Are - Sommes Sonnes - Artist-run centre dedicated to audio art and electronics

Are – Sommes Sonnes

December 12, 23, 12 noon to 12 midnight

On the occasion of Christof Migone’s 12-year project You And I Are Water Earth Fire Air Of Life And Death, and to close the festivities surrounding its 30th anniversary, Avatar presents Are – Sommes Sonnes.

The first year it started with ‘You’, then in 2021 ‘And’ came to connect you to anything and everything, and last year that point of connection was ‘I’—the porous one, the sole collective. This year with ‘Are’ action enters the fray. What are you and I to do? What are you up to? Well, let’s begin with being, simply being, however tenuous or contentious that may be. ‘Are’ points to fact, to status, but it also suggests question marks, suggests that the known might not always be as it seems. New this year is the inclusion of a subtitle: (Sommes Sonnes)—this translates from the French simply to ‘are sounds’. This theme, which conjures up plurals: multiplicities leading to infinities, polymorphs and polyglots, surrounded sounds, layers upon layers, etceteras upon etceteras, was envisaged with Myriam Lambert and Alexandre St-Onge, who join me as curators of this edition. – Christof Migone

FREE EVENT / 12 hours of performances at:
Cinéma Beaumont (CA) *with live performances*

Comox Valley Art Gallery (CA)
Rad’art (IT)
AND ONLINE :
Partner radio stations and YouTube Live

Are – Sommes Sonnes, presented by Avatar

Curated by: Myriam Lambert, Christof Migone and Alexandre St-Onge

PARTNERS

Cinéma Beaumont (Québec) *** live public performances ***

Comox Valley Art Gallery (Canada)

Rad’art (Italie)

ONLINE PARTNERS

Arraymusic – NAISA Radio – Radius – Resonance Extra – Wave Farm Radio – Youtube direct

PRESENTERS

Antitube – Cronica – Fado – NAISA – Rad’art – Resonance Extra – Rhizome – Spira – Université Laval

12 HOURS of pre-recorded and live performances.

‘One’ (Sommes Personnes)

‘One’ is part of a series that runs alongside the main series of 12 events over 12 years. It functions with its own 12-word sentence: ‘Different From The One Place Time Mood Mindset You Are In Now’. For this year’s ‘One’, 12 artists produced performative portraits that eschew the frontal in favour of the partial, the barely there, the fleeting, the merely-passing-by, the a-bit-askew.

Serie “One” (Sommes Personnes) is presented by FADO

30 SECONDS FOR 30 YEARS: To help celebrate Avatar’s 30th anniversary, some of the hourly introductions at the top of every hour will be interrupted by 30 second interventions by artists who have (or have had) a close connection to the organization. The prompt for their contribution was the subtitle to the event ‘Sommes Sonnes’ [Are Sounded].

30 SECONDS FOR 30 YEARS, a 30 second intervention by Magali Babin

presents

HOUR 1

12:00 pm

Tanya Mars / serie One
Ronnie Clarke / serie One
Olga Prokhorova / serie One
Liina Kuittinen / serie One

Tanya Mars. CRONE, FADO Performance Art Centre, 2017. Photo: Henry Chan.

Tanya Mars is a feminist performance and video artist who has been involved in the Canadian art scene since 1973. She was a founding member and director of Powerhouse Gallery (La Centrale) in Montreal (the first women’s art gallery in Canada), editor of Parallelogramme magazine for 13 years, and very active in ANNPAC (the Association of National Non-Profit Artist-run Centres) for 15 years. She is the recipient of a 2008 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. A book on her work published by FADO and edited by Paul Couillard, Ironic to Iconic: The Performance Works of Tanya Mars, was launched in May of 2008. In the 70s and 80s Mars’ work focused on creating spectacular feminist imagery that placed women at the centre of the narrative. [+]

Hollow Objects (Performance Still), Ronnie Clarke, presented by BAND Gallery, Toronto, 2022.

