September 6, 2014 - Sylvie Laplante invited me to walk with her along the same route where she emplaced a previous walking work titled Edo-Tokyo-Montreal (2011).
BIOGRAPHY
Sylvie Laplante has professional experience as a tour guide. In her approach, she is interested in the organizational display of the world and in ways to access passages and crossings, as well as the physical encounter with site locations. She also questions the tourism phenomenon. In her practice, the course of trajectories allows her to apprehend spaces with investigation, interversions or playful methods by means of which are created personal anecdotes that make her familiar to these incongruous crossed spaces. She then builds transpositions. The resulting works take the form of cartographic narrations, each consisting of its own theorem. In addition to urban and territorial actions, she uses different mediums: audio recordings, drawings, installations, collections of artifacts, sculpture, videos and photographic documentation.
The four projects the plant in town - wandering with a leaf, Edo-Tokyo-Mtl, envelope and baselstellar are different cartographic works relating to crossed territories.
REFLECTIONS TO WALK WITH
How does what you perceive while you walk become a framework for how you construct your knowledge of the world?
Does walking provide a way to appropriate the world, to make the world your own?
Do you feel that you could create new connections and perceptions of place by changing your habits of walking? To explore this idea, try this activity offered by Sylvie in 2018: Follow the map of a distant place to walk around where you normally walk. Follow the map like a tracing game. This perhaps diverts the experience of everyday walking and skews the perception of what is possible - or opens it up more. As Sylvie suggests, this might allow for the experience of “a third space”.
SOME CONSIDERATIONS FROM SYLVIE (July 2018)
"As I listened to this audio from 2014, I heard myself speaking with hesitation. I left many sentences suspended and often I did not finish my sentences. It's as if by affirming something, something else was already needed, wanted to be adjusted, added. These additions I hear them in my heart, today. For example, about the danger inherent in walking a woman, I would add that it is very likely that instinctively I focus my perspectives towards friendly directions. This is not Western, it is universally feminine.”