After Burn Setup Day
Last weekend I was invited to install at Montreal’s Village Pied-du-Courant.
The Village at Pied-du-Courant is a festive and unifying collective space built with the support of the local community and many collaborators. Running during the summer months, it’s a yearly pop-up beach full of permanent and temporary art installations that have quickly become a staple of summer activities in Montreal. It seeks to provide a showcase for artists, as well as to give a genuine area of life for the citizens of the community.
For their last Friday of the season, Pied-du-Courant wanted to reach out to the burner community that was just trickling back into the city after their yearly pilgrimage. They invited all burners and creative and festive spirits to a decompression party. They wanted to transform their beach into the atmosphere of the playa with interactive installations, performances, visuals and live painting.
Archimedes was invited out to do another collaboration with
, who I’d collaborated with at
earlier this year. It was exciting to be able to set up for more dome projections. The Village was the ideal layout for more projections on the dome.
Setup day was beautiful weather, although you could start to feel the nip in the air that says that fall is fast approaching.
Despite the discovery of some missing pieces, and some repairs that needed to be made, the first dome went up quickly, looking beautiful and very at home in the playa-like environment.
I decided to leave off a portion of the outer panels, drop the dome a level and put in an inner tent. I wanted to see kinds of surfaces I could make on the outside for VJ UserZero to project on.
The whole thing was finished off with Courtney Lush’s canvas on the ground, making a homey and beautiful resting spot for people to lounge in.
With the projection dome set up we moved on to the second dome which would be set up as a hangout spot on the back of the dance floor.
The sun was beautiful as the afternoon got later. The skyline of Montreal in the background giving a wonderful anchor to this stunning site.
We were only given 2 hours to set up before the site opened, and soon attendees started to trickle in. It felt very burner-esque to be building a structure as the party began. It definitely gave a true playa feel.
Soon we were finished and the structures were ready. The nice thing about being in the middle of the city was being able to run home, clean up, eat a real meal and be back in time for darkness to set in. A nice break from living on festival sites al summer.
As the sun went down, the excitement set in to see the dome projected on again, and for the people of Montreal to experience a little bit of the true burner spirit!
