Unbuilding the City

The artists created this artist's book during an editing residency at Centre SAGAMIE in Alma, Quebec. The book's content, consisting of fragments of text and drawings, presents both the city and one of its inhabitants, along with their respective deconstructions.

Unbuilding the City also means contributing to the slow deconstruction of a city made of paper buildings. This book, as a singular object, is part of a whole made of stacked copies recreating the buildings of a city. It becomes a stratum of buildings and an extract from the lives of its inhabitants. By purchasing a book, the reader will have to remove a copy from this model of the city and thus contribute to its deconstruction.

Ève Breton-Roy & Marie-Hélène Leblanc

Ève Breton-Roy lives and works in L'Anse-Saint-Jean where she runs Terrain vague inc. which is both a publishing house for artists' books and a craft binding workshop. She holds a master's degree in visual arts from the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, where she questioned the book as an object, its formal characteristics as a materialization of thought. In October 2007, she presented "Campagne de salissage", her first solo exhibition at the artist-run centre Espace Virtuel in Chicoutimi.

Marie-Hélène Leblanc lives and works in Gatineau where she is the artistic director of the Daïmõn artist-run centre, a production centre for photography, video and new media. She is interested in architecture, temporary housing, the near and the far. She has participated as a curator and/or artist in a dozen exhibitions in Quebec and France.