Dematerialization, Appropriation, and Land Grabbing<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nWhether or not it is protected by an agricultural policy, a territory is defined in accordance with a large number of parameters that are changing constantly. One way of trying to understand it consists in measuring, surveying, and mapping it. Yet, when the territory is removed from its immediate environment in order to transpose it onto a map, the tangible reality of the land diminishes and gives way to appropriation. A distinction between the terms \u201cterritory\u201d and \u201cland\u201d emerges. Whereas the former refers to a political and financial concept, an abstract representation of borders and the natural resources contained within them, the latter mainly signifies the terrain used for cultivation, with a material and sensory dimension that tends to make it more concrete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n![\"Angela-Marsch_friche\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/110_DO_Fortin_Angela-Marsch_friche-IMG_8203.jpg\")
Angela Marsh<\/strong>
Friches<\/em>, installation view, Centre d\u2019art Jacques-et-Michel-Auger, Victoriaville, 2023.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nThis is at the core of Ibghy\u2019s & Lemmens\u2019s large-scale installation The Great Appropriation<\/em> (2020-ongoing).Composed of more than three hundred small sculptures, each representing a seigneury or township, the work highlights the geometric division of Qu\u00e9bec\u2019s territory and the dematerialization of the terrain through cartographic processes. Reproduced to scale, the sculptures offer little information about the physical, social, or food-production characteristics of these lands; instead they trace their outlines using playful materials such as nets, sticks, and acetates, which attract us with their vibrant colours, minimalist aesthetic, and plays of light and reflection. While using some of its codes, the installation subtly subverts the two-dimensional and universalizing language of mapping by presenting each sculpture not as an assemblage of abstract forms but in an isolated and vertical manner with a small scrap of paper at its base, on which its name and the date of its inscription in the land registry are written. Furthermore, The Great Appropriation<\/em> is a critique of the seigneurial and township systems imported from Europe, in particular the legal instruments that paved the way for colonization. The installation implicitly reveals a crucial part of the history of how Indigenous land was transformed into colonial territory, a transformation made possible by the apparatuses that enabled a mental appropriation of the land.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n![\"Richard-Ibghy-Marilou-Lemmens\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/110_DO_Fortin_Richard-Ibghy-Marilou-Lemmens_04.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n![\"Ibghy-Lemmens\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/Ibghy-Lemmens-06.jpg\")
Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens<\/strong>
La grande appropriation<\/em>, installation views, Fondation Grantham pour l\u2019art et l\u2019environnement, Saint-Edmond-de-Grantham, 2020-ongoing.
Photos: H&S, courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nLand grabbing today is happening at the global level in what could be called agrarian neocolonialism. Ontarian anthropologist Tania Murray Li describes this phenomenon as a \u201cland rush.\u201d In trying to answer the question \u201cwhat is land?\u201d she explains that what it is \u201cfor a farmer is not the same thing as for a tax collector. Land may be a source of food, a place to work, an alienable commodity, or an object of taxation\u2026. Land is not like a mat. You cannot roll it up and take it away. It has presence and location.\u201d1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - Tania Murray Li, \u201cWhat Is Land? Assembling a Resource for Global Investment,\u201d Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers <\/em>39, no. 4 (2014): 589\u200a\u2013\u200a602, accessible online.<\/span> We can understand it, therefore, in different ways depending on the tools used to comprehend it and the distance that separates us from or the proximity that connects us to it. The abstraction processes at work in the Cartesian representation of a territory through lines, grids, and cadastres flatten a complex terrain, reducing it to a plot that can be appropriated as though it were a mat that we can \u201croll up and take away.\u201d Available for global investment, the land becomes an object of financialization and loses any affective, historical, or ecological dimension in the eyes of the speculators acquiring it.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThis is illustrated in the series Hectares of land acquired by speculators in areas zoned for agriculture in 54 municipalities in Quebec between 2009 and 2014<\/em> (2020) through six photographic compositions representing the area of arable land acquired by financial corporations in the Saguenay region. For this series, Ibghy & Lemmens chose a opaquer materiality, assembling recycled pieces of wood to represent the shapes of the fifty-four municipalities sampled in a study on which the work is based. Each sculpture is then photographed and associated with a lot number, next to which the name of the consortium that made the purchase is divulged: the National Bank of Canada, companies such as Entreprise \u00c9ric Dub\u00e9, and various others that are identified only by a number. The materialization of these territories through wood sculptures, which are once again set vertically, is followed by a dematerialization, which is performed through the intermediary of a photographic support and the annotations accompanying it\u200a\u2014\u200aan echo of the administrative abstraction specific to land speculation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Richard-Ibghy-Marilou-Lemmens\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/110_DO_Fortin_Richard-Ibghy-Marilou-Lemmens_08.jpg\")
Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens<\/strong>
Le nombre d<\/em>\u2019hectares de terre agricole acquis par des sp\u00e9culateurs dans 54 municipalit\u00e9s du Qu\u00e9bec entre 2009 et 2014<\/em>, installation view, Fondation Grantham pour l\u2019art et l\u2019environnement, Saint-Edmond-de-Grantham, 2020.
