Skip to main content
art

Armande Darmana, left, and Mario Brodeur enjoy soup and conversation as part of Le temps d'une soupe, an artistic social action project, in Montreal on Thursday.Christinne Muschi/The Globe and Mail

In this weekly column, Robert Everett-Green writes about the people, places and events that make Montreal a distinctive cultural capital.

The man came in the door at Montreal's busy Berri-UQAM metro station for no other reason than to touch the hand of Mère Émilie Gamelin, the first superior of the Sisters of Providence. Gamelin, who died in 1851, is represented inside the metro entrance by a life-sized bronze statue, the outstretched hand of which is shiny with acts of devotion like the one I saw earlier this week.

Gamelin's order directed its good works to the hungry and the unemployed, and dished out millions of bowls of soup at the sanctuary and shelter that stood till 1963 near the present metro station. The site is now Place Émilie-Gamelin, a broad public plaza where, this weekend, Gamelin's mission of the soup bowls is being revived and reinvented as a socially conscious art project.

The project is called Le temps d'une soupe, and it aims to bring Montrealers into greater sympathy with those who sleep on the street or in shelters. The central part of the work is a platform where pairs of strangers are seated in matching chairs (no two pairs the same), given a bowl of soup, and invited to talk together while they eat. Mediators prompt the conversation with a card containing a question or piece of information about homelessness, and also step in if an exchange gets too heated or uncomfortable.

"It's first of all a neighbourhood encounter," said Annie Roy, who conceived of Le temps d'une soupe with Pierre Allard, her partner in life and in an 18-year-old social art company called Action Terroriste Socialement Acceptable (ATSA). "The important thing is to be in front of someone you don't know, who may not be a homeless person, and to talk about this subject," she said, during a conversation at the site. "We explain to people that they are going to participate in an art piece, because it's important for us that they know that. It makes them feel more engaged."

This weekend is a time of engagement with homelessness all over Quebec, where for the past 25 years, Les nuits des sans-abri (Nights of the Homeless) has given the issue a public focus. Last year, 17 towns were involved during the four-day annual event, which includes an all-night Friday vigil.

Les nuits des sans-abri is run by a coalition of social welfare groups, and though there is always music and performance at the events, the primary aim is to educate the public. Roy and Allard, who ran a version of their soup project for three years as Fin Novembre, felt that the point would be better served if there were an aesthetic dimension to the discussion. They successfully proposed a joint venture with Les nuits des sans-abri at Place Émilie-Gamelin.

ATSA expects that by the end of the four-day event on Sunday, they will have served 3,000 bowls of soup, with help from the SoupeSoup restaurant chain, other sponsors both private and public, and many volunteers. Some of the volunteers are homeless people, including the man who was taking a nap in a sleeping bag in the tent where I met with Allard and Roy on Wednesday morning.

The homeless were also the focus of ATSA's first intervention in the winter of 1997, when, galled by the magnitude of bank profits, they set up The Sock Bank at Place des Arts. "We put it illegally in front of the Musée d'art contemporain," Roy said. "It was a participatory installation, made of several stoves joined together, like an ATM machine filled with socks. You could open the doors to put socks in, and you could withdraw socks as well." The point was to raise public awareness of the needs of homeless people in a wintry city, and to meet one of those needs through the provision of new warm socks. The piece was allowed to stay on the street for nearly three months, distributing socks the whole time, and ATSA began a partnership with the museum.

There will be clothes given out at Le temps d'une soupe too, and a photo record made of each encounter. "To leave a trace of this conversation that is very ephemeral and intimate, we take a picture of each 'duet,'" Roy said, "and they have to give a title to this photo, to their conversation, five or six words that will resonate with something about the encounter." The participants write their title on a big card they hold in the photo, like people asking for money on the street. The photos are projected continuously on a screen above the soup platform.

ATSA's many other interventions include an annual pop-up refugee camp that ran for 10 years in downtown Montreal, and several touring pieces. They would like to tour Le temps d'une soupe, and believe that the format could be used to illuminate any number of social issues. One big challenge: creating in a strange town the kind of support network they have spent years building in Montreal. But they feel there's goodwill and generosity everywhere, if you know how to look for it.

"I feel sometimes that people are waiting to give," Allard said. "They just don't know where to start." No doubt Mère Gamelin would have agreed.

Interact with The Globe