Symposium Cime et racines

Under the torrid August sun, I am pacing along the shores of the Saint-Maurice River. More precisely, I am wandering in Parc La Gabelle, between Shawinigan and Trois-Rivières. Only in its second year, the symposium Cime et Racines (Canopy and Roots) revives the breath and tradition of nature/art events in Québec. Just like the behaviours/situations, Nature/Culture dualities remain an impassable paradigm in humanity's adventure. In this case, it rises even higher in the form of joining local context with an international opening. However, while drying up my forehead, a question comes up : what types of mutation are we informed of by these site-specific sculptural shapes?

Letting the "views of the world" get tangled up with parts of civilizations extracted from Asia, from New Zealand and from elsewhere in North America to end up in La Mauricie, this second edition is enriching a socio-artistic corpus in which enigmatic relations are made with the site, the wood/material and more fundamentally, the wide dynamics of the sacred and of ecology.

These pages depict in writing my journey through the six environmental sculptures created in the summer of 2001. This text takes the risk to relate the "sitespecific2" proximity of the sculptures to the ecosystem's stakes, Mother Earth. The critical sociological viewpoint introduces a pretext : together, these works lead to a necessary drifting towards what I would describe as "factual zones" for the new century.