Ronnie Clarke is a Black and queer emerging artist living and working in Toronto, Ontario. Her work blends elements of choreography, dance, movement, collaboration, video and installation. With an interest in the poetics of digital gestures, spaces and interfaces, she often uses movement to investigate how technology plays a role in our interactions with others. She holds a BFA from The University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario.

Olga Prokhorova. Photo Anna Alimpieva

Olga Prokhorova is a performance artist living and working in Oulu, Finland. In her art she establishes presence at the place and works through the study of body, movement, and behavior, creating a visual phenomenon – alternative situations that people can observe. Prokhorova’s works have been seen internationally in Sweden, Norway, Estonia, Russia, and Mexico.

@ Liina Kuittinen, Earth’s Face, 2017. Photo Jan Ahlstedt.

Liina Kuittinen is a visual artist with background in fine arts, working mainly in the field of performance art. Her work has been shown in the context of festivals and events but also in galleries and on instagram. Kuittinen received her MA in fine arts at the Fine Arts Academy in Helsinki, Finland in 2017.

30 SECONDS FOR 30 YEARS, a 30 second intervention by Émile Morin

presents

HOUR 2

1:00 pm

Pedro Tudela, Miguel Carvalhais, Rodrigo Carvalho

& Patrícia Viana de Almeida

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Pedro Tudela and Miguel Carvalhais collaborate as @c since 2000. They release and perform extensively, and work on sound installations, often collaborating with other artists in a practice marked by radical experimentation with computational sound. In 2003 they established Crónica, a label they since run. In this performance they were accompanied by Rodrigo Carvalho on light design, programming and performance, and Patrícia Viana de Almeida, on video and cinematography.

30 SECONDS FOR 30 YEARS, a 30 second intervention by Pierre-André Arcand

presents

HOUR 3

2:00 pm

Kelly Ruth,

Threads of a Future Not Yet Woven

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Kelly Ruth Kelly Ruth is a new media artist currently living in Treaty 6, Edmonton, Canada. She has been activating her textiles and tools through using electronics, sound, and integrating microcontrollers into the foundations of her woven cloth. In performance she uses contact microphones and effects pedals on her weaving loom and other fibre related tools. Most recently she has been researching and creating art in a virtual world.

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Threads of a Future Not Yet Woven

Performing at NAISA in person and in a space designed and built by the
artist within a social perpetual virtual world, she uses her weaving loom as
an instrument of sound. Using contact microphones and effects pedals she creates music that evokes histories past and future.”

30 SECONDS FOR 30 YEARS, a 30 second intervention by Philip Gagnon

presents

HOUR 4

3:00 pm

Agnès Pe, Are we human or are we dancers

Milo Thesiger-Meacham, Joint Venture

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Agnès Pe Agnès Pe (1985) is a teacher, researcher, producer and self-taught musicologist. She is interested in the exception, in everything that touches the social margins, with a special focus on the generative environment of sound content through the internet (prosumers), such as remix and cut up. She currently lives and works in Barcelona; she hosts the radio programme Shuffle at Resonance Extra and collaborates with the Reina Sofía Museum radio.

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Are we human or are we dancers

It’s the cloud, it’s the preferences. They are your predictions. They come from possible search terms that relate to what you are looking for and what other people have already searched for. It’s a kind of seer. Surfing the Web requires a particularly intensive form of mental multitasking. In addition to flooding our working memory with information, the juggling imposes what neurologists call “switching costs” on our cognition. As Maggie Jackson explains in Distracted, her book on multitasking, “the brain takes time to switch targets, remember the rules necessary for the new task, and block out the cognitive interference of the still-living activity that was occupying it”.

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Milo Thesiger–Meacham‘s work combines sound, musical composition, text, visual material and
performance. He has worked on solo and ensemble projects for Tate Modern, The V&A Museum, the European Capital of Culture, London Fashion Week, The Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow, Radiophrenia, Cafe Oto, Iklectik, the Jerwood Foundation, the European Poetry Festival, Radio Revolten, the IvyNODE/Tierra Vivente residency, and Echoraeume, among others. He is the manager and curator of Resonance Extra, an international arts radio station.

