WE TAKE IN

35,000 First Nations people live in Montreal, but their culture barely registers in the public space. "From that standpoint, Montreal is fifty years behind cities in Western Canada," observes the Franco-Anishnabée artist Caroline Monnet. She is proposing a remedy on this November evening under the Van Horne overpass. It is raining. There is talk about water. 150 Native communities do not have access to drinking water in Canada, regularly or on a permanent basis.

In Canada, the land of water and progressivism.

Caroline Monnet is part of that dual effect – invisibility and injustice. She speaks to the Montrealers that we are, immerged in the swirl of the city and the daily grind, insensitive to the discreet signs of history. Her message to us is to "be aware". She has designed an installation that strikes the eye and the soul. Many hours after leaving the site, the next day in fact, her work lingers in the mind.

There is something indelible in those images of church ceilings in Montreal that she projects under the overpass, ceilings that she filmed by turning the camera in circles so that the effect in kaleidoscopic: baroque rose windows, images of a crucified Jesus, colossal chandeliers, kitschy crosses illuminated by pink or blue light. Zoom-ins on paintings of thunder create a punitive, menacing effect, an image of being suppressed, as was the case for Native peoples for so long. Under that luminous, moving arch, Monnet has placed seven stacked blocks of ice that imprison children's clothing (small sweaters that are yellow, pink and green, black pants and skirts) and are now slowly melting under the lights. The ensemble evokes the genocidal tragedy of the Indian residential schools, where the representatives of Christian religions stripped young children of their cultural and family roots, of their mental structure – and from which their young charges sometimes attempted to flee, only to die in the cold and the snow. And then there is the sound, a dark, hypnotic soundtrack by the composer Daniel Watchorn, to which the artist whispers a poignant list of the impacts of the lack of drinking water and the communities concerned.

Forbidden to Swim is the name of her installation. It refers to the pollution of Canadian waterways, which is particularly acute in northern Canada due to intense extraction of natural resources. A small stand offers bottled water for sale at the price charged in isolated northern communities – double or triple the price found in cities. The proceeds will go to organizations fighting for safe drinking water. Spectators could also snack on bannock as they warmed their hands over a fire. 

L'anthropologue Carole Lévesque et l'artiste Caroline Monnet évoquent la rencontre entre citadins, écologistes et autochtones, et le rôle de l'art dans cette démarche :