Photo: H&S, courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nWith this work, Ibghy & Lemmens emphasize that \u201csince 2008, there has been an increase in the area of farmland acquired globally by private equity funds, pension funds, hedge funds, and other institutional investors, domestic and foreign, for large-scale corporate agriculture and speculation.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens, \u201cHectares of land acquired by speculators in areas zoned for agriculture in 54 municipalities in Quebec between 2009 and 2014 (2020),\u201d artist website, accessible online.<\/span> Although the situation worsened after the market crash that year, when investment companies moved away from complex and intangible financial assets and took refuge in what to them seemed a sure value, because it was more concrete\u200a\u2014\u200athat is, agricultural land\u200a\u2014\u200aLi reminds us that the devices that enable global investments in land date back to the beginnings of colonization. Today, the pressure exerted by this type of investment, which is compounded by the constraints imposed by the agri-food industry, greatly contribute to the difficulties encountered by alternative farming models, which try to engage in human-scale agriculture.<\/p>\n\n\n\nOn Rocky Soil Covered in Weeds<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nAs the price of agricultural land in Qu\u00e9bec continues to rise, many investments based on financial speculation are made to the detriment of other forms of valorization. Often, the parcels acquired in this manner are not cultivated, as their owners hope to obtain authorization to rezone to allow non-agricultural development. Once rezoned and reallocated, the land\u2019s financial value skyrockets due to its industrial, commercial, or realty use\u200a\u2014\u200aclearly more lucrative avenues than agricultural activities\u200a\u2014\u200ayet it loses its food and ecological values for the human and other-than-human populations that live on them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the current debate on modernizing the legislation that protects Qu\u00e9bec\u2019s agricultural territory, unused land is described as uncultivable. During the press conference marking the launch of the public consultation on the territory and agricultural activities, Martin Damphousse, president of the Union des municipalit\u00e9s du Qu\u00e9bec, urged the Commission de protection du territoire agricole du Qu\u00e9bec to demonstrate more flexibility in rezoning, particularly in the case of rocky soil where \u201ceven a dandelion struggles to grow.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Thomas Gerbet, \u201cCrise du logement : Des agriculteurs craignent un \u201ctroc\u201d de leurs terres,\u201d Radio-Canada<\/em>, June 30, 2023, accessible online (our translation).<\/span> The image offered by Damphousse refers to unused land in rural areas identified by curator Dominique Laquerre as fertile terrains for artistic creation. Laquerre emphasizes that \u201cjust like unused land intrudes between field and forest or pushes through cracks in the asphalt, artists weave their way through fissures in the dominant discourse so as to show us and make us feel something else.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Dominique Laquerre, pamphlet for the project Friches<\/em>, Centre d\u2019art Jacques-et-Michel-Auger (2023), 2 (our translation).<\/span> This rocky soil, covered in \u201cweeds\u201d and deprived of its potential for agricultural production despite being rich in biodiversity, served as a framework for Friches<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n![\"Sonia-Reboul-Friches\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/110_DO_Fortin_Sonia-Reboul-Friches_02.jpg\")
Sonia Reboul<\/strong>
