just hanging around

It was at Tristan’s open house a few weeks ago, as I munched on wontons and mingled with strangers, that the inquisition began.
“Are you an actress?” a certain gentleman drawled by way of introduction. I shook my head.
“A photographer? A musician? A designer?” he pressed on. Nope.
My new acquaintance began to look a little distressed: what was I doing there? Clearly I was some kind of misfit; perhaps I’d wandered in off the street.
“So you just, like, hang around artists?” he finally blundered.

Yeah, I guess I do…almost as if they were regular people.
“Well what do you do?” came the next arched-eyebrow question.

Ah yes, that old question. It usually elicits a job title (“sustainable transportation officer”) or, in the case that one’s job isn’t particularly thrilling, a field of study (“environmental science”). What all this amounts to in my case is that I care about places - especially Montreal. What I want to work towards is building a sustainable city.

Ecological sustainability is part of it - the city’s infrastructure puts water and energy at our fingertips, whisks away our trash, and etches out the paths for us to travel. The city is middleman between us and the natural environment - hopefully one that represents our values. But it is just as important to build places that inspire and endure; places that nurture vibrant communities at a time when the word “community” is more likely to signify a MySpace group than a neighbourhood.

So why aren’t I off in city-planner school, learning how to tweak zoning regulations to create a sense of “no place like home”? Because I’ve found that in order to build sustainable communities, people have to care about the place in which they live. City planners have a role to play, but art can create and pass along collective meaning, draw attention to our shared experiences and build a sense of place.

And so I am always on the lookout for places that are more than passive settings, places that turn up as characters in our lives and in our fictions. My posts will be about the bits of Montreal that feel like art and pieces of art that feel like Montreal.

In the meantime, if you catch me “hanging around artists”, just consider me that most vital and coveted commodity of the art community: an audience.