MAQ Highlights

(Above) inner facing, back and front panels of pamphlet

Inner left, centre and right panels of pamphlet

In the previous post, I introduced the One Hour Spatial Residency, the cumulation of the spatial theory seminar I took, this past semester. In this post, I share my own spatial intervention. The pamphlet you see is the one I discuss in my artist statement, which was ultimately published in a commemorative booklet. To get an idea of what my intervention was like, read the descriptions of the "highlights" in the above picture, and my artist statement below. 

MAQ Highlights

Tom Collins

What defines the experience of a gallery — its contents or its boundaries? It is with this question that I began my own investigation of the Maison de l’Architecture du Québec, an investigation which would culminate in an hour-long spatial intervention of the nineteenth-century firehall turned gallery. I found it slightly ironic that in a institution ostensibly dedicated to architecture, so little attention is paid to the structure of the institution itself. 

Admittedly, the MAQ’s interior is rather nondescript, in keeping with the modernist philosophy that the gallery should be a neutral frame for its contents. Yet the myth of neutrality is precisely the one I wished to deconstruct with my intervention; the mundanity of space seemed ripe for creative interpretation, and indeed, it lent itself well to my own hyperbolized descriptions and interactions. 

My intervention took the form of a semi-improvised, and loosely directional tour of the MAQ, officially beginning at the Place d’Armes Metro. Although, I also had impromptu discussions with visitors already at the MAQ. In my various engagements, I introduced myself as the an organizer of the larger staging of interventions, by my fourteen classmates. This directorial position was supported by my tailored business attire, intended to be indicative of both professionalism and cultivation. 

Proceeding through the space, I drew visitors’ attention to a number of unassuming features of the space, such as the load-bearing columns, ceiling rack, and radiator. My brief lectures contained a humorous mixture of meaningless fact and provocative fiction, and were delivered in such a way as to evince their absurdity. Essentially, my intention was to encourage critical thinking in and about an institutional setting.

The directly participational aspect of each tour ended spontaneously, once I felt that my small audience had been given an adequate feel for the space. However, with the consent of some of my classmates, I had also encouraged visitors to engage more actively with said classmates’ own interventions. Furthermore, visitors could collect, as commemoration of their experience, one of a limited edition of pamphlets, which I created to illustrate and annotate the banal tour highlights. The pamphlet was to be a final reminder of the MAQ’s ironically neglected architecture.

In addition, I wrote a lengthy paper, which discussed the theory and outcomes of my experiment. Unfortunately, the formatting of this paper is too complex to be reproduced here, but feel free to contact me for a copy.

My pamphlets on display at the Maison de l'Architecture du Québec

Myself holding a piece of baseboard during the intervention