Roundtable discussion

The Relevance of North/South Exchanges

Moderated by Michel Saulnier

 

With Mattiusi Iyaituk, Beatrice Deer, Marie Côté and Laurent Gagnon

 

Excerpts from my presentation

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There is a profound simplicity to this affirmation of geographic and creative exchanges. One can find personal benefits, but exchanges like those proposed by La Biennale also help to open our collective horizons in order for us to see further and wider.

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When I was up North I realized how much the environment, in its broader sense – both natural and constructed – provides a unique way of acknowledging and naming the world. Intimate and profound ties that connect us to the environment  reveal themselves and testify to the plurality, the expansiveness, of humans and the territories they live in.

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Those exchanges provide the foundation to questions such as “how to bring together” and “how to support” worlds that are so different. Living in a city, my horizon often seems only to be “just across the street” – it is locked in categories, folded into more layers, filters and segments. In the city the limited horizon blurs any sense of continuity and blurs the essentials of life, its beauty and its tribulations. 

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Mark Carney, the current governor of the Bank of England, talks of “The Tragedy of Horizons.” He talks about the failure of the financial world to imagine the world outside of short-sighted views. He talks about how we can miss the broader horizons for the future of our planet. For a banker, this almost “Shakespearean” expression exposes the two sides of the issue: one side being the objective, scientific and documented reality that concerns us all collectively, and that of our limitless imagination which connects each of us to our intimate relation with the world.

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Sitting on a rock, I contemplated the infinite northern horizon, the place where boundaries dissolve themselves in an infinite sky. Perhaps this is where we can start our dreams.  At this precise spot our place as human in nature is revealed, and the world can begin, once again, to enter our imagination. There in front of us.

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I was there to learn and to allow the sublime beauty of the land to transport me.

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Thank you very much.