Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil

For the past dozen years, Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil has been investigating manifestations of the desire for security in the public spaces of developed societies. Often adopting a documentary format or pastiching a guided tour, his works show how, increasingly, the exercise of freedom in democratic societies is being subtly demarcated by protection and surveillance technologies. He has created a guided tour of the surveillance systems of the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, revealed the discreet but omnipresent video surveillance cameras along the routes of demonstrations in the French capital, and produced a video map of the most well situated sidewalk cafés from which to direct potential terrorist attacks in major European cities. Auguste-Dormeuil’s art not only renders visible the multiple forms of fear and the need for control that haunt our contemporary nature, but also uncovers the degree to which they afford a decoding of the economic stakes undergirding that nature. For Mobile Space, he will explore how security requirements delineate subtle tensions in the urban fabric of downtown Montréal.