[ Fig. 01 ] ManonLabrecque_les yeux fermés (installation, excerpt) photo ©ManonLabrecque.jpg

Mobile Bodies: Thinking with Nicole Gingras

Maude Trottier

Release your shoulders. Seek out the place that tightens in you, and imagine a fog settling around that resistance, because something in you will tighten, inevitably. You, so unaccustomed to being spoken to. But you are not alone. Countless other readers accompany you. You no longer have to bear the burden of being so singular, so irreplaceable, so alone. Trust that this you is a space capable of welcoming this weight. Relax into it, into this now-shared charge of existence.

  • Clara Dupuis-Morency, Désert Désir1

 

Words make image; thought resonates.

 

  • Nicole Gingras2

 

Were I to give shape to Nicole Gingras’s world3,  I might do so more obliquely, not so much through singular works as by asking you to imagine a building, an edifice of many rooms or, if you prefer, various spaces leading toward openings. In each room or space, I might lodge less an image than a word whose resonance would act upon your whole body. There, we would come upon these terms: listening, accompaniment, duration, image, memory, rhythm, voice, silence, matter.

These words, once the gesture of opening has been performed (a door pushed, a window opened, a latch unfastened, an image revealed, a screen filled with light, a space traversed), would begin to act upon our organs and our consciousness sensually, intuitively, meditatively—even analytically—but also through fields of colour and harmonic echoes, spatial sensations, memory associations, sonic reverberations and sudden textures. Within this free-flowing spatial metaphor we might, for instance, witness the behaviour in space of the word écoute (listening here for its staccato quality, cushioned by vowels); be surprised by how carnal silence can be; ponder the weight of a certain object in our hand; suffer our own memory lapses.

There, we might also hear words, all manner of words. Explanatory words, affective words, words on a loop, others that by turns rise up and collapse. There, experiences recounted as memory unfolds; calls to the beyond4;  questions such as “What do you make of the expression ‘to feel at home’? Is it an important notion for you? Or one that feels pertinent to you? If so, when, where, and how do you ‘feel at home’?”5  There, we would sense “bodies put to the test, the difficulty of staying anchored to the ground despite the storms without and within.”6  There, we would hear laughter, discreet or wide open, and sometimes even the imperceptible sound made by the parting of smiling lips. We would experience image as a breath, “born, precisely of a state of suspension, exhaustion and loss necessary for its manifestation,”7  within that “paradoxical dimension of all appearance, inexorably tied to its disappearance.”8  We would undergo “interminable thresholds, ceaselessly renewing themselves.”9


Drawing freely on an ancient memorization technique10 that lets me move through Nicole Gingras’s corpus, I attempt to grasp the amplitude of a body of thought, to summon the richness of spectatorship it calls forth, and to take stock of what supports it, imaginary and flexible though it may be, insofar as it is what allows us to wander through consciousness. Akin to the strands of a single braid, I envision it through three knots, or three movements, to help convey all the resonance that spending time with Nicole Gingras’s work has awakened in me.

I use the word œuvre advisedly, in two senses. In the sense of a work in the making, inchoate and never closed: to open up the intelligence of created works, to unfold endlessly what they offer to our bodies of thought. But also, and conversely, in the sense of a sum that gives itself to contemplation—both coherent and sinuous—in its singularity and its physicality.

Finally, I also try to make perceptible a certain clearing, a kind of intercalary dimension of the experience rendered everywhere by and within this œuvre. Also, most certainly, all the gentleness of address inherent in it.

On Mobility

But while the terms I’ve chosen to bring the rooms of this imaginary building to life allow the sensory world of Nicole Gingras to resound, I find myself thinking of yet another word, one drawn from her own speech.

More than others, this word lets us go further in understanding a trajectory marked by the sheer range of mediums it subsumes and activates, gathered under three headings: exhibition (in museums, galleries, artist-run centres); film and video programming; and writing and publishing. These modes of dissemination and collaboration share one common thread — exchange — insofar as it carries a kind of know-how, builds presence, and itself relies on particular supports: the voice, paper, email, the recording.

I am thinking of the term mobility, or rather of its semantic spectrum, which likewise recurs in the discourse of Nicole Gingras.

