Stéphane Gilot

Montréal délire [Delirious Montréal], 2017

Installation

2067 – Cour internationale de Justice. Siège des crimes écologiques de Montréal, 2 drawings: lead pencil, coloured pencil, watercolour on paper; Quintet, drawing: lead pencil, coloured pencil, watercolour and collage on paper; L’écume des îles, drawing: lead pencil, coloured pencil, watercolour and collage on paper; Minecraft video game platform; table, wood and metal; computers; video projection, 12 min 45 s, sound

Stéphane Gilot’s mini-pavilion functions as a temporary micro-community reflecting on the laboratory of ideas that was Expo, but that regrettably never extended beyond the boundaries of Île Sainte-Hélène and Île Notre-Dame. More than a semiotic phantom, the 1967 Universal Exposition, with its huge potential for alternative forms and approaches, is revisited through the Minecraft construction game platform, chosen because of its geometry (cube and vector), freedom of shareable creation (open source code) and concept of resources (limited or unlimited). Visitors are invited to move through and participate in the construction of a virtual world while exploring the vectoral forms of the architecture given prominence at Expo 67: the cube, the triangle and their many variations. The pentagonal shape of the table is a direct reference to Robert Altman’s 1979 film Quintet, shot on the Expo site, in which the social order established by a casino-based government in a post-apocalyptic future is maintained through a game centred on the pentagon. The link with the fate of the Québec and French pavilions, which were converted into a casino, is striking. The musical excerpts are from the works of composers Gilles Tremblay and Iannis Xenakis.

Programming and management of video game server: Daniel Guérard, with assistance by Antoine and Julien Guérard, Adrien Gilot

Editing: Caroline Boileau

Stéphane Gilot, born in 1969 in Belgium, lives and works in Montréal. His multidisciplinary practice combines drawing, models, architectural installations and performance. Among his recent projects are a major solo exhibition, Le catalogue des futurs at the Musée d’art de Joliette (2016); Pièce pour cinq interprètes, lumière rose et silence presented at the 12^th Havana Biennale, Cuba (2015); MULTIVERSITÉ/Métacampus at the Galerie de l’UQAM, Montreal (2012); and La Cité performative at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Québec (2012). He has also shown his works at Art Toronto (2015); at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in the 2008 Québec Triennale; and in Smile Machine at the Berlin Transmediale (2006).