Carole Lévesque went in search of Montreal?s terrains vagues, abandoned or undeveloped patches of land, such as empty lots and wild greenspaces. The exhibition La précision du vague is the result of three and a half years of work carried out by this professor at the UQAM School of Design. Working with a team of assistants, she created a kind of atlas of terrains vagues, using various representational modes to document these often neglected spaces: photography, digital database, video, sound, perspective drawings, collection of found objects, herbarium, and landscape elevations. Together they form an exhaustive representation of places that are generally considered empty and devoid of interest.
The terrain vague has long been a favourite location for temporary interventions, improvised agriculture and, more recently, citizen appropriation. It is not the terrain vague itself that is usually of interest, but rather its availability: the developer sees it as a business opportunity, the architect as a site for a grand project, the activist as a place to defend an ideal, and the citizen as an opportunity for rebuilding socialization. But what would happen if we focused more closely on the place in itself" And above all, what would happen if, by paying less attention to the terrain, the lot, a space determined mainly by its availability for building, our attention were focused more on the vague, i.e. its lack of definition, and its elusive relationship to our experience of th...