For example:

“Experiencing duration inscribes us in mobility—the mobility of seeing and hearing, of thought and memory.”11

But also : 

What keeps my commitment to curatorial practice current is working with artists and authors: a film, an installation, a sound work, a painting, the title of a book, a discussion, a studio visit, a word, a sound. I’ve observed many initiatives that confirm artists’ intense and deep commitment and the determination of people involved in the presentation and dissemination of ideas and artworks—for instance, independent publishing houses, micro-movie houses, occasional events in venues not devoted specifically to art, and other models for smaller presentation spaces and exhibitions. These are not new phenomena, but I note an effervescence that both fascinates and comforts me. What’s important is to continue looking, listening, reading, being present and receptive to the visions offered by artists working in the solitude and stringency of their studios. It’s also essential to be on the lookout for the paths proposed by researchers, thinkers, and authors. It’s important to think, and it’s also important to maintain our mobility toward what catches our attention and how we want to share it.12 

“To maintain our mobility”: the expression condenses an inner state from which to look at the world. It may mean taking up residence in mobility, inhabiting it. An oxymoron that cannot help but carry forward a pulse characteristic of Nicole Gingras’s small and large obsessions, namely fixity and movement, and that conveys the negative imprint of a true ethics of listening, in which cultivating a posture of openness (and of fruitful doubt) comes to rely on a precise practice: “to continue looking, listening, reading, being present and receptive to the visions offered by artists.”

To maintain our mobility is, moreover, to stay alert to the modes by which works are transmitted: “independent publishing houses, micro-movie houses, occasional events in venues not devoted specifically to art, and other models for smaller presentation spaces and exhibitions.” It is to know how to lend our body and our consciousness to a plurality of forms (“a film, an installation, a sound work, a painting, the title of a book, a discussion, a studio visit, a word, a sound”) and, from there, to work in secret on the constant movement of our own identity, to welcome transformation, to widen ourselves through contact with the not-known. To embrace a certain porosity.

To maintain our mobility is to conceive of exhibition, programming, publishing, writing, and conversation in the full breadth of their in-betweenness: between the interiority of works and the exteriority of the hypothetical people who will receive them. More precisely, it is to invent mobilities,   or “modes of accompaniment,” as Nicole Gingras would say, that allow artistic visions to be transmitted across space and time, bringing our own understanding into play as the binding agent.

To approach the work of Nicole Gingras through the prism of mobility is, where the supports are concerned, to open onto their protean character, in a perpetual state of invention.

[ Fig. 02 ] Puisqu'à toute fin correspond - interviews, Montréal, Nicole Gingras, 2007

In moving through the curator’s various publishing projects, among them those issuing from the press she founded in 1996, les Éditions Nicole Gingras, we grow familiar with a constantly adapting materiality. We discover by turns: a book’s edges used as a space of encroachment and overspill (Raymond Gervais, Nicole Gingras, Puisqu’à toute fin correspond — Entretiens, Éditions Nicole Gingras, 2007), an ingenious touch by graphic designer Dominique Mousseau; a book-object devised by Jean Corbeil where the pages flip upward like a notepad (Manon Labrecque : corps en chute, Éditions Nicole Gingras, 2002), surprising us with a drawing by the artist and images that bloom across the entire page; a tiny book, a precious object wryly marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of Vidéographe, at the close of viewing (or “listening” to) some eight hundred videos over two years (Revoir la collection : 25 ans de vidéos québécoises, canadiennes et européennes, Vidéographe, 1997).

[ Fig. 03 ] Manon Labrecque - corps en chute, Montréal, Nicole Gingras, 2002 (front cover)
[ Fig. 04 ] Manon Labrècque, untitled (2001) drawing reproduced in Manon Labrecque - corps en chute, Montréal, Nicole Gingras, 2002
[ Fig. 05 ] Manon Labrècque, C't'aujourd'hui qu' , 1999, reproduced in Manon Labrecque - corps en chute, Montréal, Nicole Gingras, 2002
[ Fig. 06 ] Revoir la collection, Montréal, Vidéographe, 1997

Out of the silence the page gives shape to, we also gauge the full sculptural and poetic weight of words offered and collected there. Most strikingly and poignantly: the remediated placement of Manon Labrecque’s voice in the book that came out of the exhibition des [ré]animations. Nicole Gingras assembled a montage of passages from the correspondence she nurtured with the artist. Mobility appears here as the choice to omit her own words so as to make the other’s appear, to mount the full meaning and brilliance of Labrecque’s thought. The margins (like choosing silence when another speaks) become a plinth for their thought.

