The Rustling of the Senses
The Rustling of the Senses
Marguerite Arbour
Avatar Award 2025
Residency
June 1 to 12, 2026
The Rustling of the Senses draws its strength from the fragility of thresholds as spaces of existence and creation. At the intersection of multiple boundaries—corporeal, identitary, social, and political—the artist explores a liminal territory where the self becomes both an anchor and a passage. It is in this in-between that disappearance is experienced: not as total erasure, but as a continuous transformation of presence.
Grounded in lived experience—marked by illness, disability, and the loss of self—the work bridges the intimate and the collective. The singularity of this reality is not framed as a cry for help, but as an appeal to the other, a place of encounter where shared identities and sociopolitical stakes can unfold. The autobiographical thus becomes relational material, a threshold through which a sensitive dialogue takes shape.
Embedded in a continuum of transformations, the project questions transitional states, those suspended moments often hastily labeled as beginnings or endings. The focus turns to what escapes fixed categories: the interval, the fold, the uncertain duration. Time is approached as an open question, traversed by moments of latency, waiting, and mutation.
Listening to the subtle variations of states, the vibrations that emerge in zones of fragility. Individual experience is transformed here into shared language, where vulnerability becomes a power of relation and creation.
About the artist
“I exist where thresholds meet. I dig into the folds of my own life, and I grapple with the idea of fading away.”
I create pieces that can shift and overlap—like puzzle parts of a language still being written. I work with sculpture, video, performance, and printmaking, playing with ideas of folds, traces, the intimate, fragility, wear, disappearance, and reflection. The fold is like reflection: a thought turning back on itself. It’s how I weave together memory, material, and identity.
The whole thing ties back to the idea of grieving myself—something I know firsthand, especially through illness. It helps me talk about the body and how it changes. Everything that bears witness to these ongoing transformations—both in life and in the materials I use—shapes the way my projects take form.
“I tune into the quiet shifts in perception.”
Marguerite Arbour lives and studies in W8banakiak/Quebec City. Active in both the cultural and academic spheres, she holds numerous positions: Le Lieu, a contemporary art center (board of directors, 2023–), the Association of Visual Arts Students at Laval University (president, 2024–2025), co-founder of the Les Aéronefs collective (2021–), co-founder of the MoMa collective (2023–), and co-founder of a public art exhibition project between the City of Québec and the Laval University School of Art for students in the Bachelor of Visual and Media Arts program (2023–2025). In addition, Arbour’s work is featured in solo exhibitions at the Cookshire-Eaton Cultural Space (2026) and the Alphonse-Desjardins Pavilion at Laval University (2025). She performs in a duo with Rachel Echenberg at Le Lieu, a contemporary art center (2025), and at student events (2023, 2024) . Marguerite Arbour is a guest lecturer for the master’s seminar “Humanities to Heal/Reflect on the Caring and Cared-For Body” at Laval University (2025).
About the Avatar Award
Each year, Avatar awards a prize to a graduating student from the Bachelor of Visual Arts program at Laval University. The winning student receives a two-week residency at the center, with unlimited access to equipment and technical support. This initiative is made possible through a partnership with the Laval University School of Art.
