Question
Answer
Who are you?
Group
Name
Name 1
Klara du Plessis
Name 2
Renée Sawtelle
Name 3
Name 4
Collective
Institution
Email
Phone
City
Montréal
Bio
Klara du Plessis and Renée Sawtelle met in Montréal and have
found artistic inspiration in each other and the city ever since.
Klara, a writer residing alternately in Montréal and Cape Town,
holds a Masters of Arts degree in English Literature and is
currently working on her first book-length collection of poetry.
Her poems have appeared in journals such as New Contrast and
Scrivener Creative Review. Renée, a visual artist and
seamstress hailing from Virginia, is primarily a costume
designer, whose work has been displayed in the 2012 Boston
Burlesque Expo and has seen stages across Canada and the
United States. Klara’s multidisciplinary collaborations include
an ongoing verbo-visual dialogue with South African visual
artist Dot Vermeulen, and opera libretti written for the
Canadian classical composer Clio Montrey. Renée’s most
recent collaboration is costume design and stage-management
with burlesque dancer The Lady Josephine.
Chosen keyword
-i Plural
Abstract
-i Plural is a multi-disciplinary project combining photography,
poetry and performance art. Photographs of public space (both
downtown and marginal) are coupled with poems about the
omnipresence of such public spaces in the city. The
photographs and poems are exhibited, circulated in pamphlet
form, and eventually staged as a walkabout reading within the
actual photographed spaces of Montreal.
-i Plural focuses on the perspective of the individual interacting
with public space in Montreal, not as a member of society, but
as an autonomous subject aiming to make the city its own.
–i Plural thus uses i as its representative letter of the alphabet. i
stands for the English first person singular pronoun, the
individual subject in the city. Moreover, the lower case i
resembles the human anatomy, the i’s dot corresponding to the
head hovering over the body.
-i Plural nouns – locus/loci, radius/radii, colossus/colossi,
fungus/fungi, etc. – extend the significance of the letter i from a
singular pronoun to a plural construct, simultaneously uniting
the individual with the plurality of the city, and allowing the
individual to stand out in the crowd.
-i Plural is one example of the individual’s creative
appropriation of Montreal’s public loci.
Medium
Project statement
Supporting documents
Budget
Photography
Performance
Text
Project Statement
-i Plural
Montreal: the individual in public loci
i – a letter of the alphabet emphasizing the individual subject, the English first person
pronoun, also resembling the human body.
-i Plural – English nouns with plural forms ending in -i (locus/loci, radius/radii,
colossus/colossi, fungus/fungi, etc.). The significance of the letter i is extended from a
singular pronoun to a plural construct.
The concept behind –i Plural originated during a cycling trip exploring the outskirts of
Montreal. Although close enough to return home at dark, camping in deserted terrains
was favoured. This experience of searching for vaguely appropriate spaces to spend the
night, brought home the realization that almost all space in and around Montreal is either
private property or, more importantly, a public space in which an individual only holds
limited access rights.
No matter how familiar an individual is with Montreal, it is only as a member of society,
as part of a plurality, that an individual has the right to act in a socially accepted manner
within the city’s public space. Public space is thus at risk of being an alienating social
construct to its own inhabitants.
An individual must then make an effort to interact with, to express itself in, Montreal’s
public space. In other words, if an individual does not own property itself, it must learn to
make public space its own.
Michel de Certeau argues that residing in and moving through a city are already acts of
appropriation of the city (The Practice of Everyday Life). –i Plural contends that a more
active intervention is necessary for an individual and its environment to bond. Rather,
being creative within a space, or creating something about a space, allows an individual
to impress a sense of belonging onto it. Perhaps nothing concrete has changed in the
relationship between the individual and the city, yet the give and take of creative
inspiration and production allow for a merger of private identity and public space.
-i Plural sets about personalizing Montreal in two main conceptual ways. First, it finds
marginal, unused lots in the city, juxtaposing these with more familiar areas of the city in
order to establish the former’s equal status as public space. Second, it inserts an
individual subject into the marginal public space, initiating a subtle oscillation between
personal identity and public space. As a creative arena, the boundary between the
individual and the city becomes more fluid, founding a personal public space.
du Plessis/Sawtelle 1
Project Statement
In less abstract terms, -i Plural will include the following key components:
1. A collection of photographs of public spaces in Montreal. Exhibited in pairs, one
