Eva Quintas
Photography and media arts
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Civilités /Civilities (2003) - (concept, artistic direction and creation / collective project)

Civilities is a modular, collective fiction that brings together some ten Montreal artists from a range of disciplines and backgrounds who offer diverse perspectives on “living together.” The invited artists explore potential spaces of confidence, reconciliation and the cohabitation of persons, peoples and religions. From the rules of religious fundamentalisms to the movements of anonymous crowds in the city, the projects examine various aspects of social organization, cultural norms and the collective spaces of shared practices. Working from interfaces representing public space, that of the community and of civitas, small stories emerge like windows onto more universal situations, onto a certain state of the world, somber and violent indeed.

Presentations :
- FILE (Electronic Language International Festival), Sao Paulo(Brésil), nov. 2004
- CanariasMediaFest, Gran Canaria (Espagne), octo. 2004
- Artrónica, Bogotá (Colombie), octo. 2004
- Stiching Media Art, Friesland, Pays-Bas, sept. 2004
- Split Film Festival, Split (Croatie), june 2004
- European Media Art Festival (EMAF), Onasbrück (Allemagne), april 2004
- Nouvelles Images 01, ¡Voilà Québec En México!, Laboratorio Arte Alameda, México, dec. 2003
- Festival du nouveau cinéma et des nouveaux médias de Montréal (FCMM), octo. 2003
- Perspectives 03, Java Museum et Computer Space, Sofia, Bulgarie, octo. 2003


    
       
       




 

Eva Quintas' project, Tirer, developed within the general structure of Civilities, deals with power and domination in the family. The family home, the space in which one first learns to live with others, is certainly the most sensitive place. Opening with an anecdote about a mother pulling a child a little too violently by the hand, the artist deals with the more general notion of everyday, insidious power and violence. How is power exerted within the limited group of the family. This theme is supported by spoken excerpts from Roland Barthes' Comment vivre ensemble?, a reflection on the relationship between power, domination, and individual rhythm: "master is he who sets the pace."

Cécile Petit
Civilities
Electronic magazine, Centre international d'art contemporain, no. 22, 2005

Cosmogonies (2002) - within the collective project Vilanova
In september 2001, thirteen photographers from the collective FOVEA have exhibited their works in several stores and outdoor spaces of the Villeneuve street neighbourhood, between Saint-Laurent and Saint-Urbain, in Montréal. My project took place at the Laundromat Villeneuve, owned by an Indian family. The web version of Cosmogonies continues to link the cyclical world of laundry and Hindu iconography , but it also addresses the image and representation of women in India.

Presentations :
- Festival du nouveau cinéma et des nouveaux médias de Montréal (FCMM),Montréal, octo. 2002
- Net art open exhibition, Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum (Turkey), sept. 2002
- FILE (Electronic Language International Festival), Sao Paulo (Brazill), august 2002

    
         
   

Carnages (1999) - collaboration with the author Mitsiko Miller

Presentations :
- PassArt, Rouyn Noranda (Canada), summer 2000
- Les HTMlles, IIIe Maid in Cyberspace, Studio XX, Montréal, february 2000

Carnages, designed by Mitsiko Miller and Eva Quintas, comprises several levels of text, including Alice, which can be related more directly to the picture story. Straight out of a mime show, Alice and her assistants take part in a narrative thread strongly influenced by childrens stories, to which explicit reference is made, starting with the title. This account uses a parodic style to take us without ambiguity into the world of symbolism. The adoption of such a style might surprise us at the outset, but it shows unquestionable humour, which becomes darker and more complex as the story progresses. Indeed, this story, while linear in structure, superimposes itself on an underground space which the visitor enters when he engages in the corridors it opens. The succession of pictures, actually permeated from all sides through hyperlinks, leads to a bottomless well, a journey into the dark universe of anthropophagy, building a fascinating bridge between childrens stories and the history of humankind. The interest of the two artists for cultural diversity is shown here by an incursion into cannibalism, which leads them to push their investigation still further, as the Web allows, from one universe and one register to another without distinction. From fiction, the visitor thus moves suddenly to the documentary, which proves an abyss where the desire of the other becomes consumption, ingestion, digestion and annihilation, whether in the area of eroticism or cultural or territorial appropriation. Carnages is not without making allusion, by extension, to the voracious and sometimes malicious nature of the Web, and to the immense potential for appropriation that is digital technology.

