Homeless Projection: Place des Arts by KRZYSZTOF WODICZKO

KRZYSZTOF WODICZKO- HOMELESS PROJECTION: PLACE DES ARTS

Krzysztof Wodiczko’s public projections give life to monuments and public buildings through expressive physical movement, combining the images and voices of marginalized citizens: the homeless, immigrants, survivors of domestic violence and war veterans. Homeless Projection: Place des Arts is a new site-specific large-scale projection in which the bodies and voices of the homeless who frequent the downtown core will populate the multi-tiered surface of Théâtre Maisonneuve.

Working in close collaboration with St. Michael’s Mission and other community organizations, Wodiczko offers the homeless a space to recount their experiences, tell their stories and express their fears and desires, thus providing a more intimate portrait of homelessness. Placing the staged projection on a theatre means that the participants become both spectators of official culture and actors playing in their own theatre, following their own lived script. The changing face of cities, increasingly given over to commercial interests and the privatization of public space, impacts heavily on marginalized populations; by giving voice to those who are visible but not always heard, Wodiczko opens up a democratic space for social speech.

Krzysztof Wodiczko lives and works in New York, Boston and Warsaw. He has produced more than eighty such public projections in Australia, Austria, Canada, England, Germany, Holland, Northern Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Switzerland and the United States. At the same time, he has been designing and implementing a series of nomadic instruments and vehicles with homeless, immigrant and war veteran operators, for their survival and communication. Wodiczko won the Hiroshima Art Prize in 1998 for his contribution as an international artist to world peace, and has represented Canada and Poland at the Venice Biennale. He is Professor of Art, Design, and the Public Domain at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Collection of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal Co-produced by the MACM, the Quartier des Spectacles and the Phi Centre, in collaboration with St. Michael’s Mission Presented in BNLMTL 2014: L’avenir (looking forward)

*The projections will be shown from Wednesday to Sunday until November 23