Si je me souviens

2019

Performance, installation, photography, making of

Whereas in Carrara a landscape with all its ecosystems has been mined for thousands of years, a new mountain is rising from the ground in Montreal next to Mount Royal, the city’s namesake. It marks the spot where municipal dump trucks have been unloading the snow collected from the city’s streets since the 1980s. Bisagno and Baltzer hired a professional climber to scratch a 50-metre-large tattoo-like inscription into the dirty mass, adding a conditional si (if) to Quebec’s motto Je me souviens (I remember). In other words: if I remembered, would my memories reach beyond the region’s dominant colonial identity? The artists’ work disappeared after one week, when the top layer of snow melted. Angelika Stepken

colonialism, landscape, memory, photography, ecology

Leonora Bisagno / Bruno Baltzer

Bruno Baltzer and Leonora Bisagno have been working as an artist duo since 2014. They analyse the contemporary condition of representation, both official and spontaneous, through installations and interventions. Baltzer and Bisagno employ multiple forms for their projects, ranging, among other things, from tourism photography to election posters, advertising neons and television archive material.

Bruno Baltzer and Leonora Bisagno, Je me souviens, 2019, Villa Romana, Florence; photo: OKNOstudio

Si je me souviens