Sophie Jodoin

When Sophie Jodoin arrived for her residency at Est-Nord-Est, it was almost a year to the day since she had lost her home, a residence and studio in Mile-Ex in Montréal from which she had been evicted. More than a place for her art and professional activities, she had lived there for twenty-five years, and it was a home that was like part of her body: an extension of her thoughts and habits, an embodied space. At Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, she mourned for it, digging into her hard disks to create a life story through visuals and texts.

Probing representations of the body, of loss, of absence, of intimacy, and of language through photography, drawing, collage, writing, and found objects, Jodoin undertook biographical research. Each day, she went to the riverbank, where she took a selfie. She also found a river root there, which she brought back with her. The proximity of the St. Lawrence was important: the river allowed her to project herself into something bigger. Although she appreciates found objects, she does not normally gather them in nature – a gesture associated with ecofeminism. The root she harvested looked like a drawing, and gradually she began to see it as a vertebra, a vein. She put it on the studio wall and instantly a life-line was sketched out, a nonlinear trace similar to an electrocardiogram. Depending on the day, she read in it the disturbances and pulsations, the physical and nervous states that are part of life. The accumulation of roots became a way to abstract emotion other than through photography.

The traces of her research were found throughout her studio. On the wall were projected selfies; forming a grid on the floor, images drawn from hard disks. She appeared in her old home, near her books, in the middle of paper trimmings, sitting on her sofa under a lamp. This photographic composition was not yet a work but concrete evidence of her research, her quest to write a new life story. This portrait of her former studio was like a large body, her body, stretched out on the floor. For the studio is a welcoming space but also porous, marked by the presence of the artist who lives there. At Est-Nord-Est Jodoin was in her element, for she could live as before – or, rather, as usual. Although she has a studio in Montréal, she feels a deep dividing line between life and work, a division of the body, as the studio is no longer shared with a domestic place.

Jodoin’s two months in residency did her good: she wanted to review the content of all her hard disks, which composed a portrait of a large part of her life. Perhaps it was due to where she was, but she realized that the word “home” was no longer recurring in her language, which showed that she was living and time was passing. At Est-Nord-Est, she managed to listen in a new way, to let herself be surprised by the things that emerged. She understood that reconstruction is possible.