Goethe-Institut Kanada 2012-2021

Join us on a journey through time!

© photo: Raumlabor

Mechthild Manus, director of the Goethe-Institut in Montreal, signs the guestbook of the city of Montreal © Archives City of Montreal

2012

Montreal
50 years and a new institute

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2012

Montreal
50 years and a new institute

The lease was coming to an end and the new European earthquake-resistant construction standards (!) required major renovations to the institute: all reasons to move, not to mention the 50th anniversary of the Goethe-Institut in Canada. Mechtild Manus, director at the time, and Manfred Stoffl, future director, visit more than thirty-five locations. Among these, they choose the ground floor of Loft des Arts, located on the iconic Saint-Laurent-Boulevard, 

in the heart of the city’s cultural life. They envision an open space with a library in its center, and bright classrooms thanks to the big bay windows. What is more, a signature design inspired by contemporary German ecodesign. Concrete, glass and wood blend perfectly together in the new Leed-Ci Silver certified institute that opens in the fall of 2012 as a place for not only exchange and dissemination but also the production of unique cultural events. The journey and rich history continue for the Goethe-Institut Montreal! 

Montreal
2013

For the philosopher Walter Benjamin, Paris is the capital of the 20th century. And the capital of the 21st century, one might ask? It just might be Berlin. Indeed, since the beginning of the century, its magnetic attraction has continued to grow, and the metropolis represents for many a unique ideal of life with its historical and artistic abundance, its creative vitality and its possibility for alternative lifestyles.    

At the invitation of the Goethe-Institut, Montreal artists Daniel Brière and Évelyne de la Chenelière gather their impressions of their past stays in Berlin, their memories and their ideas, and they create the mutli-faceted work Berlin Appelle. Between theater and performance, the space of the institute is taken over for two evenings by the couple, accompanied by Catherine de Léan and Marc Fortier, to give a festive, reflective and fragmented interpretation of Berlin. Texts, images and videos scroll through different boards that address, among other things, the history, the quest for identity and the architecture of the metropolis. 

Berlin Appelle
Poster for "Berlin Appelle"

Montreal
2014
"Maison Fontaine" house

Water. A simple and short word, but with a long list of implications that extend to all aspects of life. In the summer of 2014, Maison fontaine is built on the Clark Esplanade in collaboration with the Quartier des spectacles de Montréal and numerous local and international partners. This circular ecological structure illustrates the fundamental role of water through its architecture. “This house, with a fountain of water running through it,” project manager Markus Bader of Berlin-based architectural firm raumlaborberlin tells Le Devoir newspaper, “is about creating a spatial celebration of what we think is an ordinary, everyday necessity that we don’t care about.” An example : the fountain water is reused and released as steam. The walls planted inside and outside turn into mushrooms and herbs.  
  
“We didn’t want to just invite a German artist to do his thing; we always seek dialogue with the local community,” explains Manfred Stoffl, director of the Goethe-Institut and initiator of the project. Quebec artist Cécile Martin illuminates the green building, Chantal Dumas offers a sound installation, Magali Babin and Erin Sexton perform inside, and AElab and Chris Salter will offer the public an audiovisual performance. The arches of Maison fontaine are open to the public for three months, becoming in their own way the ephemeral home of an entire community.    

Maison fontaine © photo: Raumlabor

2015

Montreal
Wir sind das Wir!

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2015 edition of the Montreal exchange © photo: Le Vivier

2015


Sharing new music

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2015


Sharing new music

Composer Hanna Hartman is Montreal’s inaugural artist of the cross-residency in new music led by the Goethe-Institut in collaboration with the Hellerau - Europäisches Zentrum der Künste in Dresden, one of Germany’s most important contemporary art centers, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Quebec-based specialized presenter Le Vivier. Since the Berlin artist’s stay, her work Horizontal Cracking In Concrete Pavements is part of the repertoire of the Montreal saxophone quartet Quasar.

On the Quebec side, composer Félix-Antoine Morin - a founding member of the experimental music label Kohlenstoff Records, a name that reveals a certain attachment to the German tradition of new music - is taking advantage of his two-month stay in Dresden to develop the tape and digital treatment of Carrousel, a work for a multi-instrument called “Babel table”.


2016
Angst III: Anne Imhof

As the flagship event of the Biennale de Montréal organized with the support of the Goethe-Institut, the star of the German art world Anne Imhof presents in a gigantic hall of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal her performance Angst III, the third and last act of her series of "operas". Fog blown by cannons, real hawks, objects of everyday consumption, the slowness of the performers who repeat the same actions for more than four hours. The work appears to the eyes of the Montreal cultural journalist Jérôme Delgado as “a kind of social metaphor, the portrait of an indeterminate community, where the exchanges are coded, ritualized, and so ambivalent that they do not correspond to any category. Seduction, repulsion or both? Power struggle or mutual aid and sacrifice?” The questions are out there!

