The project is rooted in the history of L’Androgyne Bookstore, one of Montreal’s earliest mixed-gender and mixed-sexuality spaces, active from 1973 to 2002. Before becoming a fixed location, L’Androgyne existed as a mobile idea, relocating five times alongside urban change and the migration of queer life across the city. These pasts surface through dirt collected outside the bookstore’s five former addresses on Saint-Laurent Boulevard, Crescent Street, and Atateken Street. Gathered from planters and cracks in the pavement, the material is soiled, contaminated, and embedded with debris, carrying both visible and invisible traces of the relational and affective worlds the site once supported. Processed through photographic methods and integrated into an installation combining image, text, textile, and light, the ground becomes a collaborator in the retelling of what occurred—here, there, and elsewhere. The work asks how place might act as an agentic voice in the transmission of memory, and how new worlds can emerge from the remnants of those that came before.
Photos by Amed Aroche. This works was made possible with the support of Conseil des arts de Montréal.