Anne-Marie Proulx

Anne-Marie Proulx’s participation in the summer residency as an author spoke to the integral role of writing in her practice. Although her projects are deployed in powerful photographic installations, text plays an essential role in their articulation. It is inseparable from both her conceptual process and the materiality of her works.

During her residency, Anne-Marie assigned herself a specific time-space to think about this articulation between images and words in a book(s) project. She immersed herself in the photographic archive that she has accumulated since her early stays in an Innu community, in the Lower North Shore region, that she has been getting to know for the last few years, slowly. Yes, none of this was rushed. In the middle of her studio, surrounded by her images, she reconstructed the narrative. It was not chronological; rather, it followed the directions – east, south, west north – and then started again, forming circles. It was through the cardinal points that she learned to recognize the territory, through the eyes and bodies of its inhabitants.

Anne-Marie’s writing overflows the margins of the travel diary; it tells of a dialogue deeply rooted in encounter and genuine human relationships. She works the written traces of her experience like a raw material to be refined – but not too much: sometimes the bumps, the hesitations, must be preserved to reveal the true rhythm of real life. Lists, itemizations, and a series of gestures make an image, bring odours back to mind, evoke the elements, sketch out a landscape, an ecosystem. In this flow of text, words in Innu surface to reflect, with complexity and precision, a profound knowledge of the land. Conversations, replies, questions, confessions. Admitting that we know very little, but that doesn’t keep us from opening up, learning, feeling, building together a new space to share. Then, as the text migrates toward the book, the words to the pages, beyond their function as witnesses, they will become exactly this place.