Geneviève Marois Lefebvre – La surveillance du tranquille

For the past four years, I have lived in Frelishburg, Montérégie, a small village near the Canada-U.S. border. This border runs along the village, crossing fields and forests, some houses being only a few meters from the United States. In the surrounding countryside, land and air patrols, surveillance cameras and the passage of drones are part of everyday life to ensure the tightness of the border. Living close to this imaginary line separating two countries has made me sensitive to the notions of surveillance and territorial constraints, especially in these times when immigration issues are numerous. My project, La surveillance du tranquille, is set in a context where migration issues and fear of foreign countries lead to increased border and travel surveillance. In my area, these measures mean, in particular, a strong monitoring of the traces of passage in uninhabited areas: cultivated or fallow fields, forests, mountains. I have the assumption that the cameras monitoring my area produce a large number of non-event images, probably reporting very little illicit activity. So they don’t monitor anything specific, or anything other than what they’re supposed to be reporting.

My project is based on the deployment of a house surveillance system in the nature surrounding my village. I have positioned hunting cameras that have captured day and night the movement occurring in front of their objective. I’ve been circulating around the perimeter covered by the cameras on a regular basis to change their location. I collected a large number of false alerts, or rather micro-event recorded by my cameras. Images of animals or a few solitary walkers, a leaf falling from a tree, a twig shaken by the wind or even a dramatic change in brightness due to a cloudy passage. During my rounds in the woods, I also collected traces of the passage of humans: clothing, bottles, tools, rifle cartridges, etc. These traces left behind by humans will be used to make a series of photograms, themselves luminous traces on photosensitive paper. Then I plan to have the surveillance photos and object photograms dialogue at the heart of an installation that will address the issue of trace as an instigator of narrative and the role of the point of view in the perception of otherness.

Photo credit: Katya Konioukhova

Biography

I live and work in Frelishburg (Quebec). I develop a practice centered on the image, in connection with the question of the narrative. My work takes various foms: photography, video, collage, installation and stealth intervention in public space. I’m interested in subjectivity within the experience of reality as well as the role of narrative in human relationships, in the construction of identity and memory. I perceive the act of storytelling as an andidote to human loneliness since the story allows to weave links through life experiences that are at once totally different and strangely similar. I’m particularly interested in the areas of encounter between the real and the imagined; between the beautiful and the ugly. I draw my references from personal memories and those of people close to me, but also from everyday life, cinema and literature. I’m interested in the contribution of the unexpected and the error in the creation process, which is why I regularly work from collections, images, environments or tools that I have little control over. My attraction to lo-fi images translates into the production of obscure, fuzzy, poorly framed or scrambled images; images that reveal as much as they hide. My work has been presented several times in exhibitions and public screenings in Canada, France, USA, Scotland and Spain.

© L’imprimerie, centre d’artistes, 2024