La Famille PlouffeSeuls et ensemble, 2021.
Photo: Yoanis Menge, courtesy of the artists & AdMare, Iles-de-la-Madeleine

The Family as Creative Laboratory

Alexandra Tourigny Fleury

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Traditional, blended, nuclear, single-parent, extended, or adoptive: as a model of social organization, the family raises questions of affiliation, intimacy, closeness, and togetherness. Our notion of the family has expanded in recent years, as various transformations and social changes have transpired. Now, it tends to be distanced from the traditional view based on blood and marriage ties. Family reveals itself through complex and varied structures that form between the unit and the whole, between belonging and exclusion, between individual and collective identity. Seuls et ensemble : Créer du lien (Alone and Together: Making Connections), a three-week residency-event curated by Martin Dufrasne and presented at AdMare on Iles-de-la-Madeleine in the summer of 2021, assembled seven artists and collectives who made these relational dynamics the focus of their artistic research. The project offered an open creative platform that encouraged the artists to reflect collectively, and especially publicly, on a subject that is usually relegated to the domain of personal rites and intimate quotidian matters — in short, the private sphere.

The artists’ work was firmly rooted in the island character of the place. The human and geographical features of the landscape informed their creative research and served as a metaphor for a nuanced exploration of the concepts of distance, closeness, affiliation, isolation, and heritage. The infiltrating and in socium practices took different forms, such as performance, story-telling, panel discussion, and mapping. The artists were encouraged to develop a process of research and exploration, without the pressure of necessarily having to produce or disseminate a specific work.