L<\/em>\u2019errance du Papillon Lune<\/em>, installation view, Centre d\u2019art Jacques-et-Michel-Auger, Victoriaville, 2023.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\nLaquerre developed the idea for the project after she learned about the results of a study5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Dominic Poulin, Caract\u00e9risation des friches \u00e0 des fins de remise en culture dans la MRC d\u2019Arthabaska, Rapport final<\/em>, Comit\u00e9 de d\u00e9veloppement \u00e9conomique de Victoriaville et sa r\u00e9gion, December 2022.<\/span> that looked at 304 plots of unused land in the Arthabaska regional county, almost half of which is prime land for small-scale agricultural projects. During the summer season, some of these unused lands served as sites on which the artists gathered materials. Angela Marsh has been working with wild plants found in abandoned landscapes for over a decade, which she collects and carefully inserts into the compartments of large recycled sheets of bubble wrap, as though to protect them from the passage of time. In the abandoned lot of a former gas station on the outskirts of Victoriaville, she collected wild plants and stencilled poetry on concrete blocks visible from the highway, re-greening the space with natural pigments. Sonia Reboul developed a close relationship with the unused land in Victoriaville\u2019s Bois\u00e9 des Fr\u00e8res, which she enjoyed rediscovering every time she visited, as though they had a long-standing friendship. Encountering an abundant biodiversity, she became interested in the emotional reach of the beings that make up the landscape and in what envelops it in benevolence, using the cocoon form to hold the specimens and artefacts that she collected on-site. The result is a series of fragile sculptures, beaded and knitted with great detail, that evoke unused land as a sensorially and texturally rich emotional terrain.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nOther unused lands bear traces of the agricultural work that forged them and that the artists wished to reveal. Every time M\u00e9riol Lehmann visited the plot on Petit 9e Rang, in Saint-Christophe-d\u2019Arthabaska, he brought with him tools belonging to an era of subsistence farming, such as a scythe and a rake. Once on-site, he alternated between documenting his experience of the place through writing and photography and doing manual labour on the land, which led to an agricultural performance. Presented in the gallery, the video Les foins<\/em> (2023) combines bird\u2019s-eye views with ground-level shots through tall grasses, which show the choreography of a reaper working himself to the bone on the unused land. In Chesterville, Karine Locatelli traced vestiges of the time-consuming process of removing stones from fields that are now abandoned, then covered the mounds of stones with fabric and composed directly in the landscape. The stone piles and micro-landscapes that Locatelli photographed, traced, crosshatched, and transferred onto pieces of fabric subsequently made their way to the gallery, where they quietly transformed the exhibition space into unused land.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n![\"Meriol-Lehmann_Friches\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/110_DO_Fortin_Meriol-Lehmann_Friches_230714_0111_00_01_47_13.jpg\")
M\u00e9riol Lehmann<\/strong>
Les foins<\/em>, video still, 2023.
Photo: Marine Fleury, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n![\"Karine-Locatelli_Friches\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/110_DO_Fortin_Karine-Locatelli_Terrederoches_01.jpg\")
Karine Locatelli<\/strong>
Terre de roches<\/em>, installation view, Chesterville, 2023.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nThe artists participating in Friches<\/em> used a variety of tools to better comprehend the sites selected, including a scythe and rake, a brush and China ink, glass beads, and stencils and words. Unlike those used to map, appropriate, and legislate land, which Li describes as \u201cinscription devices\u201d6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Li, \u201cWhat Is Land?\u201d<\/span> that contribute to understanding land as a resource, these tools were used not to dematerialize the terrain and enable its manipulation from a distance so as to appropriate it more easily but to materialize a sense of presence and develop an awareness of the relationships that exist on the land. Once the artists departed, the fate of the unused lands returned to the hands of their owners. Although fleeting, these artistic interventions nevertheless raised public awareness of the importance of valuing the land for what it is, without demands of financial profitability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n![\"Meriol-Lehmann_Friches\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/110_DO_Fortin_Meriol-Lehmann_Friches_230720_DSCF0662.jpg\")
M\u00e9riol Lehmann<\/strong>
Les foins<\/em>, performance view, Saint-Christophe-d\u2019Arthabaska, 2023.
