Programming
Caroline Boileau
Symptômes relocalisés
Symptômes relocalisés, le projet qu'elle développe pour Mémoire vive, s'intéresse à l'histoire de la santé publique à travers les faits, les statistiques et les publicités de médicaments qu'elle a trouvées lors de recherches en archives.
Mémoire vive
Initiated by DARE-DARE in collaboration with the Centre d'histoire de Montréal, Mémoire Vive provided a framework for reflection that brought together artists and stakeholders in the heritage field.
Symptômes relocalisés, the project she is developing for Mémoire vive, looks at the history of public health through facts, statistics and drug advertisements she found during archival research. Curious to discover how this history spreads in the city and is transformed, how it is contaminated by persistent whispers that give it a particular flavor and smell, she will compare her findings to the stories of people on the street. In her research, she focused on facts and anecdotes related to specific places in Montreal. From the beginning of June to the end of July, she will spontaneously inhabit these places for a few hours to pass on these stories to passers-by. In return, she will ask them to tell her a memory, a legend, an event about water, blood and milk related to a particular place in the city. These vital fluids, which strongly mark the imagination of the people, become the vehicle of the story.
In a back and forth movement between what history retains and what people experience, what they know and what they feel, Relocated Symptoms approaches history as a living organism permeable to its environment and is a metaphor for memory.
Caroline Boileau is fascinated by the different ways of talking about the body and inhabiting it. Her creative work somatizes the medical, parasitizes the hospital, poetically recycles the drug, proposes color as a therapy, probes the body and exorcises the disease. By all these means, Caroline Boileau questions the way medicine looks at the body by confronting it with popular beliefs as well as the intimate stories people tell her.
Press Release
To participate in Caroline Boileau's story collection, drop by the Centre d'histoire de Montréal to pick up the Relocated Symptoms collection kit. The kit includes a form for telling a memory, legend or event about water, blood or milk, related to a particular place in Montreal. A postage-paid envelope is included to return your stories to the artist, who will in turn send you a button. You will find it at the Montreal History Centre in the Living Memory Lab. Available while quantities last.