Exeko: From Shadow to Light

As Montréal slowly slips into spring and the days grow longer, From Shadow to Light invites you to enjoy twilight a little longer. Created through a collaboration between performing artists, VJs and Exeko, this unusualhybrid project takes over public space on Wednesday, April 15 and 22, especially a wall near Saint-Laurent metro station, in partnership with Montréal’s Quartier des spectacles. Exeko’s fifth residency of

the season, From Shadow to Light takes the form of a small technological jewel: the tagtool, an open-source conceptthat graphic designer Marie-Noël Vanasse has adapted and built. While one participant draws on a graphics tablet, another can use a few simple buttons to animate the forms and drawings, which are projected in real time onto a large wall in public space. The project brings several themes together.

Beyond discovering an unusual and participatory medium based on light, it questions our relationship to the public space in which it unfolds. Alessia De Salis, mediator and actress, invites participants to become part of the artwork by stepping into the space between the projector, its technician-artists and the wall. Helped by a range of accessories such as fabric and umbrellas, they become living screens that receive the projected image. The moving body adds a performative, happening-like dimension. Each person can influence another’s creation through their position. The temporary artwork is co-built and rests on the behaviour of one protagonist or another. In the half-light of two Wednesdays, the Exeko team and

its artists in residence invite passersby, residents, workers, visitors and neighbourhood users, whatever their origin or social condition, to make this meeting place their own: a space between citizens, and also between art and collective reflection, lighting up the city that brings them together. A non-profit organization, Exeko has worked

since 2006 to include citizens, especially people who are marginalized or at risk of exclusion. With each person, Exeko seeks to question norms through creative approaches and to reflect, on equal terms, on society, place and the identity each person can build within it. Among Exeko’s target areas, homelessness plays an increasingly important role, especially through the idAction Mobile program, a small philosophicalcaravan for intellectual and cultural mediation that has been on the road for three years. It pays particular attention to the inclusion of young people and Indigenous people experiencing homelessness. In recent months, this rolling pretext box has become a privileged platform for artistic projects, hosting multidisciplinary initiatives that aim at co-creation and at bringing citizens together in all their diversity around an artistic and cultural object. Painting, theatre, museology and photography all become ways to blur boundaries, spark encounters, promote access to artistic practice and deconstruct prejudice.