Communes mesures

Raphaëlle de Groot

Quebec artist Raphaëlle de Groot lives a nomadic life between Canada, Italy, and Brazil. This experience has led her to develop a networked, plural, and multi-layered dialogue with groups of people from diverse backgrounds and realities around the notion of mobility. Evolving as she moves between places, the dialogue involves interlocutors who are not connected initially and are separated by distance.

Defined as the ability or capacity to move, to travel, but also to change and evolve, mobility evokes the notion of transformation. This main thread traverses the project as much as the social and geographic borders that drive it do. In fact, de Groot has arrived at a turning point in her practice, and the MAC LAU — the Canadian anchoring point for her project — has also been reassessing its institutional model and practices in recent years in order to redefine its relationship with artists, the territory, the community, and its collection. Following from the intersection of these trajectories, the collective conversation about mobility that de Groot develops with different groups deals with the unique experience of being confronted with starting over. In Saint-Jérôme, she has met with groups of immigrants learning French, people undergoing social and professional reintegration, and others dealing with mental health issues who are also engaged in creative activities. The idea of starting over serves as the link and metaphor for exploring the attitudes, emotional states, and frames of mind present in the face of the unknown. These exchanges reveal a profound need or intense drive to set things in motion despite the challenges, to nourish a mobility of thoughts, emotions, and gestures.

With what is happening to us, Raphaëlle will not be physically present as part of her exhibition which brings together the current state of her project Prépare ton sac. Lab observatoire de la mobilité, in resonance with a project that she produced as part of the Nuit blanche à Paris - La grande marche des petites choses.

In Saint-Jérôme, de Groot is collaborating with Les Impatients from the Integrated Health and Social Services Centre (CISSS) of the Laurentians, the work integration social enterprise Atelier Éclipse, and the Continuing Education Department of the Cégep de Saint-Jérôme.

The artist thanks the Canada Council for the Arts and the Government of Quebec for their support.

See past initiatives with Raphaëlle de Groot.