Photo: Marine Fleury, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n![\"Karine-Locatelli_Friches\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/110_DO_Fortin_Karine-Locatelli_Friches_05.jpg\")
Karine Locatelli<\/strong>
Friches <\/em>(detail), 2023.
Photo: Atelier PhotoSynth\u00e8se, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n![\"Angela-Marsch_friche-cequiseleveraverslesoleil\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/110_DO_Fortin_Angela-Marsch_friche-cequiseleveraverslesoleil_09.jpg\")
Angela Marsh<\/strong>
Friches<\/em>, installation view, Saint-Christophe-d\u2019Arthabaska, 2023.
Photo: M\u00e9riol Lehmann, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/Sonia-Reboul-2023-Photo-Sonia-Reboul-7.jpg\")
Sonia Reboul<\/strong>
Installation in situ closing the residency, Victoriaville, 2023.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nHands in the Soil<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nIn the wake of the works by Marsh, Reboul, Lehmann, and Locatelli, which resulted from direct contact with the terrain, Ibghy & Lemmens\u2019s video Planting, Unplanting<\/em> (2020) immerses us in a convergence between body and land as we follow a farmer\u2019s hands planting seedlings and pulling out \u201cweeds\u201d from cultivated rows. To make the video, the artists contacted a small organic farm in a neighbouring village. Somewhere between Mont\u00e9r\u00e9gie and the Eastern Townships, they spent many hours in the field with this woman and the plants she cares for, trying to capture, in close-up, her repeated series of gestures: planting, pulling, weeding. Ibghy & Lemmens explain: \u201cThose gestures participate in the complex webs that connect the living and nonliving, the human and nonhuman, in continuing cycles of living and dying. Those cycles are fundamental to regeneration and without regeneration there is no sustainability. Sustainable forms of agriculture involve maintaining long-term soil fertility and the conditions for biological activity and diversity within the soil. It involves thinking in circles, instead of along lines, the lines of progress and production.\u201d7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens, \u201cHerber, d\u00e9sherber\/Planting, Unplanting,\u201d in Cahier 01: Exhibition Richard Ibghy Marilou Lemmens<\/em> (Saint-Edmond-de-Grantham: Grantham Foundation for the Arts and Environment, 2020), 9, accessible online.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\nTherefore, the avenues of thought opened by artists who work with the conceptual, geographical, physical, and affective terrains of agriculture also seem to allow us to imagine the sustainability of farmland. By considering sustainable agriculture \u201cin circles instead of along lines,\u201d it becomes possible to see not only a financial<\/em> but also a living<\/em> value in arable land. The abstract vocabulary of financial returns and private property is replaced by poetic yet concrete gestures. To better understand all the value hidden behind maps, property deeds, and unused land, perhaps it is necessary, as Lehmann suggests, to \u201cgo into the field, get down on our knees in the high grass, and open all our senses to collect the fragments hiding there.\u201d8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - M\u00e9riol Lehmann, \u201cFriches,\u201d artist website, accessible online (our translation).<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\nTranslated from the French by Oana Avasilichioaei<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nBased in the Eastern Townships, No\u00e9mie Fortin is an independent curator, writer, and cultural worker sensitive to forms and practices rooted in ecofeminist thought. Her research focuses on ecological art that goes outside institutions in order to encounter territories and communities, particularly in rural areas.<\/p>\n\n\n
Friches<\/em>, installation view, Centre d\u2019art Jacques-et-Michel-Auger, Victoriaville, 2023.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
This is at the core of Ibghy\u2019s & Lemmens\u2019s large-scale installation The Great Appropriation<\/em> (2020-ongoing).Composed of more than three hundred small sculptures, each representing a seigneury or township, the work highlights the geometric division of Qu\u00e9bec\u2019s territory and the dematerialization of the terrain through cartographic processes. Reproduced to scale, the sculptures offer little information about the physical, social, or food-production characteristics of these lands; instead they trace their outlines using playful materials such as nets, sticks, and acetates, which attract us with their vibrant colours, minimalist aesthetic, and plays of light and reflection. While using some of its codes, the installation subtly subverts the two-dimensional and universalizing language of mapping by presenting each sculpture not as an assemblage of abstract forms but in an isolated and vertical manner with a small scrap of paper at its base, on which its name and the date of its inscription in the land registry are written. Furthermore, The Great Appropriation<\/em> is a critique of the seigneurial and township systems imported from Europe, in particular the legal instruments that paved the way for colonization. The installation implicitly reveals a crucial part of the history of how Indigenous land was transformed into colonial territory, a transformation made possible by the apparatuses that enabled a mental appropriation of the land.