[ Fig. 07 ] Excerpt from the publication by Manon Labrecque - des [ré] animations, Maison des arts de Laval, 2022, Manon Labrecque

To Our Transformations

Indeed, “maintaining our mobility” unfolds and gains substance through long exchanges with artists and the co-organization of crossings of thought and experience between mediums and works. Nicole Gingras specifies, as she always does, that her work is elaborated in close collaboration with the artist [with whom she is working at the time], that “decisions are made together.”    These expand through long-term exchanges, the co-extension of writing and the accompaniment of processes as they unfold, the fashioning of medial envelopes and assemblages so as to keep as close as possible to observed, felt, even intuited movements, and to address us in an intimate, subterranean way… The kind of mobility crafted by Gingras traces a circulation among the works, approached as moving beings or as organisms looking back at us.    The expression image-in-movement, which the curator readily uses, thus seems to extend to the oeuvre conceived as a living being. This circulation runs as well among the artists with whom she composes matrices of questioning and thought; the spaces and durations in which to inscribe these works or moving beings; and then our own spectating bodies, themselves approached as spongy, liquid, shifting substances. In this way, she carves out a space within us capable of welcoming this weight.14  

Here again I take Nicole Gingras at her word, this time drawing on the talk she gave during one of the discussion-screenings on film programming that we organized at Hors champ in 2025, a session titled “Le film exposé.”15  And I speak by way of a kind of historical or reflexive present that might invoke or imply “since that event,” the better to draw out the share of mobility that plays out, at every instant in Gingras’s work, within multiple strata. Under the pressure of the density at stake, it might also produce an effect of slowness in my own understanding.  

For the occasion, to convey her thinking on the session’s central theme, Gingras presented two exhibitions she had curated at VOX: Compositions | Pale Shadows (2019–2020), on the work of Monique Moumblow16,  and Chutes (2024), on the work of Alexandre Larose17. She opened her presentation by asking: “How does one exhibit a film? Does one exhibit a film? To what kinds of experience does a projected film, or an exhibited film, invite the spectator, the viewer, the visitor? What kinds of presence are we then witness to? And what attention do we grant them?”18

From the outset, then, the task is to lay out an interrogative space for exploring the processes behind and at work in the two exhibitions, and, in this way, to insert into her own voice and into the listening of those present a deliberate suspension, a step back, a kind of margin pointing toward what the terms imply. To speak of exhibited film is tacitly to ask what kinds of experience, presence, and attention it summons. In other words, the task is to give oneself the means to exercise mobility, that is, to create space in advance.  

Gradually, rigorous descriptions invite the audience to spend time with the works of Moumblow and Larose, binding their respective poetics to the parameters of the exhibition space:

number of rooms

architectural elements

contrasting atmospheres between white cube and black box from one room to the next

type of images (video, digital image, film stock transferred to digital)

modes of presenting sound and image: headphones or open sound; looped playback; installation (number of projectors or monitors, projection directly on the wall or monitor)

format of the images and the degenerative effect produced in Moumblow’s series erased, where each playback loop erases a small part of the images

contaminations or dissociations produced between works (Larose’s Chutes included three days of screening the filmmaker’s films on celluloid at the Cinémathèque québécoise, an occasion to play, not without mischief, with the distinct expectations of audiences tied to experimental cinema and the visual arts)

how the hypothetical visitor is addressed (a tête-à-tête effect for one work; or intimacy created by listening to sound through headphones for others; or immersion and mobilization of the spectating body via the four-screen installation with soundtrack, La Grande Dame)


It is also a matter of signalling the presence of movements and transfers, by naming “the ghostly presence of cinema in the video and installation work of Monique Moumblow”19  and “the relations between dream and work in Alexandre Larose (or the dream-work),”20  and more precisely, in this latter case, the process by which one can render “a sensation, an emotion in its spatiality and its visceral materiality.”21  
 

