About

This site will feature work by and about writer Miriam Montrémy, visual artist and videographer Geneviève de Parnier, actor Pierre Baronsky, musician Ali Khalil, and writer and pornographer Q. Sutherland.

Each put down roots in the B-Ville neighborhood, were well acquainted with each other, and despite different métiers found that their work often had consistent themes and preoccupations, notably that of artistic constraint which was attributed as often as not to the physical instead of the political world. Do we accept the body or reject it? Are we bound or not by time? Can objects liberate themselves from their “objectivity?”

In most of them these questions led them to a minimalist aesthetic. De Parnier rejected motion in her series of “Still Life” videos. Pierre Bronsky redefined the art of film’s walk-on parts. Montrémy, as well, began writing shorter and shorter works, telegraphing meaning, abbreviating even words. Khalil seesawed between excess and utter silence.

Q. Sutherland embraced neither excess nor minimalism and is the least typical of the group, perhaps because she arrived in B-Ville as an adolescent and continued to work in her native English. Resisting the stylistic conformity, she did in fact grapple with the aforementioned themes and belongs in any discussion of B-Ville.

My aim here, and in the ongoing manuscript on which most of this is based, is to profile the persistence, modesty, and perpetual engagement with the “objectivity” of the lives of their generation, that offered, finally, the key to its ultimate transcendence.

–Grégoire Poilroux