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Land grabbing today is happening at the global level in what could be called agrarian neocolonialism. Ontarian anthropologist Tania Murray Li describes this phenomenon as a \u201cland rush.\u201d In trying to answer the question \u201cwhat is land?\u201d she explains that what it is \u201cfor a farmer is not the same thing as for a tax collector. Land may be a source of food, a place to work, an alienable commodity, or an object of taxation\u2026. Land is not like a mat. You cannot roll it up and take it away. It has presence and location.\u201d1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - Tania Murray Li, \u201cWhat Is Land? Assembling a Resource for Global Investment,\u201d Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers <\/em>39, no. 4 (2014): 589\u200a\u2013\u200a602, accessible online.<\/span> We can understand it, therefore, in different ways depending on the tools used to comprehend it and the distance that separates us from or the proximity that connects us to it. The abstraction processes at work in the Cartesian representation of a territory through lines, grids, and cadastres flatten a complex terrain, reducing it to a plot that can be appropriated as though it were a mat that we can \u201croll up and take away.\u201d Available for global investment, the land becomes an object of financialization and loses any affective, historical, or ecological dimension in the eyes of the speculators acquiring it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is illustrated in the series Hectares of land acquired by speculators in areas zoned for agriculture in 54 municipalities in Quebec between 2009 and 2014<\/em> (2020) through six photographic compositions representing the area of arable land acquired by financial corporations in the Saguenay region. For this series, Ibghy & Lemmens chose a opaquer materiality, assembling recycled pieces of wood to represent the shapes of the fifty-four municipalities sampled in a study on which the work is based. Each sculpture is then photographed and associated with a lot number, next to which the name of the consortium that made the purchase is divulged: the National Bank of Canada, companies such as Entreprise \u00c9ric Dub\u00e9, and various others that are identified only by a number. The materialization of these territories through wood sculptures, which are once again set vertically, is followed by a dematerialization, which is performed through the intermediary of a photographic support and the annotations accompanying it\u200a\u2014\u200aan echo of the administrative abstraction specific to land speculation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With this work, Ibghy & Lemmens emphasize that \u201csince 2008, there has been an increase in the area of farmland acquired globally by private equity funds, pension funds, hedge funds, and other institutional investors, domestic and foreign, for large-scale corporate agriculture and speculation.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens, \u201cHectares of land acquired by speculators in areas zoned for agriculture in 54 municipalities in Quebec between 2009 and 2014 (2020),\u201d artist website, accessible online.<\/span> Although the situation worsened after the market crash that year, when investment companies moved away from complex and intangible financial assets and took refuge in what to them seemed a sure value, because it was more concrete\u200a\u2014\u200athat is, agricultural land\u200a\u2014\u200aLi reminds us that the devices that enable global investments in land date back to the beginnings of colonization. Today, the pressure exerted by this type of investment, which is compounded by the constraints imposed by the agri-food industry, greatly contribute to the difficulties encountered by alternative farming models, which try to engage in human-scale agriculture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the price of agricultural land in Qu\u00e9bec continues to rise, many investments based on financial speculation are made to the detriment of other forms of valorization. Often, the parcels acquired in this manner are not cultivated, as their owners hope to obtain authorization to rezone to allow non-agricultural development. Once rezoned and reallocated, the land\u2019s financial value skyrockets due to its industrial, commercial, or realty use\u200a\u2014\u200aclearly more lucrative avenues than agricultural activities\u200a\u2014\u200ayet it loses its food and ecological values for the human and other-than-human populations that live on them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the current debate on modernizing the legislation that protects Qu\u00e9bec\u2019s agricultural territory, unused land is described as uncultivable. During the press conference marking the launch of the public consultation on the territory and agricultural activities, Martin Damphousse, president of the Union des municipalit\u00e9s du Qu\u00e9bec, urged the Commission de protection du territoire agricole du Qu\u00e9bec to demonstrate more flexibility in rezoning, particularly in the case of rocky soil where \u201ceven a dandelion struggles to grow.