Sylvie Parent
FiXions, cinq photoromans sur le web,
Magazine électronique du Centre international d'art contemporain, no. 09, dec. 1999

  

 

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Photonovel

Liquidation, a plurimedia photonovel: CD-Rom, web, radio, installation (1998-2001)
- cocreation with the author Michel Lefebvre
     
  Cette fiction photographique et littéraire est prévue pour les supports multiples que sont le Cd-Rom, le Web, la radio, le livre et l'installation. Les auteurs, Michel Lefebvre et Eva Quintas ont conçu un scénario qui comprend plus de 1800 photos et 4 heures de dialogues et de musique originale avec quelque 25 interprètes et trois groupes de musiciens. Avec humour et poésie, les auteurs s'approprient les genres populaires du photoroman et de la bande dessinée en utilisant la parodie et les scènes de genre. Leur thématique, qui donne le titre au photoroman, porte un regard mi-critique, mi-amusé sur nos vies et nos villes où en n'en finit plus de liquider ce qui a été accumulé.
   
       
    A random photonovel on CD-Rom (2001)

Having produced a Web radio version of this photo-novel in 1998, the artists offered a CD-ROM version designed as a random fiction. PRoman, a software package developed specifically for this fiction by Alain Bergeron, randomly places fixed images, display effects, text, and sound effects, as a function of a viewing duration chosen by the user (from 15 to 120 minutes). Although its interface also allows for sequential viewing, LIQUIDATION on CD-ROM is presented primarily as a film whose plot changes each time it is viewed.


Presentations :
- Prix Mobiüs international des multimédias, Beijing (Chine), nov. 2001
- Microwaves, Hong-Kong, sept. 2001
- Territoires extrêmes de la poésie, Bibliothèque nationale du Québec, Montréal, may 2001
- Videoformes, Clermont-Ferrand (France), march 2001
- Canarias MediaFest, Gran Canaria (Espagne), october 2000 - Mention
- FILE (Electronic Language International Festival), Sao Paulo (Brésil), august 2000
- Video Lisboa - Romerias, Lisbonne (Portugal), april 2000
- Images du nouveau monde, Québec (Canada), march 2000
- Festival international de la bande dessinée, Angoulême (France), january 2000
- Canadian Currents, Toronto Goethe Institute, Toronto (Canada), november 1999
- IIIe États généraux de l'écriture interactive, Forum des images, Paris (France), november 1999
- Festival du nouveau cinéma et des nouveaux médias de Montréal (FCMM), october 1999

Awards :
- Möbius Québec-Canada Award, category Fiction, october 2000
- Téléfilm Canada Award, Best Canadian Work, New Media, FCMM, 1999		    
       
   


Liquidation, une fiction web-audio (1998)
The Web radio fiction was broadcast simultaneously on the Internet and by the Radio Canada FM cultural network on Fridays January 16, 23, and 30, 1998, during the program Les décrocheurs ... d'étoiles. On each of the broadcast evenings, events were organized in public sites in Montreal with projection of the Web site on a large screen and performances by the musicians who composed the sound track for LIQUIDATION: the group Papa Boa, the chorus Mruta Mertsi, and the musician Martin Tétreault.

Presentations :
- Festival international du film de l'internet, Lille (France), march 2000
- European Media Art Festival (EMAF99), Onasbruck (Allemagne), may 1999
- Biennale de Montréal, CIAC, summer 1998
- Diffusion radiophonique sur la Chaîne culturelle de Radio-Canada FM, january 1998
- Projections-événements : Cinémathèque québécoise, Building Danse, Café électronique, january 1998

    
       
   
Genèse et aboutissement d'une liquidation (1998)

On May 1, 2, and 3, 1998, the authors took over the Centre des arts actuels SKOL to present the prototype of the CD-ROM and the creative steps for the photo-novel. On this occasion, SKOL hosted a world première: the printing of 100 poetry books by Professor Morgan on rock-fibre paper! A recent discovery by Les Papiers Alexandrie.

  

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