Sound excerpt from the discussion-dinner that took place in the former Parc Claude-Jutra on August 20, 2016 (please listen with headphones in order to hear the approximation of the spatial diffusion). Coming…

The Table is a sound installation/occupation that seeks to revisit and transform our reading and our experience of public places. How do we inhabit the spaces we share? And how can we participate in creating new senses of belonging in common spaces? At The Table, we are invited to sit and share a collective meal in the festival, to discuss, and to take a headset, mingling these moments with those of previous meals at the same place, listening to other people, other words, other ideas. La Table is a metaphor of a real public space: it transforms the public site into a palimpsest of presences intertwined with one another; it creates improbable encounters between people who would never have met. Anchored in a destabilized experience of spatiality, The Table creates tension between reality and fiction through site-specific listening.

A month before the event, I invited 16 anonymous persons from diverse fields of knowledge and experimentation (toponymy, geography, political philosophy, oral history, choreography/dance, urbanism, sociology, activism, landscape architecture, political cinema, visual arts) to share a meal in this specific urban place.

Wireless sound transmission system, sound players, wireless headphones, tableware, food, portable gas stove. Special thanks to all who participated in the public discussion in August and to all who cooked and shared a meal with us in October. Photo : Stéphanie Lagueux.