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Thomas Gerbet, \u201cCrise du logement : Des agriculteurs craignent un \u201ctroc\u201d de leurs terres,\u201d Radio-Canada<\/em>, June 30, 2023, accessible online (our translation).<\/span> The image offered by Damphousse refers to unused land in rural areas identified by curator Dominique Laquerre as fertile terrains for artistic creation. Laquerre emphasizes that \u201cjust like unused land intrudes between field and forest or pushes through cracks in the asphalt, artists weave their way through fissures in the dominant discourse so as to show us and make us feel something else.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Dominique Laquerre, pamphlet for the project Friches<\/em>, Centre d\u2019art Jacques-et-Michel-Auger (2023), 2 (our translation).<\/span> This rocky soil, covered in \u201cweeds\u201d and deprived of its potential for agricultural production despite being rich in biodiversity, served as a framework for Friches<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Laquerre developed the idea for the project after she learned about the results of a study5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Dominic Poulin, Caract\u00e9risation des friches \u00e0 des fins de remise en culture dans la MRC d\u2019Arthabaska, Rapport final<\/em>, Comit\u00e9 de d\u00e9veloppement \u00e9conomique de Victoriaville et sa r\u00e9gion, December 2022.<\/span> that looked at 304 plots of unused land in the Arthabaska regional county, almost half of which is prime land for small-scale agricultural projects. During the summer season, some of these unused lands served as sites on which the artists gathered materials. Angela Marsh has been working with wild plants found in abandoned landscapes for over a decade, which she collects and carefully inserts into the compartments of large recycled sheets of bubble wrap, as though to protect them from the passage of time. In the abandoned lot of a former gas station on the outskirts of Victoriaville, she collected wild plants and stencilled poetry on concrete blocks visible from the highway, re-greening the space with natural pigments. Sonia Reboul developed a close relationship with the unused land in Victoriaville\u2019s Bois\u00e9 des Fr\u00e8res, which she enjoyed rediscovering every time she visited, as though they had a long-standing friendship. Encountering an abundant biodiversity, she became interested in the emotional reach of the beings that make up the landscape and in what envelops it in benevolence, using the cocoon form to hold the specimens and artefacts that she collected on-site. The result is a series of fragile sculptures, beaded and knitted with great detail, that evoke unused land as a sensorially and texturally rich emotional terrain.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Other unused lands bear traces of the agricultural work that forged them and that the artists wished to reveal. Every time M\u00e9riol Lehmann visited the plot on Petit 9e Rang, in Saint-Christophe-d\u2019Arthabaska, he brought with him tools belonging to an era of subsistence farming, such as a scythe and a rake. Once on-site, he alternated between documenting his experience of the place through writing and photography and doing manual labour on the land, which led to an agricultural performance. Presented in the gallery, the video Les foins<\/em> (2023) combines bird\u2019s-eye views with ground-level shots through tall grasses, which show the choreography of a reaper working himself to the bone on the unused land. In Chesterville, Karine Locatelli traced vestiges of the time-consuming process of removing stones from fields that are now abandoned, then covered the mounds of stones with fabric and composed directly in the landscape. The stone piles and micro-landscapes that Locatelli photographed, traced, crosshatched, and transferred onto pieces of fabric subsequently made their way to the gallery, where they quietly transformed the exhibition space into unused land.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The artists participating in Friches<\/em> used a variety of tools to better comprehend the sites selected, including a scythe and rake, a brush and China ink, glass beads, and stencils and words. Unlike those used to map, appropriate, and legislate land, which Li describes as \u201cinscription devices\u201d6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Li, \u201cWhat Is Land?