Culture pour tous

Une rue, des parapluies (Umbrellas to the street)

 

Mireille Racine, a Quebec City artist-hatter, enjoys inviting the community to participate in street performances and colourful choreographies.

During the Journées de la culture 2008 in Québec City, the artist‑hatter Mireille Racine occupied the rue Nassau for the holding of a collective visual creation event, Une rue, des parapluies, which gathered friends, neighbours and the general public to compose paintings and moving forms in a choreography of umbrellas.

Mireille Racine is a longtime participant of the Journées de la culture. Since 1977, she has welcomed people to her garden to present her artist‑hatter creations. In 2005 she took the street by storm and organized La rue s’habille in response to an invitation by Pascale Guimont, the coordinator of the Journées de la culture in Québec City, who wished to create a Coup de Coeur event for the region. With more than 350 people contributing to the collective creation of a giant quilt the event was a resounding success. In September 2008, motivated by the memory of the experience Mireille again invited the public, this time to take over the rue Nassau, a small deserted street in Sainte‑Foy in the neighbourhood where she was born and now lives.

Of course such an event calls for preparation. She solicited the Pointe-Sainte-Foy Caisse Populaire who allocated her a $1000 budget. For its part, the Quebec City Sainte‑Foy‑Sillery burrough provided important technical resources, such as sound systems, equipment and manpower, tables, chairs and traffic cones which served as markers for some figures, but also as decorative supports on which the artist placed... umbrellas, of course!

In August 2008, a month before the Journées de la culture, Mireille Racine extended an invitation for a picnic under the sign of creativity and conviviality to test the umbrella handling and the creation of figures. The encounter took place in the enclosure of a burned down church on the la Visitation site at Chemin Saine‑Foy. The artist invited the participants to bring their umbrellas, but she also acquired several of the same colour to create uniform masses to which other disparate umbrellas of various colours could be added.

The artist then had to promote the event and encourage participation, a task which she finds demanding and difficult and this despite the support of the local media who have known her work for a long time and the Journées de la culture’s broader publicizing. Mireille Racine admits that she feels a bit stressed during the days leading up to the event. Besides participation—will people show up?—the weather is also an imponderable factor.

And on September 26, J day, all is ready but the weather is unstable. Perhaps, as announced in case of rain, the event will be postponed until the next day, but even before the scheduled 1:00 pm time the public arrives for the beginning of the activities. Come what may, it’s a go ahead to take to the street. Some have their own umbrella, others choose one from the artist’s collection. The students from the Maison des métiers d’art de Québec school, where Mireille Racine teaches, have also brought some of their creations.

At the start the event unfolds tentatively with simple handling exercises. It takes some time for the gestures and the movement of people to take on a certain cohesion. As more arrive, play and become familiar with the place and other participants, the first choreographies take shape and small groups begin to form. The street comes to life and the artist’s wish is fulfilled. Forms begin to be set in motion, imitating the sinuous movement of a caterpillar, or the slow advance of a turtle. All this to the sole sound of umbrellas opening up, or to the accordion tunes played by Héléne Poliot and Martine Rodette, and drumming or popular music rhythms played through the loudspeakers.

Finally the unstable weather of that day and the light rainfall may have discouraged participation, nevertheless almost 80 people took an umbrella and joined in the creation of figures overseen by the choreographers Mario Veillette and Monique Major. The artist certainly encountered people from her neighbourhood, and others she does not know, as well as persons recruited through her personal network, friends, acquaintances and collaborators from the dance, crafts or visual arts circles.

Some figures were of course more successful than others, but, as the artist underlines “the important thing is the participation, the fun, the celebration.” In order to document the event, as she says “for the pleasure of memory, so that people can see the result of their efforts,” the artist invited the photographer Idra Labrie and videomaker Mathieu Gotti, and the result was unveiled during a diner reunion at the café Babylone several days after the event.

The frontier between hat making and urban performances is one that Mireille Racine crosses with ease. The artist has always considered the hat as a “portable sculpture that occupies a space around the head” and she has been trespassing the border of her trade for a long time now. She collaborates regularly with circus, cinema and theatre and frequently presents her art, notably during the exhibition Le silence des chapeaux, which was a tribute to the art of the hat but also a testimony of its decline. Few people in Quebec nowadays master the hatter craft, but one can count on Mireille Racine to pass on her expertise and to twist and twirl one’s perceptions of fashion adornment....

Note: Besides her artistic activities, Mireille Racine teaches courses in hat making and clothing adornment, principally at the Campus Notre‑Dame‑de‑Foy in Saint-Augustin de Desmaures and at the Maison des métiers d’art de Québec.