photograph will represent a marginal area, the other a more central social arena.
The photograph printouts will further be personalized, literally inserting the
individual subject, as the letter –i, into the various spaces. Each photograph will
be titled with an –i plural noun. Sample photographs by Renée Sawtelle are
attached.
2. A series of poems matching the photographs, discussing the individual’s
experience of public space in Montreal. While some poems will be didactic and
intellectual in character, others will be more lyrical in style, expressing an
emotional relationship to the public space too. The poems will be printed as short
pamphlets and distributed around Montreal, as well as accompanying the exhibit
of photographs. Sample poems by Klara du Plessis are attached.
3. A performance/dramatic reading of the poems by an actress in simple costume,
staged as a walkabout tour of Montreal. Visiting the public spaces employed as
inspiration for the photographs and poems, the poems will be read sequentially
within the actual photographed spaces. Whereas a conventional walkabout tour
would provide information about the sites visited, these readings will rather locate
the private viewpoints, thoughts and feelings of an individual within that specific
public space. Further, first passively viewing the photographs of the public spaces
in the exhibit room and then actively entering into those same spaces, the
audience must also negotiate a link between the photographs hanging on a public
wall and their own experiences of the city, Montreal.
du Plessis/Sawtelle 2
IAMBUS/IAMBI
it has taken me years to realize the
footprint I leave on my doorstep is
an open book written with one
continuous sentence no punctuation
leading in and out of my house I
haven’t noticed the book just as I
haven’t noticed the scroll that
unrolls beneath my feet wherever I
go each step of my pedestrian ego a
word a foot in the script of my story
in this city I eternalize my life
through my feet writing the routes
as theorists say urban navigation is
a way to appropriate space but I fall
prey to lines on the roads entangled
in signs saying walk here walk
there so I close my eyes to name
bits of pavement after myself Is
Milton Street the only street
possibly with a literary history him
probably not the writer but some
city planner who hid the alphabet in
the basement so we’re forced to
learn the public poetry of the city
by rote roads leading to bridges the
point when the past grows fast to
the present and the present is inking
itself into the past
iambus i am and bus transport has never
really been my thing so I pluralize this
word to iambi coupling myself as i and i
is already present almost twice in the
word for city UTERUS/UTERI
Luce Irigaray asks “And how can we
fail to refer back to the sexual act, and
especially to the feminine sex, as
place?” And indeed, for lust is the
ultimate act of making public private,
or making private parts public. Or this
scenario in a public lavatory when a
man steps out from a stall intended for
women. We wash our hands at the
same basin, each with an own tap,
watching each other in the mirror, as
he hands me the soap, as he hands me
paper towels. Later I hear him with a
woman “May I ask you a personal
question?” Like the city, she probably
answers “Yes please.” But when you
think you’re in private, you’re
probably overheard. Like one day we
go out with our gear and set up rogue
camp in a vacant lot. It’s vacation and
we want to be with some isolated bits
of city we never meet. And we talk,
exchange memories and say “When
you’re lonely call me. Or just drop
by.” And while we sit in this illusion
of intimacy, someone paints a uterus
as a triangle with hair like locks on a
classical statue, erecting a monument
right by the broken wire fencing of
the plot. COLOSSUS/COLOSSI
Colossal, space is really so small.
(Bullet points read as pronouns not
numbers:
i. A city, a dot on a map.
i. Wo/man the head on top of the -i.
i. Oh so beautiful.
i. With all those o’s and i, colossi,
circling the individual and the city
into itself.)
FUNGUS/FUNGI
The word chorus is a funny one, one
could expect it to pluralize as chori, but it
doesn’t, and in some vague way the
chorus of Greek tragedy will always
remain as chaos sung in unison

Recently I read a book by a certain Farrell
Krell, an intricate argument searching for
roots of the word architecture not in the
Greek tec for technics, but in tic for touch
and reproduction

What this does is to reinsert a corporeal
element into urban space. I like this, it
digs open the foundations of the
omnipresent public seat the city has
become

And gives us all a chance to straddle the
throne, the park bench, the discarded chair
of the guardian gods of the metropolis
But fungi don’t dig so deep to find their
roots. They leech onto (grow over borders)
and quote those they happen to hear, so
space flows into tongues and many voices

She says. He says. Plato says. Derrida says
chorus merge with khôra “a place occupied
by someone, a country, habitation,
designated seat, or region. Who are you,
Khôra?”