MIRABEL: MORE THAN JUST A CAUTIONARY TALE
Multimedia show puts ill-fated airport in a new light
Montréal-Mirabel International Airport, or what’s left of it, is a forlorn sight these days. Conceived as a joint federal/municipal government showpiece in the heady post-Expo 67 days and projected during its 1969 groundbreaking as a facility that would one day be the biggest of its kind in North America, Montreal’s second airport instead became a symbol of all that can go wrong when official hubris goes unchecked.
Scuppered on its 1975 opening by the global energy crisis and stranded by a lack of viable connecting transit, Mirabel never really took off as an international nexus, and so grim was its cargoonly decline that in recent years it was less a fully functioning airport than a handy set for filmmakers of an alienation/dystopian bent: the 2004 Tom Hanksstarring airport-as-anomie feature The Terminal was partly shot there, as were scenes from the 2013 zombie movie Warm Bodies. But there’s a lot more to the place than just a cautionary tale with a kitsch punchline, as an illuminating new exhibit shows us.
Cheryl Sim, managing director and curator at the DHC Foundation for Contemporary Art, is one of the driving forces behind YMX: Migration, Land and Loss After Mirabel. First coming to Montreal in 1992 to take a job at the National Film Board, she worked on projects aimed at critiquing the representation of aboriginal women in Canadian culture.
“There was great freedom in (making NFB documentaries), because you had time to get deep into a story and work with people,” she said. “But there’s even more freedom as an artist. You can be more poetic in your treatment, and in bringing associations that can help people see a subject from another point of view. And you can be more critical.”
Wearing her artist’s hat, Sim — along with co-curator Matt Soar — has put together an immersive multimedia show that should indeed make us see Mirabel in a new light. Incorporating actual artifacts — signs, panels and stanchions salvaged from the airport’s passenger terminal before its demolition — it also features archival news footage, evocative sound design and, crucially, input from people to whom Mirabel has a personal significance quite apart from its standard white elephant narrative.
As for that critical spirit Sim alluded to, it is integral to a show with an undeniable political dimension. Mirabel, lest we forget, was built on prime agricultural land, paving over farms that in many cases had been in the same family for generations. Nor, for those expropriated, was that the last indignity.
“When Mirabel finally failed, the Harper government said ‘We’d like to make reparations and allow you to buy back the land,’ ” Sim said. ” ‘Buy it back!’ And, of course, you can go back further still. Montreal is Mohawk land. They were the first people to be displaced, so they basically said to the government ‘We’ve had a petition with you guys since the 1700s! Where’s our deal?’ ”
Befitting a Canadian of Chinese and Filipino parentage, Sim is sensitive to what she calls “the diaspora point of view,” and to that end she has brought in, via a video montage, the “bittersweet and marvellous” stories of those for whom the airport is a personal touchstone. Representing them are two prominent Canadians who first entered the country though Mirabel: producer/filmmaker Prem Sooriyakumar, who arrived in the 1980s as a political refugee from Sri Lanka, and Governor General’s Awards-winning writer Kim Thúy, who did the same from Vietnam in 1979. A locally rooted artistic perspective is provided by Quebec poet Pierre Nepveu, also a winner of a Governor General’s Award, whose 2002 collection Mirabel is utilized.
Talking about the crowd-control stanchions that are central to the show, Sim commented: “In an airport, those things pretty much dictate all our movements, so I thought, rather than having them form a labyrinth that restricts us, why not have them form a sort of meditation path?
“The idea being that if you follow them, by the time you get to the end you arrive at a form of enlightenment. We’re hoping it will be a meditative and calming experience, that visitors will feel they’re on a journey and not just stuck in this liminal no-person’s land that airports represent to so many people now.”
Asked what she’d say to those whose gallery-going might not normally encompass something as hard to categorize as this exhibition, Sim replied: “Contemporary art shows like this are really stories of our time and places for us to think and talk about them. Stories of displacement, airports, barriers, who’s in and who’s out, bans — these things are right now. So this show is for us and about us.”
Contemporary art shows like this are really stories of our time and places for us to think and talk about them.