Intervals Collective

Intervals is a non-profit collective of artists and cultural workers interested in the social role of art in a plural world. Founded in 2015, the collective strives to bring together creators from Montreal’s ethnocultural communities through discursive, creative, production and artistic dissemination activities.

The collective aims to fill liminal spaces and, through social interactions and interventions, seeks to fill a void – a gap between communities, institutions, and established structures. Intervals is itself the space of the in-between, the hyphen that connects, communicates and facilitates experiences, exchanges and relationships to the world.

The members are Caroline Douville (artist/curator), Maria Ezcurra (artist/educator), Dominique Fontaine (curator), Romeo Gongora (artist/educator) and Miwa Kojima (artist/designer/editor).

Since its inception, the members of the collective have met regularly to exchange ideas, share experiences and plan artistic projects. These meetings have become a creative and reflective interval that has greatly contributed to our sense of community and belonging as Montreal artists, and has inspired us to find ways to extend this experience with other individuals and communities.

Tales of plurality

In response to Art Souterrain’s invitation to co-curate this year’s festival under the theme “Voix-voies résilientes,” the collective Intervals selected the work of 22 artists that explores and reflects diverse “Tales of plurality.”

In these current times of crisis and uncertainty – affected by an ongoing pandemic, an accelerating climate chaos, social and labour inequality, multiple human rights violations, environmental and economic crisis, isolation, and abandonment, among many other critical issues – resilience seems to be our last refuge.

While this pandemic crisis has been challenging for everyone, everywhere, it has unequally affected the most vulnerable segments of societies: women, children, elderlies, low-income classes, and racial and ethnic minority groups. If something, this pandemic has shown that building resilience for one community could be harmful to another.

Thus, many of the artworks presented in this exhibition involve diverse experiences of resistance and a plurality of voices, many of which are often silenced or discriminated against based on race, gender, age, body-ableness, class or social status (ranging from immigrants, single mothers, the homeless…). Many of these projects engage with people working at the frontline as well as with communities that have undergone hardships during the Covid-19 confinement, and others still remind us of our interconnectedness on this earth, brought to our attention in the intervals between our accelerated contemporary urban living and ancestral wisdom.

The body of work that forms the “Tales of plurality” exhibition involves personal experiences from various artists and their unique sense of observing the lives of others or collaborating with diverse communities. Their practice sometimes becomes a coping mechanism, a response to difficult situations, a way of connecting with others, or sometimes a critical approach to our current circumstances. It is often channeled by audiences to bear witness to those stories, foster a conversation, and grow together within a common social milieu – a plurality of actions and interactions, all contained in the commonalities and differences of the challenging times we are experiencing, alone and together.