Guillaume Brisson-Darveau

Installation

The film-installation Les réservoirs unfolds as a journey punctuated by encounters. In a landscape scarred by its history of industry and mining, hybrid creatures dialogue with the wounded, transformed territory. The project explores the relationship between living beings, memory and landscape, resonating with the extractivist logics that have shaped these sites. The scenes were shot in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais mining basin, on the twin slag heaps of Loos-en-Gohelle and at the 9-9bis site in Oignies, near Le Fresnoy.

Through a series of cinematic tableaux, creatures inspired by stone and mineral forms, organic life and science fiction explore the metamorphoses of the body and the environment, as each contaminates the other in some way. In the final scene, at dusk, they shed their outer shells, as if moulting and opening up to other forms of existence.

The film is presented in an installation, extended by sculptures and garments laid out on the floor, echoing this transformation.

Crafted from recycled or second-hand materials, these forms turn the act of sculpting, assembling and transforming into a way of of being and a means of rethinking our relationship with the land.

Guillaume Brisson-Darveau

Guillaume Brisson-Darveau lives and works in Montreal. As part of his PhD in Arts Studies and Practices at UQAM he was invited to continue his research at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains. His practice explores how the making and wearing of costumes can bear witness to the experience of “trouble,” by making connections between personal history and collective reality. His work has been exhibited notably at Artexte (Montreal, 2025), as part of the Festival Art souterrain (Montreal, Canada, 2025), at the CONTEXTILE Biennial (Guimarães, Portugal, 2024), at MACBA (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2023), at the Trois-Rivières National Biennale of Contemporary Sculpture (Canada, 2022), at Engramme (Quebec City, Canada, 2021) and at the Museo de Arte Contemporáne-Parque Forestal (Santiago, Chile, 2018). He has also undertaken several residencies, including La Ira de Dios (Buenos Aires), cheLA (Buenos Aires), the NARS Foundation (New York, USA) and the Atelier mondial (Basel, Switzerland).

Production

Credits