Repenser la famille. De l’utopie aux nouvelles strategies presents the results of the ArtLab residency held between October 2019 and August 2020. Artist Camila Vasquez took the opportunity of this residency to initiate a socio-artistic laboratory focused on exploring the model of the nuclear family in its current state of transformation, under the pressure of shifting socio-economic conditions. Using self-ethnographic tools to research utopian values, practical failures and adaptive strategies lived by families nowadays, this project takes root in the singular context of Waterville, in the Eastern Townships.

This project rests on the long-term involvement of eight local families, who met throughout the past year in the context of multidisciplinary workshops, get-togethers and performance art seances. Interrupted in its original form by the pandemic, the project was brought to migrate towards a digital platform. From September to December 2020, the project unfolds online and ramifies into an accretion of digital artworks. Once completed, the resulting online art project is to remain accessible in the form of an archive. The administrative traces of the project are assembled and exhibited at the Foreman Art Gallery, thus positioning the pragmatic underpinnings of the project in flagrant contrast to a self-referential photographic series created in citational relation to Sally Mann’s intimist work.

This project is supported in the context of the Entente de développement culturel- Gouvernement du Québec / MRC de Coaticook. This project was developed in partnership with Waterville’s Community Center, the City of Waterville, the MRC de Coaticook, the Maison de la famille de Coaticook, and with the collaboration of 0/1 Hub numérique de l'Estrie.

More information

foreman.ubishops.ca/repenserlafamille/