can also use the clapper.” I’m intrigued.

Foster gets under the bell and lightly taps the uvula-like sphere hanging within against the bell’s inner lip. “Sometimes after a concert someone will start swinging it, and I have to run over and try to stop them,” he laughs. “They would instantly regret it. It probably risks shattering the windows, it’s so loud.”

“How can we keep this space alive?” Brandon Patitucci for Les Vespérales.

The bells are emblematic of what makes Les Vespérales so special. While they couldn’t retain their sacred function of calling the faithful to prayer, the bells have been repurposed by artists who love them to serve a new, largely non-religious audience drawn to their ethereal resonance.

Les Vespérales excels at creating aesthetic experiences that blur the line between the secular and the sacred. Even its pay-what-you-can philosophy seems like a nod to the Sunday mass donation plate, albeit via the inclusive ethic of grassroots concert organizing.

For Foster, reimagining the sacred is not just abstract but a question of preservation.

“There are fewer people going to church, and there are churches all over Montreal closing all the time, and this would typically be a church that would be at a high risk of being closed,” he says. “So, it’s important in this kind of case to ask: what value can we bring to this building that has been an important part of the community here in the Centre-Sud that maybe its religious vocation no longer can do alone? How can we keep this space alive?”

Les Vespérales is one answer to this question, and central to its offering is its unique marriage of sound and space. “What we’re developing here is not just a space to hold any kind of music events, which many churches already offer,” Foster emphasizes. “What we’re really focusing on is new musical creation by artists who are creating new music in this space, for this space.”

A case-in-point is Esther-Ruth Teel, who arrives partway through our conversation to rehearse for Sirens, an audio-visual collaboration with composer Gavin Fraser. Sirens revisits Greek mythology and reimagines the creatures as survivors rather than as agents of sexual violence.

“I’m a little nervous,” admits Teel. In addition to performing the organ and vocal parts live, Teel’s poetry and performance work feature heavily in the piece’s visual component.

“In some of the footage I’m standing on rocks draped in a cloth, but not modest, and so the alarm bells in my head are going off,” they tell me. “But I think there’s something exciting about portraying and reclaiming your body within a church where female-associated bodies especially haven’t been celebrated.”

Like most Vespérales de l’orgue du Sacré-Cœur concerts, Sirens showcases the series’ titular organ, a 1928 electro-pneumatic Casavant Frères whose pipes take up the better half of the gallery above the church’s main entrance.

If the bells are the heart of a church, then the organ is its lungs.

“One of my favourite things about the organ is this kind of acousmatic listening experience.” Brandon Patitucci for Les Vespérales.

Teel tells me that what initially drew them to the organ was its powerful ritualistic purpose. “Like, at a funeral, if you’re playing something beautiful that’s meaningful to the family, then you’re integrating with their lives in a way that classical concert music doesn’t do in the same way. You’re guiding an experience,” Teel says. “And I feel like this series is really doing that. You’re actually doing something important for people, bringing them on a journey.”

Once we make our way up to the organ loft, Foster admits that he’s never heard a recording that really does the organ justice. “There are some instruments where you can listen to a recording and feel like you’re hearing the instrument pretty well and getting a good re-creation,” he says. “But I find organ recordings are almost always disappointing compared to hearing it in the room. I think it’s because there’s so much about the way that it interacts with the space that speakers can’t capture.”

Sound registers differently throughout a church. Individuals make their own choices about how to make use of these spatial dynamics.

For example, Vespérales’ yearly Winter-Solstice Ambient Night seats listeners directly in the organ loft to create a more direct and intimate experience of the organist. Speakers are also mounted on either side of the gallery, and performers can live-treat sounds from the pipes through effects if they so choose.

“One of my favourite things about the organ is this kind of acousmatic listening experience where you don’t see the music being played but hear this disembodied sound which is coming from this massive instrument that is part of this massive space,” Foster says.

His interest in acousmatic sound transformation and non-traditional use of the organ has also led him to commission the creation of a new experimental organ that will eventually become a fixture of Les Vespérales.

“Les Vespérales sounds cool. It evokes night and mystery and the religious element without being overtly religious.” Brandon Patitucci for Les Vespérales.

