Créer à rebours vers l’exposition

This wide-ranging research project examining the history, future and documentation of exhibitions in Quebec. Its goal is to observe the past using conceptual tools of the present to inscribe these exemplary cases in a history-in-the-making. Thus it is by working backward (“à rebours”) that we are studying the practice of exhibitions in Quebec, following the threads of the multiple stories that have made up its narrative fabric up to now.

This series of reactivations has allowed us to assemble an exhaustive archive of heretofore unseen documentary material—hundreds of visual, audio and text documents—in combination with reactivations of performances and present-day accounts, which we now want to make available for future research. While it is true that Créer à rebours vers l’exposition has aimed to constitute archives that were often non-existent in the cases studied, the reactivations differed considerably in their approaches, encompassing a theatre stage, an installation, the page layout of a catalogue, a reactivation of a performance, a voluminous lightbox, and a period room, thus creating specific documentary experiences that were both active and enlightening. Read more