Material-Discursive Dissimulation<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p> Whereas the spherical biogas wells dissimulate waste in a sustainable environment, the holding centre confines incoming \u201cotherworldly\u201d matter- bodies out of site\/sight. Both of Lemay\u2019s projects are \u201chybrids of waste, technology, ecology, humans, and non-humans.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Ibid, 667.<\/span>\u201d They are both sinks<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
What might be dissimulated within the biogas wells\u2019 enclosures is a powerful assemblage of political manoeuvres and system(s) of the containment of matter-bodies: a $4 million architectural project for the Laval Immigration Holding Centre, also being designed by Lemay (absent from the architecture firm\u2019s website). Can the Laval Immigration Holding Centre and the Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric-Back Park projects be collapsed into a single speculative collaboration of absence and presence? Can both be defined as technopolitical apparatuses that hide and reorganize bodies and matter? Are they both bound to a wider, elaborate political network of \u201ccleansing\u201d? As Jennifer Gabrys argues, \u201cPollution is not a fixed category, and what we regard as contamination shifts across space and time.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Jennifer Gabrys, \u201cSink: The Dirt of Systems,\u201d Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27, no. 4 (2009): 668.<\/span>\u201d Extending this porous definition of contaminants into the realm of the Anthropocene might help with deciphering a through line in Lemay\u2019s designs, where specific bodies are realized as such in political and economic world making. Echoing the rise of alt-right movements that catalyze racist, Islamophobic, and anti-immigrant attitudes, migrants are subjected to the Canada Border Services Agency\u2019s protocols, which include arrest and detainment as common tools of control and deportation. If migrants are suspected of being a \u201cthreat\u201d to the country, or deemed likely to fail to appear for upcoming hearings, or if their identity comes under question, subjects can be held in detention for an indefinite amount of time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/101-DO8-IMG3-IM_Vandal_Frederic-Back_02_CMYK-1024x683.png\")
Photo : Alain Beauchesne<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/101-DO8-IMG2-IM_Vandal_Frederic-Back_03_CMYK-1024x683.png\")
Photo : Alain Beauchesne<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/h4>\n\n\n\nSinks as Technopolitical Apparatuses<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
Sinks are not only containers but technological and scientific devices for monitoring and channelling matter; they act as tools \u201cfor negotiating ecological balance, but also as an instrument of political management7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Ibid, 671.<\/span>This Biogas well technicians, border services officers, and holding centre officers engage with bodies and matter through their respective apparatuses, stabilizing flows and regulating their respective sink systems. Their diverse sensing technologies, from pressure sensors to paper-scanning equipment, to border policies and procedures, perpetuate inequalities through unethical economic, cultural, and environmental projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Resonating with Karen Barad\u2019s agential realist approach to (scientific) apparatuses, these sensing devices are open-ended instruments that are subject to the performance of their users and milieus8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).<\/span>they are static in their material configuration yet (re)configure their surroundings through discursive practices, and they are subject to (re)interpretation. Sensing devices make worlds \u2014 or rather, they select environmental data made available for interpretation, manipulation, and control of matter(ing). Correspondingly, the \u201csurreal\u201d glow emanating from the biogas wells\u2019 phosphorescent membranes blinds the visitors to Lemay\u2019s complicit landscape design aimed at cleansing the vicinity of other forms of contaminants, thus rehabilitating it. Inversely, the architecture firm\u2019s project for the holding centre embodies the instrumentality of the biogas well by controlling inflows \u2014 or spills \u2014 of immigrants, as we are reminded by the \u201canti-Lemay, anti-cop, anti-authoritarian, and anti-fascist\u201d graffiti found on the glowing biogas enclosures9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Montreal Counterinformation, \u201cNighttime Visit to Lemay\u2019s Installations in Parc Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric-Back,\u201d 2018,https:\/\/bit.ly\/36ZqED0<\/a><\/span>. Spherical shapes are used in both architectural endeavours : the precast concrete bollards found in the project proposal for the holding centre echo the design of the biogas wells, constraining incoming and departing vehicles along rigid pathways. If the concept of the sink were extended to Lemay\u2019s assemblage of architects, rhetorical advertising, and munic- ipal affiliations, its mission of \u201ccreating better living environments for communities and future generations\u201d10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Lemay, \u201cWho We Are: LEMAY \u2014 Architecture and Design,\u201d 19 Aug. 2020, https:\/\/lemay.com\/fr\/notre-firme\/<\/a><\/span>would lose all of its intersectional legitimacy and spill its meaning out of the firm\u2019s porous philosophy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Spills and Their Cultural Entanglements<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