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Joint Venture

A tale of discovery told from the combined perspectives of multiple joints on the human body.

presents

HOUR 5

4:00 pm

Maud Joiret, Alexandre Berthier & Catherine Bélanger

Catherine Bélanger - crédit : Ève Cadieux

Maud Joiret was born in 1986 in Brussels. Poet and performer (on stage + on video + sometimes in front of a camera), she is also a columnist. She has professionally supported Belgian authors on the site www.bela.be for ten years and continues to convey texts and voices, through articles, participation in juries, sharing of enthusiasm in literary programming, hosting meetings and on social networks. In 2023, she will also give lessons as part of a workshop at La Cambre for students of the Master in Texts and Literary Creation. Cobalt , his first collection of poetry (editions Tétras-lyre), received the prize for the first work from the Wallonia-Brussels Federation in 2020 and was adapted into video. His second book, JERK , published in 2022 by l’Arbre de Diane, was brought to the stage in a form that combines text, music and dance. She is also published in magazines and anthologies in Belgium, France and Mexico.

Since 2004, Alexandre Berthier’s artistic practice has evolved in three fields: visual arts, media arts and performing arts, mostly in collaboration with other artists. His main collaboration has been with artist Karl-Otto von Oertzen, under the duo Marswalkers, for over ten years. Their work has been presented at CIANT (Prague), The Public (Birmingham), Wimbledon School of Art (London), Rockport Center for Contemporary Art (USA), l’Œil de Poisson (Québec), TUPAC (Peru), 6ème manifestation internationale vidéo et art électronique de Montréal, Mois Multi 12, BANG (Chicoutimi), and Espace F (Matane), among others. As a solo artist, Alexandre Berthier develops his personal practice of video, sound and photography. His work has been shown at the following festivals: Mois Multi (Quebec), Bains Numériques (Paris), Nouveau Cinéma (Montréal), Sounds like (Saskatoon). [+]

Catherine Bélanger lives and works in Quebec City. She holds a bachelor’s degree in visual arts and an interdisciplinary master’s degree in art from Université Laval. Her creative research focuses on encounters and gifts, and explores the intangible heritage of everyday rituals and the desire to preserve them. His work mainly takes the form of animation, video and digital and interactive installations. Her work has been presented in the metaverse by the Ellipse platform in 2023, at Mois Multi, Quebec City’s international multidisciplinary and electronic arts festival in 2023 and 2017, at La Centrale Powerhouse in Montreal in 2019, at the Musée de la Civilisation in Quebec City in 2016, and at the Bangkok art and culture center (BACC) in Bangkok in 2015. In addition, she has participated in various individual and collective events since 1997, in France, Montreal, Quebec City and the surrounding region. She is currently collaborating on transdisciplinary research on culinary gesture and movement with the Université des technologies de Belfort-Montbéliard in France, as well as with the Centre de recherche en intelligence numérique in Matane and various technical partners and artist-run centers in Quebec City. Her research has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Fédération des Cégep du Québec and Première Ovation. Since 2004, she has also taught visual arts at Cégep Limoilou.

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30 SECONDS FOR 30 YEARS, a 30 second intervention by Carole Siciak

present

HOUR 6

5:00 pm

David B. Ricard, Nous sommes sommes aléatoires

Nadège Grebmeier Forget / serie One

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David B. Ricard, a Quebec-based multidisciplinary artist, works across video, theater, film, and performance. His documentary focus lies in the introspective power of cinematic recording, exploring intimate and everyday themes while valuing intuition and spontaneity. As a theater designer and performer, he blends improvised image manipulation with performance, creating a videostage experience that merges video with bodies, voices, music, and diverse languages, promoting interartistic explorations.

