Programming
JENNY CARTWRIGHT
1312 obstructions to the right to demonstrate
The police surrounded us for hours, denying us water, access to toilets, and the warm clothes we were brought. The City has acknowledged its wrongdoing, but the apology is half-hearted and disappointing, firmly planted in an era where words like intersectional and systemic scare the powerful.
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On April 5th, 2013 I was, like nearly 300 other people, « souriciée » by the SPVM during a demonstration against the iniquitous P-6 regulation. Surrounding us for hours, the police refused us water, access to the toilets, the warm clothes we were brought.
Shortly after my arrest, I became the representative in one of 16 class action suits filed in response to these abusive and arbitrary arrests. 10 years later, a settlement was reached: the city of Montreal will pay $6 million to the arrested.
The city has also acknowledged its wrongdoing. But the apology was halfhearted and disappointing, stuck in an era where words like intersectional and systemic scare the powerful. It took a lot of media coverage highlighting the fact that the apology was buried in a corner of their website, in a PDF document with no date, no header, and no signature, for Valerie Plante to finally pay lip service to it, restricting the deprivation of our basic rights and police brutality to the year 2012.
For this project, I wanted to give their text the existence in the public space that it has been denied by imagining a "translation" of the city's apology, from my perspective.
Thanks to David Cherniak and Marie-Hélène Racine for their invaluable proofreading.
The city's apology
"Between 2011 and 2015, various social protest movements led to major demonstrations in Montreal.
In the context of the out-of-court settlement of 16 class actions for which the city of Montreal is being sued in this context, the city recognizes that certain actions taken by police forces and the municipal administration towards participants in the demonstrations covered by these class actions infringed on some of their fundamental rights, thereby causing them damage.
It is for this reason that the city of Montreal publicly apologizes to all of these individuals."
Jenny Cartwright
Jenny Cartwright explores themes of self-determination and inequality through topics such as gentrification, activism, work and poverty. It is through this bias towards the marginalized that she attempts to combine poetry and manifestos. While she constantly questions the way she tells stories, moving from classical to experimental film and from installation to sound creation, her practice remains resolutely documentary.