Angst III:  Anne Imhof at the Montreal Biennale 2016 © photo: Jonas Leihener

2017

Street art blog "Artbits"
Bits of art

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2017
Strength in numbers

EUNIC stands for European Union National Institutes of Culture. It brings together the organizations of the Member States of the European Union responsible for cultural action abroad. Created in 2006, it has 27 members from 23 countries, active in more than 150 countries. Now, a Montreal cluster is part of it!   
  
On November 29, 2017, EUNIC Montreal is officially launched and brings together the Goethe-Institut Montreal, the Austrian Cultural Forum in Ottawa, the Consulate General of France in Quebec City and the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Montreal to better promote  together European languages and cultures, strengthen international dialogue, knowledge transfer and cultural diversity.

The director of the Goethe-Institut Montreal, Katja Melzer, at the launch of the EUNIC Montreal cluster © EUNIC
The director of the Goethe-Institut Montreal, Katja Melzer, at the launch of the EUNIC Montreal cluster
Kihako Narisawa / Sonoko Kamimura : Figurative © Goethe-Institut

2018

Let’s dance!

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2018


Kihako Narisawa (choreography) and Sonoko (dance) received a residency in October in the studios of Circuit-Est centre chorégraphique.

2018

Together around the virtual world

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Pasch Tour 2018 - thumbnail © Pasch

2018

10 years of Pasch

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2018

To celebrate 10 years of PASCH, the Goethe-Institut Montreal invited German pop singer Wincent Weiss to a North American tour
Wincent Weiss on Tour 2018


2019
Emergences

To the question “What is emerging in contemporary performance art?”, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and EUNIC Montreal answer with Émerge, an impressive five-day event that brings together a dozen European and Canadian artists and participants invited to present recent works and discuss issues related to performance art. Founded in Berlin in 2016 by Berlin-based Sarah Ancelle Schoenfeld and Montreal-based Louis-Philippe Scoufaras, the duo PPKK performs PPKK 04.01, a work conceived in 2017 in Munich for the exhibition-concert entitled Mythology, Electricity and Music.  
  

Find here the recordings of the exchanges made during the great forum that gathered the participants of the conferences and workshops! 

Website - Emerge

PPKK 04.01 with Sarah Ancelle Schoenfeld and Louis Philippe Scoufaras photo: Art Genève
PPKK 04.01 with Sarah Ancelle Schoenfeld and Louis Philippe Scoufaras


2020
Reconciliation

As far as reconciliation efforts to constructively come to terms with traumatic historical conflicts are concerned, Tagesspiegel editor Lars von Törne is categorical: “Comic narratives can contribute to such coming to terms with the past, as many authors have shown in the history of this artistic form of expression.” The Goethe-Institut Canada agrees with this assessment and has invited twenty Canadian and German comic artists to create new comics in English, French, German and Indigenous languages around the theme of reconciliation.  

 “We found that this is a theme that touches both our countries from different angles,” Goethe-Institut Montreal librarian Marie-Pierre Poulin tells Le Devoir newspaper.   
  
For example, the German artist Olivier Kugler staged the English actor Stan Boardman, part of whose family had fallen victim to the Nazi bombing of Liverpool in 1941. Later, the actor used his impressions and memories of World War II and the Germans as a source of inspiration for his jokes. The 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance Comic Book by Indigenous author and cartoonist Gord Hill, formulates reservations about the concept of reconciliation itself and its implementation by the Canadian government. 
  
The comics of the twenty comic artists can be found HERE.

Tim Mossholder © unsplash
 © Simon & Schuster

2021


Annus horribilis

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2021


Annus horribilis

In 2020, Canada is the guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair: a prestigious and big opportunity to bring together contemporary literature from here with that of Germany and the world. Unfortunately, the pandemic has forced the event to be postponed to 2021, and Canada retains its title of guest of honor. What could this earth-shattering year 2020 have meant? The 20 on 2020 exchange project allowed ten authors from Canada and their German counterpart to reflect on their experiences and offer their observations on this tragic year.   
  
In the introduction to this digital book - available for free - essayist and novelist John Ralston Saul quotes a public letter by Thomas Mann written in early 1937: “The unity of humanity and the completeness of the human problem lie in the word, from which one cannot, less than ever in our time, separate the intellectual and artistic from the political and social, isolating oneself in the ivory tower of the ‘cultural’.”

Get the book for free here.