Site specific installation Petite Vie is one of 12 that have been created as part of the Les Passages Insolites 2015 (The Unusual Passages) festival of public art held in Québec City, Canada. Designed by creative trio Francis Fontaine, Luca Fortin and Pascal Labelle, the Petite Vie mirrors the surface of the adjacent stone walls, it plays with their reflections and in doing that questions spatial meanings and relationships.
This one is a part of an organized event, but more often urban installations appear without asking anyone for permission; they surprise, provoke and intrigue. Most enchanting thing about urban interventions is not so much that they are an interplay of different media (installation, performance, art, architecture, activism) but that they are a strong expression of freedom because they are a product of a mind that thinks outside the constrains of established routines and systems. They are the results of creative experiments performed by intellectuals on structures that have mostly been shaped by capitalism, institutions and population migrations. Organized or not, the goal of urban interventions is the same - let the city talk to you and talk back to it. The ones that don't ask for permission just have more balls. Tomorrow is for those who dare. //Go out and have fun, you are the city.//
"Ernst May's plan for Frankfurt, Martin Wagner's Berlin, Fritz Schumacher's Hamburg, and Cornelis van Eesteren's Amsterdam are the most important chapters in the history of modern urban planning. Yet beside the oases of order that were the Sieldungen - true constructed utopias, on the margins of an urban reality little affected by them - the old cities continued to accumulate and multiply their contradictions. And for the most part, these contradictions would soon appear more vital then the tools established by the architectural milieu to control them." [ Hays, K., Michael, Architecture theory since 1968, The MIT Press, 1998. / p. 23 ]