\u201d<\/span> that contribute to understanding land as a resource, these tools were used not to dematerialize the terrain and enable its manipulation from a distance so as to appropriate it more easily but to materialize a sense of presence and develop an awareness of the relationships that exist on the land. Once the artists departed, the fate of the unused lands returned to the hands of their owners. Although fleeting, these artistic interventions nevertheless raised public awareness of the importance of valuing the land for what it is, without demands of financial profitability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the wake of the works by Marsh, Reboul, Lehmann, and Locatelli, which resulted from direct contact with the terrain, Ibghy & Lemmens\u2019s video Planting, Unplanting<\/em> (2020) immerses us in a convergence between body and land as we follow a farmer\u2019s hands planting seedlings and pulling out \u201cweeds\u201d from cultivated rows. To make the video, the artists contacted a small organic farm in a neighbouring village. Somewhere between Mont\u00e9r\u00e9gie and the Eastern Townships, they spent many hours in the field with this woman and the plants she cares for, trying to capture, in close-up, her repeated series of gestures: planting, pulling, weeding. Ibghy & Lemmens explain: \u201cThose gestures participate in the complex webs that connect the living and nonliving, the human and nonhuman, in continuing cycles of living and dying. Those cycles are fundamental to regeneration and without regeneration there is no sustainability. Sustainable forms of agriculture involve maintaining long-term soil fertility and the conditions for biological activity and diversity within the soil. It involves thinking in circles, instead of along lines, the lines of progress and production.\u201d7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens, \u201cHerber, d\u00e9sherber\/Planting, Unplanting,\u201d in Cahier 01: Exhibition Richard Ibghy Marilou Lemmens<\/em> (Saint-Edmond-de-Grantham: Grantham Foundation for the Arts and Environment, 2020), 9, accessible online.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Therefore, the avenues of thought opened by artists who work with the conceptual, geographical, physical, and affective terrains of agriculture also seem to allow us to imagine the sustainability of farmland. By considering sustainable agriculture \u201cin circles instead of along lines,\u201d it becomes possible to see not only a financial<\/em> but also a living<\/em> value in arable land. The abstract vocabulary of financial returns and private property is replaced by poetic yet concrete gestures. To better understand all the value hidden behind maps, property deeds, and unused land, perhaps it is necessary, as Lehmann suggests, to \u201cgo into the field, get down on our knees in the high grass, and open all our senses to collect the fragments hiding there.\u201d8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - M\u00e9riol Lehmann, \u201cFriches,\u201d artist website, accessible online (our translation).<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Translated from the French by Oana Avasilichioaei<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Based in the Eastern Townships, No\u00e9mie Fortin is an independent curator, writer, and cultural worker sensitive to forms and practices rooted in ecofeminist thought. Her research focuses on ecological art that goes outside institutions in order to encounter territories and communities, particularly in rural areas.<\/p>\n\n\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
La grande appropriation<\/em>, installation views, Fondation Grantham pour l\u2019art et l\u2019environnement, Saint-Edmond-de-Grantham, 2020-ongoing.
Photos: H&S, courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Le nombre d<\/em>\u2019hectares de terre agricole acquis par des sp\u00e9culateurs dans 54 municipalit\u00e9s du Qu\u00e9bec entre 2009 et 2014<\/em>, installation view, Fondation Grantham pour l\u2019art et l\u2019environnement, Saint-Edmond-de-Grantham, 2020.
Photo: H&S, courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nOn Rocky Soil Covered in Weeds<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
L<\/em>\u2019errance du Papillon Lune<\/em>, installation view, Centre d\u2019art Jacques-et-Michel-Auger, Victoriaville, 2023.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Les foins<\/em>, video still, 2023.
Photo: Marine Fleury, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Terre de roches<\/em>, installation view, Chesterville, 2023.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Les foins<\/em>, performance view, Saint-Christophe-d\u2019Arthabaska, 2023.
Photo: Marine Fleury, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Friches <\/em>(detail), 2023.
Photo: Atelier PhotoSynth\u00e8se, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Friches<\/em>, installation view, Saint-Christophe-d\u2019Arthabaska, 2023.
Photo: M\u00e9riol Lehmann, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Installation in situ closing the residency, Victoriaville, 2023.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nHands in the Soil<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n