AN URBAN EXHIBITION OF CONTEMPORARY ART | Curated by Diane Gistal | July 1 to October 1, 2025

We still inhabit the world in a differentiated, fragmented way¹. Based on this premise, the fifth iteration of Mémoire de l’avenir takes a critical look at the territory as a place of identity, emotion and politics. The exhibition examines the persistent traces of "colonial inhabitation²", of which the contemporary dynamics of unbridled expansion, monopolization and racialization of spaces are some of the most visible manifestations. These legacies are not without consequences: our future, in the age of the Anthropocene, seems uncertain. Despite the fragmentation of lands disputed by a handful of humans, we wish to remind you that the earth remains the place where possibilities emerge, where relationships, experiences and poems are interwoven, and where all living things cohabit. Tiohtià:ke (Montreal), a cultural metropolis, reflects this: a fragment of the All-World³. This territory, criss-crossed by geographies of solidarity and multiple communities, invites us to contemplate a "living together". The duo Andrew Jackson and Sophia Borowska use textiles and photography to highlight the way in which communities carry the history of this city within them, in a context where their presence and memory are sometimes threatened with erasure. Through performance, Florencia Sosa Rey explores emotional and geographical distances, while Léuli Eshrāghi, with sensual gestures and tender movements, opens up the space of relationships and embodied knowledge. Lastly, Marwan Sekkat and Lorna Bauer use glitch to symbolically and sensitively reveal and decipher the multiple visible and invisible strata of the territory.

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¹ Felwine Sarr, Habiter le monde (Paris: Mémoire d'encrier, 2017), p. 26.

² See Malcom Ferdinand's Une écologie décoloniale. Penser l'écologie depuis le monde caribéen (Paris: Seuil, 2019).

³ We refer here to the concept coined by Martinique thinker Édouard Glissant. This neologism refers to a way of thinking that invites us to go beyond borders, to focus on interconnections and relationships, and to embrace creolization.