Created by the organist Alexander Ross, the LIMINARE, as it is known, is a unique hyper-organ whose pipes can be directly manipulated by performers as they play. While traditional pipe organs are built with a particular wind pressure in mind so their pipes produce stable tones at intended pitches, the LIMINARE organ is microtonal, and its wind pressure can be dynamically adjusted live.

“As you increase the wind pressure more than the pipe is voiced for, it starts to overblow, and when it’s overblowing it will jump to different harmonics and the timbre will change.” Foster demonstrates as LIMINARE’s reeds squawk something like a mad duck.

“This is an instrument that I commissioned that I want to make music with, but it’s here in this space and will be an integral part of this series with other artists coming to explore it on their own and find their own way of making music with it.”

As the sun sets and twilight enters the dimly lit church, a hush descends upon the space.

I think that it would be a good moment to ask Foster about the name of the series. He says that Pappathomas suggested it.

“Les Vespérales sounds cool. It evokes night and mystery and the religious element without being overtly religious, because this isn’t a religious series. André says that when we’re doing these organ and electronics performances there’s this kind of cloud of sound around here, and he feels like the sound is like little prayers floating around in the vault of this space.”

I tell Foster and Teel that even the English word “vespers” sounds to me like a portmanteau of “vapours” and “spectre.” It recalls midnight mass when I was a kid, the excitement associated with church at night — smoke, incense, fog.

“I like that,” says Foster. “It makes me think of the ghostly traces of everyone who has filled this space.”◼︎

Cover image: Brandon Patitucci for Les Vespérales.

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How Do You Spell Holiday?

Dirty Boulevard: Montreal vs. New York City

The life of the working artist is often romanticized, a mythology that centers on passion over profit, creativity over comfort, and the willingness to risk everything for art. The great artist, we’re told, knows no other way.

Behind this romantic notion lies a complex web of economic choices, geographic constraints, and class dynamics that determine not just who gets to pursue art full-time, but where they can afford to do it.

To understand how location shapes creative practice and artistic possibility, I spoke with working artists in New York and Montreal, two of North America’s most culturally vibrant cities.

Alex Wolfe is a New York-based artist, writer, and educator who uses walking as a generative tool to explore memory, place, and the overlooked spaces of American cities. Willow Loveday Little is a writer, language instructor, and Montreal native who remains enamored with her city’s artistic culture. Gavin Sewell is a visual artist who lived most of his life in NYC before moving to Montreal, offering a unique perspective on both scenes. And Markus Lake (aka Markus Floats) is a musician and my neighbour. After commiserating about our landlord’s latest rent increase, we dove deep into what it really costs to make art.

“I’ve never owned a car,” Markus Floats tells me from his Montreal apartment down the hall from mine. “I eat a lot of rice and beans. I walk everywhere.” His small space is packed with the essentials: music equipment, books, records, and graphic novels. “There are certain things that I just don’t think will make my life that much better. And maybe they would, but I’m going to keep it simple and find happiness in that.”

For Floats, like many artists, money isn’t about acquiring things; it’s about freeing up time and energy to create.

“A lot of the sacrifices I’ve made are just so that I have free time. I like to sleep in. I get up around 11, 12 most days. I go to bed at 3. I go for a night walk every night.” He pauses. “But I realize that it’s unsustainable in that I don’t make any money doing those things. But those things allow me to make music.”

The idea for this article emerged from a hallway conversation between Floats and other neighbours about organizing against a rent increase, a reminder that even in Montreal, creatives are grasping onto the remnants of cheap rent. This tension between financial stability and creative freedom became a central theme across these conversations.

“People listen to your vision because they want to understand it.” Willow Loveday Little photographed by Gustavo Salinas.

“There’s something just so magical about Montreal,” says writer Willow Loveday Little. “It’s the same thing that makes people visit once and get that almost glassy look in their eye. They’re hooked.”

Little and I sit in Parc La Fontaine on an idyllic summer day as she describes a recent conversation with a first-time Montreal visitor who noticed something distinct about the city’s arts scene. “Where he’s from, artists attend each other’s events because it’s a formality of the social contract. Here, there’s a lot more genuine curiosity and engagement. People listen to your vision because they want to understand it.”

