Call to participation – 5 to 7 with Sven in Paspébiac

Call to participation – 5 to 7 with Sven in Paspébiac

Rencontres de la photographie en Gaspésie and the City of Paspébiac invite the population to a get-together with multidisciplinary artist Sven on Thursday, October 21, from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. at Café culture in the Centre culturel de Paspébiac. This exchange session will be the kickoff for the artist’s residency at the Centre, where he will be carrying out his project until October 27.

Building on his work Plongeons, presented at the Musée de la Gaspésie in the town of Gaspé as part of Rencontres in the summer of 2021, Plages is a new augmented-reality device. While Plongeons diverted world heritage photographs to present a falsified interpretation of historical situations, Plages will draw its material from the local population. Throughout Sven’s residency, the people of Paspébiac are invited to share with him memories connected to visits to the barachois and the town beaches – family archives, personal accounts, and so on – for integration into his project.

View of the exhibition Plongeons, by Sven, presented at Musée de la Gaspésie (Gaspé) as part of the Rencontres in the summer of 2021. Credit for this image and the one at the top: Robert Dubé

Plages will be unveiled to the public as a permanent stand-alone installation with its own augmented-reality application as part of Rencontres in summer 2022. In the Centre culturel de Paspébiac space, a large-scale photographic composition will display visual snippets representing certain bucolic and historical aspects of the Paspébiac beach. Thanks to augmented reality, Sven will be inviting the public to revisit his composition by using smartphones and digital tablets. The screens will act as digitizers and reveal virtual images superimposed on the printed ones, adding a rejiggered dimension to the original composition.

The project has received financial support from the Canada Council for the Arts. “This will be the second permanent work from a public art process that we wish to develop,” states Claude Goulet, the executive and artistic director of Rencontres. A first permanent work was installed in Carleton-sur-Mer in the context of the town’s 250th, in 2017, in partnership with Rencontres. That was the mural Tracadigash, by Patrick Dionne and Miki Gingras, to which an augmented-reality component was added in 2021 thanks to the support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

About Sven

Stefan Buridans, a.k.a. Sven, has been living and working in Montreal since 2007. A graduate in film studies (ESEC, Paris), he has a particular interest in the visual print left on our collective memory. His research in digital arts is the result of professional audio-visual experiences. A founding member of Mouvement Art Mobile (MAM) in 2012, Sven initiates events in the public and digital space.

In carrying out Plages, Sven will be collaborating with Paul Gascou-Vaillancourt, a specialist in software development, Web programming and integration, with whom he worked on his first solo, Plongeons. After making its debut at Rencontres in 2021, Plongeons is currently on tour in Québec art centers and cultural houses.