BIO The visual artist, filmmaker and scholar Anne Ardouin has carried out numerous scholarly and poetic projects which address the relations between humans and their environment, their landscape and their imaginary realms. She holds a Ph.D. in city planning (UdeM), a master’s degree in visual arts (Concordia), and a bachelor’s degree in visual arts and a certificate in cinema studies (Laval). She is an associate member of the Chaire en paysage et environnement (UdeM).
APPROACH Much of Anne Ardouin’s work, in both cultural outreach and her scholarship, has taken place in schools where she investigates the connections between young people and the region by exploring the landscape elements they depict in their own creative work. She has established a hybrid work method to grasp, in elements of the video creation process, what pertains to nature and what pertains to society. It has emerged that enjoyment of places is manifested through close connection with ephemeral elements, with the weather and the colour of the sky, but especially with one’s home and immediate surroundings, as a kind of theatre where landscape sensibilities develop. In her research, Ardouin has also worked with several First Nations communities in Quebec.
PROJECT In 1977, a text by Luc Bureau entitled “Des paysages, des idées et des hommes: le projet collectif de Charlevoix” appeared in Cahiers de géographie du Québec. Anne Ardouin’s project rereads this text’s four concepts (identification, modelling, signification, affectivity) by gauging them in the micro-region of Baie-Saint-Paul and its surroundings in the company of children and teenagers. The project will consist in creating a series of photographs made up of fifteen portraits and short narratives of the young participants in front of sites of interest to them in Baie-Saint-Paul, as well as a series of sketches which Ardouin will make of these valorised sites. She will also write short stories illustrating what comes out of explorations, strolls and syntheses.