Montreal: City as Archive Artist Lab
A five-day, in-person Artist Lab at Atelier Galerie 2112 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Tuesday, 28 July to Sunday, 2 August 2026 with two virtual meetings on Zoom (dates to be determined)
Early Deadline to Apply: Sunday, 14 June 2026
Final Deadline to Apply: Sunday, 28 June 2026

Montreal: City as Archive Collage Artist Lab is a five-day intensive where collage artists use Place as a laboratory and spend a week making artwork; learning about the city, its people, and its history; and discussing how art can capture, share, reflect, comment, and otherwise engage with a sense of place.

Place as Archive takes as its premise that the landscape can be viewed as a sort of archive from which artists can draw, not unlike a material archive maintained in an institutional collection. When artists approach a place as an archive, they draw out a deeper, more complex understanding of that place that enriches our understanding of our communities, helps us be better citizens, and empowers us to take better care of our neighbors. Place as Archive intersects with other Kolaj Institute Projects around photography, folklore, trash as material, and history.

To see the Place as Archive is to consider all the things that make up that place as holding a story. The shape of a building may speak to past economics. Trash on the ground may tell us what people are eating or how they feel about their community. Graffiti, Street Art, and signage become part of the public discourse. The shape of streets and sidewalks; the shape and placement of parks or green space; the markings on bricks or manhole covers; all of these things point to complex human systems of place making and belonging. Be they grand or mundane, they are opportunities for artists to tell us something about the world we live in.

In The Lure of the Local, Lucy Lippard writes about the fragmented nature of contemporary life. “Most of us live such fragmented lives and have so many minicommunities that no one knows us as a whole. The incomplete self longs for the fragments to be brought together. This can’t be done without a context, a place.” Collage is the work of bringing fragments together into a whole. When artists approach a place as an archive, they draw out a deeper, more complex understanding of that place that enriches our understanding of our communities, helps us be better citizens, and empowers us to take better care of our neighbors.