I find myself awkwardly telling Caroline Andrieux, the artistic director of the Fonderie Darling, amidst our meeting in the gallery that she helped to establish, about the contemporary phenomenon called “decay porn.”

Ruins photography, as it is sometimes less problematically labelled, is the artistic movement dedicated to the aestheticization of urban deterioration.

Abandoned factories, deserted construction sites, gutted shopping malls, rotting grain silos, defunct train stations, disused warehouses, crumbling interchanges — these non-places constitute ripe raw material for those with an eye toward the poetics of futures past.

Reclaiming the remnants of the industrial age is a post-modern form of gleaning, wringing out symbolic value from discarded sites of production. But I don’t need to teach Andrieux, who more than 20 years ago took over this majestic Old Montreal edifice and retrofitted it into one of the city’s most vibrant arts centres, anything about this.

“I was always fascinated by old buildings,” says Andrieux. “In 1997, ’98, another building that we were looking at — it was so beautiful. But it burned down. This area was a ghost village. It was like a game board. And it was also full of stories. It was a real miracle, in a way, that we saved this building.”

Over the past two decades, Fonderie Darling has served as an invaluable workshop, exhibition space, and megaphone for countless artists at all stages of their creative lives.

Through partnerships with public funding agencies such as the Ministère de la culture du Québec and the now-nonexistent Ministère de la Métropole, and private industries like Bétons Lafarge and the Darling Brothers, the building’s original occupants, Fonderie Darling has managed to sustain the opposite economic model to most commercial art galleries.

Rather than representing artists and taking a percentage of their sales, Fonderie Darling instead pays artists to produce works of art in their adjacent ateliers and showcases them in the converted Foundry space, a cavernous three-storey arcade on Ottawa Street, right in the heart of Montreal’s most historic — and gentrified — neighbourhood.

“All the studios receive a sponsoring,” Andrieux explains. “So, artists don’t pay for their studios. They don’t pay rent. They have a grant to produce. And they have a lot of exposure because we work with them. We set up the best conditions for artists to launch their careers.”

There are currently eight Montrealers and four international residents working on-site with support from the Foundry. “I cross my fingers,” says Andrieux, “because it’s been difficult to get funds. But for now, we’re lucky enough to have them all sponsored for the past three years.”

Hailing from Hyeres, in the south of France, Andrieux was reared by her grandmother, an aspiring painter of Lebanese ancestry who married a French officer at the beginning of World War II.

“When the war was starting, she had to raise her kids by herself. So, she abandoned art,” recounts Andrieux. “But she was always painting at her place. Painting on Sunday. Even if I don’t remember very well, I remember the smell, and I remember her as an artist.”

Andrieux began taking drawing classes as a teenager and for a time entertained the notion of becoming a professional artist herself. “I was never happy enough with what I was doing,” she admits. Nevertheless, Andrieux soon discovered Art History and found her calling studying art as a discipline more than merely as a practice.

She completed a Ph.D. jointly through the Pantheon-Sorbonne University in Paris and Université du Québec à Montréal, writing her dissertation on the concept of the void in art. Andrieux focussed on a single work each from four New York artists — Agnes Martin, Gordon Matta-Clark, Yoko Ono, and Robert Barry.

“I chose Day’s End by Gordon Matta-Clark, which is a work he did on a pier in New York,” she tells me, “It helped me to understand why I’m so attracted to industrial buildings.”

Andrieux relocated permanently to Montreal in the early 1990s and founded Quartier Éphémère — an organization dedicated to recuperating some of the city’s most storied abandoned buildings as artists’ spaces — at the corner of Prince and rue de la Commune. Quartier Éphémère was responsible, for instance, for the legendary Silophone project, which turned the enormous Silo No. 5 on Rue Mill into a resonant echo chamber.

“There were all these buildings around us,” says Andrieux, “and there were still people working in them. I remember when I was walking to work at Quartier Éphémère, I was always the first person to walk the street in the morning.”

Although Fonderie Darling focuses mainly on contemporary artforms, Andrieux is intent on engaging with art history in general, and Montreal’s history, specifically. Its summer 2024 exhibition is entitled Black Summer ’91 and centres boldly on that particular season in this city.

Curated by Rito Joseph, an historian of Montreal’s Black cultural legacy, the show is a multidisciplinary project bringing together new works from five artists, as well as archival materials that document the events of that precise year.

“In 1991, it was still very difficult for a Black artist to exist,” says Andrieux. “People were pushed out of their apartments because of their race.”

Andrieux chooses her exhibitions carefully and according to instinct. “It’s really for the space,” she says. “I like the dialogue with the space. It can be in an architectural way, but it can also be in a posture. For instance, the space is very brutal and dominant. And we found that work that is very delicate and almost invisible has a power in the space. It’s interesting to challenge the space, but not to confront it. More to respond in a yin-yang process.”

I ask Andrieux if she considers curation as an artform, and she demurs: “It’s less courageous than being an artist,” she believes. “Artists are really courageous. But to make choices is the foundation of being an artist, I think. So, we are close. I think the real creative process is to transform your being into a life.”

No doubt, Andrieux has devoted her life to cultivating Montreal’s creative scenes in profound, meaningful, and long-lasting ways. It is unclear, however, if the whims of transient politicians such as the premier presently in power will spell ruin for Fonderie Darling’s survival in its current form.

“Quebec’s budget is affecting us a lot,” laments Andrieux. “We don’t know yet how much it’s going to affect us, but for sure, it affects all the artists. It’s very difficult these days, with two wars and a government that is totally ignorant. But wealth is not always money,” she says, wisely. “It’s also inside, in our spiritual self.”◼︎

Black Summer ’91 runs 20 June – 18 August 2024 at Fonderie Darling, 745 rue Ottawa.

_{Cover image: Caroline Andrieux photographed for NicheMTL.}