[ Fig. 08 ] Monique Moumblow, 1970, Sans paroles, 2014, installation, presented as part of Monique Moumblow - Comptions / Pale Shadows, VOX, centre de l'image contemporaine, Montréal, 2019-2020 ; curated by Nicole Gingras. Photo © Michel Brunelle
[ Fig. 09 ] Alexandre Larose, La Grande Dame, 2018-2022, installation, presented as part of Alexandre Larose - Chutes, VOX, centre de l'image contemporaine, Montréal, 2024 ; curated by Nicole Gingras. Photo © Maxence-Croteau

The full wealth of possibilities is spread before us, letting us understand and retrace how an installation form takes shape—in both cases, though differently—from or around filmic works. How, from one medium to another, transformation can come about through exchange, by setting ideas in tension or holding them in common. How, in other words, all is ghosts, hauntings, and dreams for whoever is willing to take the time to see and to listen: force of circulation, potential for displacement.22

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*

That day, Nicole Gingras also took care to specify that it was in the wake of an exchange she called “magical” with Michèle Thériault during the screening of Moumblow’s film 1970 — Sans paroles, selected for the experimental section of Le FIFA (the Festival International du Film sur l’Art), carefully and brilliantly programmed by Gingras for twenty-three years, that the idea of transforming the film into an installation likely first emerged. It bore fruit some years later in exchanges with Moumblow while mounting the VOX exhibition. During FIFA, the film version of 1970 — Sans paroles was placed in dialogue with the film Speak White by Pierre Falardeau and Julien Poulin (1980). Here again: exchanges, “frictions among works,”23 space (in the sense of time passing), duration, exchanges, becoming, transformation.

[ Fig. 11 ] Monique Moumblow, 1970 — Sans paroles, 2014, exhibition, Compositions | Pale Shadows, VOX, Montréal, 2019–2020. Photo: Michel Brunelle.

By way of reminder: the film 1970 — Sans paroles extracts, from Michèle Lalonde’s iconic address filmed by Jean-Claude Labrecque and Jean-Pierre Masse in 1970, the pauses where her breath becomes perceptible. By suspending Lalonde’s speech to redirect attention toward what, more faintly, underlies it (her breathing, her voice surging or falling away), Moumblow toys with the charged imaginary of that overheated historical moment. Both in the immediacy of that evening and over time since Labrecque and Masse’s film, it is this very performance before the crowd gathered at the Gesù that came to crystallize struggle and poetic protest in collective memory. Moumblow makes this moment fragile, cuts into it in the manner of blackout poetry, and in so doing makes it newly available for reflection.

In her commentary on the film’s transformation into an installation, it is precisely, necessarily, the eloquence of this setting-into-silence that held Gingras’s attention, along with the irony that turning it into an installation induced between, as she put it, “the subtlety of the soundtrack,” played through headphones, and the “monumentality of the image.”

I say necessarily, because how could one fail to see, in this operation of reassembling breath in 1970 — Sans paroles and in its subsequent transformation into installation, the ghostly body of a metaphor that houses (no longer by means of an imaginary building but, this time, by means of an artwork) the work of Nicole Gingras. A metaphor for all sorts of degrees of mobility activated and reached, each charged with reflexivity. A metaphor for the setting into resonance of the bodies of works that meet one another and of the voice-silences that run through them. A metaphor for the way a work can make itself an agent of memory, can create duration and inscribe itself within a duration, can become a place to gather in experience, a meeting point of our shared solitudes. A metaphor for a labour of displacement, of the airlock antechamber, of the threshold, of mobility as a vital approach and of transformation made possible through exchange.

But 1970 — Sans paroles also arises in my consciousness like a kind of negative, or solarized mirror, of the silence Gingras practised before Manon Labrecque’s words, of that very setting-montage. In it I find, in intaglio   , the shape of the coming-into-being of the curator’s body as a knot of relations, as an organism that absorbs and reflects light, one that holds out an ideal for my own body as an editor. Where silence is a thing that makes itself heard, it becomes the very matter of the ethics of listening embodied by the edifice-work—equal parts monumental and subtle—of Nicole Gingras.
 

