Abstract

This research-creation dissertation examines how the metallic contamination of urban soils, persistently diffuse, and often are rendered invisible by socio-political and urban dynamics (Salazar et al., 2020; Meuleman et Granjou, 2020), yet can be perceived and reappropriated by the communities entangled with them. The Champ des Possibles in Montréal constitutes this studies’ central field site. Although perceived as a natural environment, it retains the toxic traces of its industrial past (Desjardins, 2019) and illustrates the tension between residual memory and urban erasure.
The project seeks to recompose matters of concern (Latour, 2004) and care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) in relation to these altered bodies of soil, and is guided by a central question: how can site-specific artistic “dispositifs” open new aesthetic perceptions of urban soil contamination, and how embodied, sensual engagement with these “dispositifs foster the activationof such issues by civilians ? This inquiry builds on aesthetic experience that can translate these imperceptible phenomena and generate spaces for dialogue and collective action.
To address this question, the dissertation formalizes a methodological approach termed residual archaeology. This concept designates a set of artistic and ethnographic gestures enabling a critical, sometimes collective, analysis of contaminated soils. It considers soils and by extension, their residues, as active - material archives of a geochemical and territorial history, operating across the past, present, and future (Foucault, 1969). Rooted in a sensitive practice that mobilizes the body and attention to its environments, it unfolds through five gestures: walking, collecting, activating, polysensualizing, and rematerializing. These gestures connect the different phases of the research and structure a methodology intended to be adaptable to other sites and territories.
The research unfolds through four participatory artistic actions: Symphony of the Stones (2022), Écotones (2022), Ballets Résiduels (2023–2024), and En, Sur et Face (2023–2024). Together, they amalgamate aesthetic experience, participation, and the materialization of environmental data to render contamination perceptible to diverse publics and contexts. While residual archaeology positions itself as a practical, theoretical, and methodological contribution for rethinking contaminated territories and generating new forms of collective narratives - the research also contributes to the field of data physicalization (Jansen et al., 2015) and to debates around participatory practices in art (Popper, 2007; Bishop, 2006, 2012), discursive design (Tharp et Tharp, 2018; Wodiczko, 2015), and Science and Technology Studies (Rogers, 2022).