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Watching Apple Trees Blossom

19 April 2023, 17h00 - 19h00 CET
Speakers: Victoria Stanton and Gabrielle Desgagné-Duclos
Moderator: Vânia Rodrigues

The title "Watching Apple Trees Blossom" serves as an introduction and refers to the non-action of sitting under the apple trees & watching them lose their blossoms, the very first in the series/project “The Sanctimonious Sect of Nothing Is Sacred” by Victoria Stanton. Alongside Vânia, Victoria and Gabreille discussed about how we can challenge the notions of “productivity” and the value we place upon time.

Gabrielle Desgagné-Duclos – Verticale — centre d’artistes

Verticale — centre d’artistes is an artistic centre that contributes to the development of contemporary art. It offers professional artists and artists in the process of professionalization a place of creation and dissemination and promotes community life and meetings with the public. VCA welcomes the heterogeneity of practices that characterizes current art and promotes the decompartmentalization of disciplines. VCA offers arts professionals from Laval and Quebec an incomparable setting in which to develop their creative process from a critical or poetic perspective by investing in a specific territory. VCA wants to bring together visual artists around a strong and diversified program, accessible to the greatest number of Laval citizens, both in spaces dedicated to art and in public places throughout the Laval territory. VCA wants to promote contemporary art as a reflection of the diversity of the City, a land with multiple statuses, and contribute to forging the cultural identity of Laval.

Victoria Stanton

Victoria Stanton (Montreal, Canada) is an interdisciplinary performance artist, published author, and researcher/curator/educator, working with live-action, human interaction, video, film, photo, drawing, and writing. Exploring diverse media, while the outward results of her practice manifest in various forms, performance is the invariable core of her research. Her time-based work includes performance on stage and for the camera, infiltrating actions in public spaces, and one-on-one encounters in intimate contexts. Her work has travelled internationally in Quebec, Canada, the U.S., Europe, Australia, Japan, Mexico and Cuba. In 2020 Stanton began a research-creation PhD in Art Education at Concordia University, exploring “Doing Nothing” as a creative vehicle in the artistic process by examining the role of rest, pause, slowness, and the interval in both performance art/art world contexts & everyday spaces like the (art) classroom.

Vânia Rodrigues

Vânia Rodrigues (1979, Porto, Portugal) has a PhD in Artistic Studies – Theatrical and Performative Studies from the University of Coimbra, with the thesis “MODUS OPERANDI – For a redefinition of production and management practices in the performing arts” (with Distinction and Praise). Graduated in European Studies from the Faculty of Letters of the University of Porto and a Master in Cultural Policies and Cultural Management from the City University of London (with Distinction), in 2009. Vânia has worked as a manager, curator and consultant for several cultural organizations, both in the institutional sphere and with independent structures in the areas of strategic planning, cultural programming and management, project design and international partnerships.