Pépite & Josèphe
in Nouvelle

In Wanderlust: A History of Walking, writer Rebecca Solnit recounts the relations shared between people and walking throughout the ages: “If there is a history of walking, then it too has come to a place where the road falls off…where bodies are not in the world but only indoors in cars and buildings, and an apotheosis of speed makes those bodies seem anachronistic and feeble.“ But what would happen if cars, rather than travel by foot, were to be the archaic ones, having failed to adapt to the body’s natural rhythm? This is the thesis at the heart of Creatures of Wander: Eastern Townships, the second chapter of a project by Pépite & Josèphe presented as part of the Photographic Mission in the Eastern Townships. 

This body of work stems from a 90 km walk where, over a period of five days, the artist duo collected old car parts along the side of the road, from the gallery Sporobole in Sherbrooke to their studio in Sutton. It acts as a study of regional travel, specifically in the Eastern Townships region, performed on the ancestral unceded land N’dakina, then presented in the Gaspé Peninsula on the ancestral unceded land of the W8banaki and Mi’gmaq. 

By blurring the old – museum and archeology codes – and the new – artificial intelligence, the artists showcase a uchronic narrative, an alternative story of our roads, in contrast with our epoch when using your feet to move from place to place is marginalized. Walking gives back what cars took from us: a deep and real connection with land, one that enriches our perceptions of distance and our ways of taking in the ordinary and the extraordinary that dapple the spaces in between. In the words of Solnit, and as exemplified by Pépite & Josèphe, “every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable.” 

Text by Ariel Rondeau, cultural worker, independent curator and writer