This is a rough video sharing the final performance (mostly the music) by Theatre students in the Right to the City course, a tethered teaching initiative in Pointe Saint-Charles, a postindustrial neighbourhood in Montreal’s south-west.
By Katherine Chou
Dario Ré performs “Song for a Fisherman” at Share the Warmth during the Right to the City Event.
By Katrina Caruso
For girls and women, to live in our bodies in a male-controlled world is to live in places of continual siege. […] I have not wholly concluded the process of reclaiming all the territory that is my body. The reconquering of territory and the maintenance of territory continues daily. Someday I will fully and unconditionally occupy all of its space at all times. – Si Tranken
Walking through Pointe-St-Charles, I have found that the neighborhood has both charming spots – lush greenery and big trees, homes with stories – and not-as-nice spaces – concrete industrialism and run-down buildings. Through my site visits, I was most drawn to the places that are part of the latter. These spaces hold a certain kind of tension – they are the in-between: reminders of moments, of activity no longer there, and places of movement, places we use to get to and from.
By Evan Stanfield and Laura O’Brien
Like many post-industrial neighborhoods throughout North America, Montreal’s Pointe Saint-Charles is currently experiencing a rapid rate of urban renewal and development as city planners try to envision a future for a place that was built around industries that have slowly disappeared. But as long-vacant buildings, and neglected plots of land are hastily transformed into condominiums, the amount and the variety of shared urban spaces that residents of the neighborhood have access to is decreasing. It is with this thought in mind that I set out explore Pointe Saint-Charles in search of a way to engage with the neighborhood through an urban intervention project.
By Lisa Graves
In October 2014, a small group of guests were invited to participate in a sound installation and collective composition while touring the remaining bell tower structure at Share the Warmth in Pointe-Sainte-Charles.
Anthropologist Kathleen Stewart remarks that every person is a series of compositional moments. These are the kind of moments I’ve encountered at Share the Warmth in Pointe-Sainte-Charles. Compositional captures made up of the rhythms of people, events and happenings in a place where life unfolds in an acoustic flow.
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Pointe Saint-Charles “Shares the Warmth” as Concordia Students partner with local organizations
On November 29th, three classes from Concordia University will be showcasing work done this semester in Pointe St-Charles. The event is open to the public and features an audio tour of the neighbourhood followed by an exhibition of projects and short performances. The audio walk departs from the Pointe-St-Charles Library (1050 Hibernia) at 1pm and the exhibition is at Share the Warmth (625 Fortune) from 2:30-5:30pm.
By Aditi Ohri
I am curious about place, belonging and the embodiment of subjective experience. Doreen Massey describes place as a social process, a living relationship between emotions, observations, and movements in physical space.
By Damien Smith
I am an individual of what would be best described as coming from a rural working class/blue collar background. Most of my childhood was spent on a former cold war era army base converted to housing that by the 1990’s had become an economic burden to both the municipal and provincial governments: was then abandoned and became a ghost town and a few years later demolished and razed to the ground.
By Sara Kendall
On October 6, 2014 Restaurant et Taverne Magnan announced that it would be closing its doors after 82 years of operation. Opened in 1932 at the corner of St-Patrick and Charlevoix streets in Pointe Saint Charles and owned continuously by the Magnan family, the tavern has been a long-standing local landmark.
By Zoe Wonfor
To be outside something is to be inside something else. To be outside (something) is to afford oneself the possibility of a perspective to look upon the inside. Which is made difficult if not impossible from the inside. This is the rare and unexpected joy of outsideness: to see what cannot be seen from the inside.
Elizabeth Grosz – Architecture from the Outside.
By John Toohey
I was first drawn to Point Saint Charles’ elliptical shape. Ringed by industry and cut off from the rest of the city, it suggested a neighbourhood that would become self-reliant and inward looking. These were ideal circumstances for the development of a distinct or idiosyncratic culture.
By Isadora Chicoine-Marinier et Samantha Wexler
Starting from the discovery of Le Ratatouillé collective garden and L’Épicerie Solidaire on Grand Trunk Street, this intervention is an ongoing field-research project around food security and activism in Point-Saint-Charles from past to future.
By Clinton Glenn
“When my father died we put him in the ground/when my father died it was like a whole library burned down.”
My intervention, titled A Loss in Three Movements, was informed by the ways in which the loss of people in our lives helps shape our experience of space, both geographical and metaphorical.
By Muriel Luderowski
Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan elaborates that a place is a center of meaning constructed by experience. It took me a long time to find that place, one that I felt was representative of the history of Pointe-Saint-Charles. A place that spoke to the past and the present of this very Montreal neighbourhood.
By Dario Ré
Geographers have begun to conceptualize music, recognizing that it is not just a cultural product, but perhaps more importantly, it is a medium of experience and a way of understanding the world.1
By Dario Ré
The proliferation of post-industrial gentrification in Pointe-Saint-Charles has transformed once-affordable rental housing into condo homes, displacing memories embedded in space and thus, as Steve Pile suggests in Temporalities, Autobiography and Everyday Life, “narratives of the self.” He argues these narratives are “more than just ‘situated’ in the sense of having a particular, unique time and place.” They are “inherently spatial [and] spatially constituted. Stories of the self are ‘produced’ out of the spatialities that seemingly only provide the backdrop for those stories ourselves.”1