  1. Excerpt translated from French by Sunny Doyle for this essay.
  2. Excerpt translated from French by Sunny Doyle for this essay.
  3. Among the questions Nicole Gingras poses to the artists Scott Benesiinaabandan, Anouk De Clercq, Aernoudt Jacobs, Vinicius Jatobá, Esther Venrooij, Andrée Préfontaine, Yan Jun, Jen Reimer, and Karen Task in 9 entretiens / interviews (Montréal: Éditions Nicole Gingras, 2024).
  4. Manon Labrecque, in des [ré]animations (Montréal: Salle Alfred-Pellan, Maison des arts de Laval, 2022), [page]. Excerpt translated from French by Sunny Doyle for this essay.
  5. Nicole Gingras, Souffle / Breathing (Montréal: Optica, un centre d’art contemporain, Voix contemporaine series, 2003), 57.
  6. Ibid.
  7. Ibid., p. 8. 
  8. I am referring to Frances A. Yates’s work on the history of the art of memory and to its appearance in Simonides of Ceos, as reported by Cicero and quoted by Yates: “[Simonides] inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty (of memory) must select places and form mental images of the things they wish to remember and store those images in the places, so that the order of the places will preserve the order of the things, and the images of the things will denote the things themselves, and we shall employ the places and images respectively as a wax writing-tablet and the letters written on it.” Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory, (New York: Routledge, 1996), 2.
  9. “Each artist strives to develop a world, his own particular world”, writes Nicole Gingras in “the sound of words”, in Nicole Gingras and Raymond Gervais, Raymond Gervais 3 x 1 (Montréal: VOX, centre de l’image contemporaine, and Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen, 2011), 98.
  10. For example: “Houdini, if you can hear us, if you are alive, give us a sign. Bear witness in any way you can to your presence in this other dimension, to which we have no access.” In conversation with Nicole Gingras, Raymond Gervais recounts the story of a record on which one can hear a séance held by friends of Houdini, who called upon the late magician to manifest himself. Raymond Gervais and Nicole Gingras, Puisqu’à toute fin correspond — Entretiens (Montréal: Éditions Nicole Gingras, 2007), 41. Excerpt translated from French by Sunny Doyle for this essay.
  11.  Véronique Leblanc, “Entretien avec Nicole Gingras”, Esse, 2023, https://esse.ca/en/reviews/entretien-avec-nicole-gingras/. 
  12. Ibid.
  13.  An exhibition presented at the Salle Alfred-Pellan, Maison des arts de Laval, May 1 to July 2, 2022.
  14. Clara Dupuis-Morency, Désert Désir (Montréal: Éditions du Noroît, 2026), 16.
  15. “Le film exposé,” session 3 of Réfléchir la programmation: gestes critiques, gestes créateurs, with curators Ariane De Blois, Dominique Fontaine, Michèle Thériault, and Nicole Gingras, Cinéma public, December 6, 2025, https://horschamp.qc.ca/programmation/view/reflechir-la-programmation-gestes-critiques-gestes-createurs-seance-3-le-film-expose.
  16. https://centrevox.ca/expositions/monique-moumblow. 
  17.  https://centrevox.ca/expositions/alexandre-larose-chutes. 
  18. “Le film exposé” session recording, December 5, 2026.
  19. Ibid.
  20. Ibid. 
  21. Ibid. 
  22. In Moumblow’s case, the thread of Gingras’s spoken commentary, retracing the exhibition’s parameters, connects the seven works on display—four installations and three videos—which, through their material and creative diversity, speak to one another (and within us) around modes of disturbance in speech, strategies of diversion, and transformative trajectories drawn from within what is being erased—like stitches, or splices. In Larose’s case, her words make their way by returning to the juxtaposition of certain archival documents and the film Bonne nuit (Super 8 transferred to digital, 2006), through time and through experience, moving toward the obsession built around the fall of his own body through space in the masterful installation La Grande Dame (2018–2022). This reconstitutive commentary reconnects the work to its process.
  23.  Véronique Leblanc, “Entretien avec Nicole Gingras,” Esse, 2023, https://esse.ca/en/reviews/entretien-avec-nicole-gingras/ 

Maude Trottier is editor-in-chief of the journal Hors champ and also works in the field of culture and heritage. She is the author of Sous le figuier (Moult Éditions, Cul-de-lampe series, 2022), a narrative poem illustrated by the painter Cécile Ronc, as well as of numerous essays and critical texts published in various cultural magazines (Panorama-cinéma, Esse, Spirale).

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