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Nous sommes sommes aléatoires

This solo performance is fundamentally based on the principle of chance. The artist employs a device that simultaneously broadcasts excerpts from films sourced from the Spira and Vidéo Femmes catalogues. Live, they handle the switching, mixing, and analog effects, orchestrating a blend of images and sounds aimed at unveiling unexpected contrasts or synchronicities. At the heart of this performance, the exploration of the unpredictable takes center stage. Chance dictates the progression of each sequence. The artist doesn’t directly control the displayed images, but adapts his actions based on the randomly generated selections. This artistic approach highlights the creativity that can spring from the meeting of chaos and structure, merging visuals and audios. The synthesis produced by the performance stands as a kind of collective work, straddling the line between cinema and video performance, offering a unique experience that celebrates the art of randomness and spontaneous creation.

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Nadège Grebmeier Forget (Montreal, QC) is an interdisciplinary artist, best known for her live and private durational performances. She critically reflects on the medium, questioning its presentation devices, documentation, and the potential of its mediation. Her work is influenced by feminisms, her own body and personal psyche as mediums of observation, research, and transformation.

30 SECONDS FOR 30 YEARS, a 30 second intervention by Guillaume Côté et Félix Tremblay

presents

HOUR 7

6:00 pm

Alexandre St-Onge, Confessions Augmentées

Adriana Disman / serie One

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Alexandre St-Onge is an intermedia artist and sonic performer exploring the mutation of the performative body through its sonic, textual, and visual mediations. A doctor of philosophy (PhD) in art (UQAM, 2015) and assistant professor at the École d’art of Laval University, he is fascinated by creativity as a pragmatic approach to the ungraspable. He has published over twenty works and presented his work nationally and internationally.

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Confessions Augmentées

Confessions Augmentées is a performative talk presented in an installation that allows the process of creating Confessions to be approached from various perspectives. Confessions is both a publication project consisting of a book, sound works, and a video-performance launched on June 21, 2022 and a series of modular and performative sound rituals, segments of which have been reorganized spatially and temporally depending on the venue. One of the project’s aims is to examine whether it can mutate by reorganizing its materials in time and adapting them to different spaces. Another is to observe whether another entity can emerge from this process and whether some relic of the artifact called Confessions can survive despite its permeability to the various contexts in which it occurs.

Photo : Anežka Medová

Adriana Disman is a performance art maker, thinker, and writer. Since 2010, their performance work has been presented in festivals and galleries across Canada, the United States, Europe, and India. Disman’s writing on self-wounding in performance can be found in both academic and arts publications. Of late,
they’ve turned their attention towards writing a novel on housing precarity and obsession, for which they are seeking agent representation.

30 SECONDS FOR 30 YEARS, a 30 second intervention by Renée Gagnon et Mylène Lauzon

presents

HOUR 8

7:00 pm

Myriam Lambert,

Contacts

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Myriam Lambert explores the theme of identity and core values through sound art, electronic art, relational art, installation, video, performance, and literature, using the most applicable medium to create artivist works that reflect the poetry of the everyday. Lambert has presented her work in many art centres, museums, and sites of memory in Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Spain, France, Italy, Mexico, and Switzerland. Actively involved in artist-run centres in Québec since 2003, Lambert is presently the General and Artistic Director of Avatar. She lives and works in Quebec City.

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Contacts

What forges Being, in the singular and plural? A mass of encounters between people, situations, places, contexts, things, images, sounds… magnetic contacts between ourselves and everything else. With this performance, I want to play with this point of contact, this fine line that makes us, that connects us to these encounters. I therefore propose 58 minutes of context.

In french, Are and Being are homonyms = Être

30 SECONDS FOR 30 YEARS, a 30 second intervention by Gilles Arteau

presents

HOUR 9

8:00 pm

Agence Augmentée

[Lé, Juan David Molina Velasco, Max St-Pierre]

Alice De Visscher & Evamaria Schaller / serie One

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Lé

Lé is a visual artist based in Quebec City. Seeking to deconstruct the musical parameters learned in classical music, they explore sensory, conscious, and personal experiences of sound through performative installations. By exploring the presence of sound, they seek to offer a space of listening into which they can settle and invite others to share the experience.

