Programming

Les Sabines are determined to publicly present one of the most beautiful images that inhabits their creative mind.

The collective found in DARE-DARE’s call for proposals FRICTIONS an opportunity to produce a public work of art inspired by the Integration of arts to architecture policy (1%). The project consists specifically of a permanent unsolicitated installation in a public space on the territory of Montreal.

In the spirit of glorifying its own success, Les Sabines chose to erect the sculpture Message for the future in a Montreal green space, without going through the existing structures by which the city grants permission to do so. True to their subversive form, Les Sabines wish to confront the heavy (and boring) processes that guide the election of public artworks. At the end of the day, these structures too often distort the initial artistic propositions to turn them into consensus-oriented objects presenting no audacity or surprises. This piece consists of a metal frame resembling a gigantic ashtray, filled with sand. The sculpture can then be cleverly used as a zen garden, a flower box, and a sand box for toddlers. The ashtray and the sandbox thus begin to trace an intergenerational narrative, a pattern that lies at the heart of Les Sabines’ creative process.

Founded in 2009, Les Sabines is a duet of cultural entrepreneurs which exploits and challenges the common perceptions of success et artist talent. Also multidisciplinary artists, they are illustrators, video artists and print-media artists. Using self-publication as a process and basis for their illustrated essays, viral advertising and VJing, Les Sabines interfere with a variety of art events and openings, ruminating the codes and recognition patterns of the art world. Their work is based in the mise en abîme of their experience, where the hazards of their professional trajectories are being brought back, as a medium, at the heart of their collective creative process.

Their production follows the random trace of their most direct thoughts, like automatic writing, and manifests itself with humour. Since their beginnings, they draw their moods and minds like caricatures and philosophically question their state of emerging artists, cultural workers and amateur theorists. True narrative foundations to the production of their annual publication, their illustrated self-published essays, catalogued in the greatest archives of Canada and broadcast to the fullest excitement of their fans, act as timely witnesses of the collective’s own professionalization, but also as a subterfuge of peer recognition. Indeed, with each published zine, they build their own professional recognition by infiltrating public archival collections. In this constant and prosperous production, they are reinterpreting the daily in some collective narrative, telling their personal lives, but also a little bit of yours.