Spills are the phenomena that define the indeterminacy and porous nature of sinks. In the case of landfills, they are scientifically monitored yet spatially and temporally unpredictable. For the biogas wells in Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric-Back Park, inspectors monitor the efficiency of a seventeen-kilometre pipe network, ensuring nominal pressure caused by fluctuating bacterial activities occurring a few metres under the curated landscape. If there is an inadvertent pressure gradient in a node, the network will adjust and spill methane and many other organic and inorganic volatile compounds into the air. Deep in the former quarry it is unknown when the waste will get consumed by bacteria and their potent leachate, but it will erode eventually through natural processes; the sink will lose its constancy and spill into an adjacent container, becoming part of another porous infrastructural endeavour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And yet, the \u201canti-Lemay\u201d activist tags are catalyzing another sort of spillage, and the biogas well\u2019s enclosure is now diffracting a different aura upon its entangled material condition. Lemay\u2019s engagement with matter holds a \u201cspatial execution, of place, land, and person cut from relation through geographic displacement,”11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 2.<\/span>which is reflected from its holding centre back onto the architectural landscape of the park. Both projects are addressing an \u201cinhuman matter\u201d12<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 12 <\/a> - Ibid.<\/span>that embodies a toxicity or a falsely determined binding with material and cultural conditions prone to abuse within the legal system. Lemay\u2019s work becomes a racialization of matter, or materialization of race, through displacement, dissimulation, and a politics of filtering, conditioned by a logic of control and dehumanizing rhetoric reminiscent of dominant colonial narratives. The extensive participation of the Canadian government in offshore extraction, polluting production processes, and pipeline acquisition contributes to climate refugee movements through waste colonialism and increasing petrochemical emissions. The Saint-Michel neighbourhood, known as an important \u201chub for newcomers\u201d in Montr\u00e9al with 79 percent of its residents born outside of the country \u2014 60 percent belong- ing to a visible minority group, and 75 percent in families with children \u2014 is multilaterally stressed through environmental gentrification, evictions, and neoliberal border and detention politics. As stated on Stop the Prison\u2019s website, a majority of migrants detained in the centres are accompanied by their children, and most likely have family ties in Canada, which might fold the Laval Immigration Holding Centre into the porous systems of the Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric-Back Park\u2019s milieu13<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 13 <\/a> - Stop the prison, https:\/\/stopponslaprison.info\/le-projet\/<\/a><\/span>. The park, which accounts for a quarter of the land in the neighbourhood, establishes a potential enclave for specific bodies and their communities through \u201cnew\u201d land management and (re)configuration. The infrastructures of both sites might cascade and spill into each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Land Management and Bacterial Agency<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps the false premise of rigid enclosures dissecting spaces, places, bodies, and biological mattering is key to resolving the containment practices found in Lemay\u2019s conditioning of matter. Bacterial activities, first considered nauseating and toxic, become another economic project of multispecies activation for real estate speculation. The land of the former quarry reflects a green space of porous sinks, an entanglement between nature and culture that echoes the impossible retention of lively matter, which spills into political and cultural agendas. TOHU and Cirque du Soleil had sincere intentions of engaging with the community in St-Michel, yet the entanglement of Lemay\u2019s project there, as with its immigration holding centre project in Laval, questions the binding, control, and filtration of matter-bodies found through the park\u2019s manufactured landscape and sustainable discourse. Gabrys\u2019s concept of the sink, with its unpredictable spills and porous material conditions, reflects the importance of considering the agential relations of matter and its multidirectional actuation. Bodies and matter marked as contained are gazed at and sifted through by technopolitical apparatuses that are enmeshed in larger networks of relations, in larger sinks of their own. Sinks are sites of transformation, crossing boundaries and creating undetermined relations. And yet, Lemay\u2019s tactical spills sound politically calculated, with their precise entanglements and outcomes. Inflows of bodies are filtered through the Laval Immigration Holding Centre and redirected toward other forms of sinks and spills. Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric-Back Park filters matter and engages in a rehabilitation project that is not solely environmental but also cultural and political. This might be the spill that is dissimulated under the biogas wells, a spill that is undetectable by pressure and air quality sensors.<\/p>\n