Juan David Molina Velasco

Originally from Colombia, I was uprooted by violence and learned about my culture of origin through childhood memories and distant stories. I integrated into a new culture and had to learn a new language. I grew up navigating between two worlds, not knowing how to define myself or with what to identify. Between Jonquière and Quebec City, I explored the performing and visual arts at Cégep de l’Outaouais in Gatineau. I received a bachelor’s degree in visual and media arts from Laval University and am currently pursuing my master’s degree in visual arts at the same university. Here is somewhere else. I am not from here but I don’t belong anywhere else.

Max St-Pierre
I am a child of the web born around Y2K. My mother tried for many years to teach me how to knit; I never finished a piece. In 2020, I learned how to crochet from online videos. I like things that are crooked, the word transsexual, and the Windows XP installation music.

I knit because I like doing it, and I archive because it’s all I know how to do. Through a joyously queer practice and my interest in everything about the web, I look for how memory is maintained, preserved, and transmitted. The spaces between memory’s spaces (what we forget) become the raw material out of which I create alternative pasts, infinite presents, and futures that don’t exist.

In the manner of a virtual urban expedition, stitch by stitch I weave my web out of abandoned pages and cover fallen walls with colourful graffiti—a way of saying I am here, I was here, I will always be here. I have tread in your steps.

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Agence Augmentée is a research-creation project that focuses on how artistic knowledge emerges by putting into action artistic methods or works and theoretical publications so as to explore different forms of agency. This notion is defined as an entity’s capacity to act and transform or affect the world, things, and beings. Rather than examining agency as a multilateral transformative action of reality and the many entities that constitute it, it is explored by observing whether the interactions between the entities can generate new conceptual or artistic material that exceeds the agents involved. For this iteration, Alexandre St-Onge invited three artists-researchers to address these questions in a unique way.

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Alice De Visscher is visual artist based in Brussels.

Evamaria Schaller, born in Graz, Austria, is a Media Artist based in Cologne.
Alice De Visscher and Evamaria Schaller met in 2010. They have been collaborating on duo-performances regularly even since in Germany, Belgium, Ireland and France. ICI=HIER is their first video performance project together.

30 SECONDS FOR 30 YEARS, a 30 second intervention by Nathalie LeBlanc

presents

HOUR 10

9:00 pm

Diane Landry, Demi-Lunes

Alice De Visscher & Evamaria Schaller / serie One

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Diane Landry thought she was a painter, but through studio practice and everyday reality, she naturally moved towards the production of installation and performance works influenced by readymade and her preoccupation with recycling. In short, she tinkers, she patents. She likes to put herself in contexts that shake up her creative habits, by doing artist residencies across various cultures. Her works have been widely shown in Canada and abroad.

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Demi-Lunes

Two half-moons become extensions of the performer’s body. Two luminous arches move in the space, activated by a woman who rocks and shakes them. The slightest shudder makes a sound, produced by the balls circulating in the tubes of each half-circle. Sometimes, gravity affects the balls and they react with great energy. The half-moons transform into insect, flag, necklace, geometry, pendulum, and almost moon.

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Alice De Visscher is visual artist based in Brussels.

30 SECONDS FOR 30 YEARS, a 30 second intervention by Chantal Dumas

presents

HOUR 11

10:00 pm

Christof Migone,

Poker, Éternuité (Forever Sneeze), Oreiller (Pillow Talk)

Oreiller no 40, Christof Migone

Christof Migone ‘s research delves into language & voice, bodies & performance, intimacy & complicity, sound & silence, rhythmics & kinetics, translation & referentiality, stillness & imperceptibility, structure & improvisation, play & pathos, pedagogy & unlearning, failure & endurance. Current and ongoing investigations: microphone hitting, book flipping, tongue extruding, record releasing, word hyphenating, para-pedagogical positioning, careless curating, noise making, sequitur following, paper passing, interval counting, rhythm repeating, phone licking, machine fingering, playlist compiling, silence listening, dozens of dozens, strobosonoscopics and stroboscopsonics.

