Index

NATALIE LEBLANC

I am particularly interested in abandoned properties —places that are closed off and made inaccessible to the public. My intention is to make these places, once forgotten, lost or displaced, (re)connected with the landscape in which they share a relation.

My dissertation entitled, In/Visibility of The Abandoned School: Beyond Representations of School Closure (LeBlanc, 2015) was an artistic form of inquiry in which photographs of an abandoned school were enlarged and projected onto its outside walls. Members of the community, who bore witness to the closure of the school, were invited to share their interpretations of the artistic event, allowing me to explore the generative possibilities of a de-commissioned building and its potential for (re)imagining relationships between space, time, place, and memory.

In my dissertation, I articulated how art-as-research had the potential to act as an intervention — a social practice that ignited possibilities to materialize, not in form, but in moments of interaction and connection. As a result, it produced an event in which knowledge was performed (Garoian, 1999) rather than culminating into a recognizable entity. During this endeavour, I grew concerned with the encounter (O’Sullivan, 2006); the experience that occurs because of art (Dewey, 1934) and because of the artist/researcher who is working as a catalyst within the context of the everyday (Loftus, 2009).

THE ABANDONED:

SPACES OF GENERATIVE POSSIBILITY

References

Dewey, J. (1934/2005). Art as experience. New York, NY:

Berkeley.

Garoian, C. R. (1999). Performing pedagogy: Toward an art of politics. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

LeBlanc, N. (2015). In/visibility of the abandoned school: Beyond representations of school closure. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Vancouver, BC: The University of British Columbia.

Loftus, A. (2009). Intervening in the environment of the everyday. Geoforum, 40(3), 326-334.

O'Sullivan, S. (2006). Art encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought beyond representation. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.