Narrative Debris: Counter-Mapping Overlooked Socio-Political Stories of Montreal’s Quartier des Spectacles

Patricia Enns, M.Des.
Concordia University, 2023

This thesis-creation bears witness to overlooked social and political narratives of Montreal’s Quartier des Spectacles, a historically and culturally rich area undergoing rapid gentrification and commercialization since 2003 (Lam, 2007).

The creation project, Narrative Debris (2021) consists of a public facing website and participatory kit. The website presents an illustrated map of the Quartier des Spectacles which invites visitors to explore experiential feedback from participants of an audio walk. The participatory kit offers the public an accessible tool to create their own paper-making debris-mapping of the neighbourhood. The goal of the research is to challenge the area’s current monolithic narrative as a place of commercialized entertainment by using embodied, materially engaged, and participatory methods.  The research emerges from a series of iterative walks leading to new sensory, temporal and qualitative approaches to mapping. These techniques captured the subjective, material, and gestural dimensions of Quartier des Spectacles, and examined how maps could amplify alternative socio-political narratives. 

Debris-maps: hand-made paper sheets created using debris collected from the Quartier des Spectacles, were developed as a counter mapping strategy. Examining what discarded remnants can tell us, the process highlighted local social phenomena such as the opioid crisis and the impacts of the recent acceleration of gentrification. This process exposed the importance of inviting others into the research. Informal interviews, an audio walk, and participatory kits were used to engage with local participants’ experiences and histories of the area.