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Poker

Two hands holding a variety of microphones scrape, scratch, pinch and poke eleven participants poker-faced in front of the camera. Participants: Katie Bethune-Leamen, crys cole, Michel F. Côté, Anni Lawrence, André Éric Létourneau, Jonathan Parant, Leila Pourtavaf, Sam Shalabi, Marie-Douce St-Jacques, Alexandre St-Onge, Roger Tellier-Craig. Remixed and reedited in 2023.

Éternuité (Forever Sneeze)

The sneeze as an attempt to become eternal. Participants: Sally Baydala, Erica Brisson, Eryn Foster, Stephanie Khoury, Angus Leech, Wm Leler, Demian Petryshyn, Naomi Potter, Don Pyle, Duncan Speakman, Barbara Sutherland, Pandora Syperek, Janice Wu. Remixed and reedited in 2023.

Oreiller (Pillow Talk)

Studies in the convergence between ears and pillows. Participants: Marguerite Arbour, Lé Boucher Trudel, Stéphanie Letarte. Text: Lisa Robertson.

30 SECONDS FOR 30 YEARS, a 30 second intervention by Mériol Lehmann (intro) and Laetitia Sonami (extro)

presents

HOUR 12

11:00 pm

Amélie Laurence Fortin / serie One
Georges Azzaria / serie One
Caroline Gagné / serie One

Jocelyn Robert / serie One

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Currently, Amélie Laurence Fortin divides her time and artistic creativity between Quebec City, Canada, and Warsaw, Poland. Her riveting multidiciplinary body of work has graced numerous solo and group exhibitions, been part of artistic residencies and festivals, and is proudly displayed in both private and public collections across Quebec and Europe.

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Georges Azzaria became interested in radio experimentation and then devoted himself to the creation of sound objects. He was part of the Bruit TTV group, was active in the Avatar artist center, presented exhibitions of his instruments and sound performances and produced records as well as soundtracks for films. His recent work touches more directly on the visual arts.

Screenshot

Caroline Gagné‘s work bears witness to a deep commitment to her practice: installations, media art, sound art and video essays form the basis of a multi-faceted artistic journey between digital media and the inescapable necessity of dealing with the materiality of things. Active in her milieu, she was artistic director of the Avatar artist-run center from 2013 to 2019. In 2020, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal’s national collection will acquire her work Le bruit des icebergs for inclusion in its permanent collection. In 2022, Editions Oboro publishes Caroline Gagné: Donner corps à l’insaisissable / Embodying the Intangible, a retrospective of her artistic career.

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Jocelyn Robert is a multidisciplinary artist from Quebec. He works in music, audio art, computer art, performance, installation, video and writing. His visual and video work has been shown internationally and his sound works have been published on more than 30 cds. He is involved in art activism at different levels. Amongst other undertakings, he founded that audio and electronic arts centre Avatar and took part
in the foundation of the Meduse cooperative.

30 SECONDS FOR 30 YEARS: To help celebrate Avatar’s 30th anniversary, some of the hourly introductions at the top of every hour will be interrupted by 30 second interventions by artists who have (or have had) a close connection to the organization. The prompt for their contribution was the subtitle to the event ‘Sommes Sonnes’ [Are Sounded]. The artists are:

Pierre-André Arcand (hour 3) – Gilles Arteau (hour 9) – Magali Babin (hour 3) – Guillaume Côté (hour 7) – Chantal Dumas (hour 11) – Philip Gagnon (hour 4) – Renée Gagnon (hour 8) – Mylène Lauzon (hour 8) – Nathalie LeBlanc (hour 10) – Mériol Lehman (hour 12) – Émile Morin (hour 2) – Carole Siciak (hour 6)– Laetitia Sonami (hour 12) – Félix Tremblay (hour 7).