This supportive atmosphere extends to the competitive dynamics, or lack thereof. “No one really believes they’re going to write a bestseller and buy a house from that money,” Little observes. “So why be competitive?”

Floats, who moved from Calgary 15 years ago, puts it more bluntly: “Montreal’s strength is just having a lot of weird shit going on. Completely unmarketable music.”

The contrast with New York couldn’t be starker. Originally from Maine, Gavin Sewell lived most of his adult life in NYC before relocating to Montreal. When he first moved to the city in his early twenties, he planned to become a playwright but quickly realized his fantasies were rooted in an era that no longer existed.

“When artists hang out in New York, we usually talk about money,” Sewell explains. “Who found a cheap studio space or a dealer that actually paid on time. You’re talking about scarce resources. In Montreal, when artists hang out, they actually talk about aesthetics, theory, art, which is really lovely.”

Alex Wolfe, currently based in New York, confirms this observation: “The downtown art scene is very tight knit, but I still find it kind of alienating. In New York, the capitalism dial is turned up quite high, which leads to a lot of networking. You go to a party and it’s people asking where you’re showing.”

The funding landscape differs dramatically between countries. “In the United States, you basically only get grants at the point where you no longer need them,” says Sewell. “In Montreal, your chances of actually getting money that can allow you to live and work for six months to a year are way higher.”

Floats received a Canada Council Grant recently. “I was living on Easy Street for six months,” he says. “Going to Jean Talon Market, getting fancy protein, fancy cheese. Those brief periods take a huge mental load off. But there’s no retirement plan.”

“When you don’t have money, everything is money.” Markus Floats photographed by Stacy Lee.

Both cities are transforming in ways that threaten their artistic communities. Floats reminisces about Montreal fifteen years ago, when rooms cost a few hundred dollars and venues were abundant. “People played in terrible bands their entire lives, paid cheap rent until they finally made it. You need that scrappy infrastructure.”

Sewell, having witnessed New York’s transformation into a playground for the ultra-wealthy, sees disturbing parallels. “It’s very sad to me, having watched hyper-gentrification in New York, seeing it replicated in Montreal. Montreal’s amazing cultural richness, that laid-back quality — it’s a very sad thing to see threatened.”

Luckily, he doesn’t think Montreal’s art scene is at risk of disappearing entirely. “To me, hyper-gentrification doesn’t mean there won’t be art anymore,” Sewell reflects. “But it means the artistic voices will mostly come from the upper middle class and above. What gets lost is room for working-class voices.”

Perhaps most telling were the artists’ definitions of success. “I think last year was the first year I was above the poverty line in ten years,” Floats shares candidly. “Home ownership is not in the cards. I’ve resigned myself to making $20,000 to $40,000 a year for the rest of my life. I’m not making popular music. I’m not going to make it big.”

The weight of living at or under the poverty line takes a toll. Floats gives examples like just being able to go to the grocery store and buy whatever you want without worrying.

“When you don’t have money, everything is money. And that sucks.”

Sewell, despite decades of comparative professional success, faces new challenges. “I thought over time it would get easier, but the middle class has constricted, which means I depend more on a small base of wealthier collectors. Individual sales feel much more high stakes now.”

What emerges from these conversations is a portrait of artistic life shaped as much by geography and economics as by talent or vision. Montreal’s affordability and supportive culture create space for experimentation and community, while New York’s intensity and expense demand constant hustle but offer unparalleled opportunities.

The artists I spoke with have found ways to navigate these realities, whether through strategic compromises, community building, or simply accepting that the romantic notion of the starving artist is both outdated and unsustainable. Their stories reveal that modern day art making requires not just creativity, but also economic literacy and community support.

As costs rise in both cities, the question becomes: how do we preserve space for the “weird shit” that makes culture vibrant? The answer may lie not in individual resilience, but in collective action — supporting public funding for the arts and building the infrastructure that allows diverse voices to flourish.

After all, as Sewell reminds us, “Being an artist doesn’t remove the obligation to join your local tenants’ union.”◼︎

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