Jacynthe Carrier, Hannah Claus, Andrée Levesque Sioui, Karine Locatelli and Kristel Tremblay
L'équilibre des vrilles
Julia Caron Guillemette, curator
An exhibition as part of the POST-INVISIBLES biennial
Julia Caron Guillemette builds relationships from Nionwentsïo, in downtown Quebec City. Through poetry and care, her curatorial, writing, and mediation practice is rooted in embodied subjectivity. She takes the issues that affect her as a starting point to cultivate relationships, reflections, and projects, with the intention of sparking dialogue. She collaborates to initiate these discussions with Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, curators, organizations, and institutions across Quebec.
Curator's webiste
Jacynthe Carrier has her roots between the St. Lawrence River and the Akiawenhrahk (Saint-Charles) River in Quebec City. Through her practice, she explores spaces of connection, both between humans and with living beings, as a tool for rethinking the world. She combines everyday gestures, poetry, movement, and the presence of the collective body to create installation and performance works. Her work has been presented in Canada and internationally, and is included in several private and museum collections.
Artist's website
Hannah Claus is part of the urban Indigenous community of Tiohtià:ke | Mooniyang | Montreal. Of Kanien’kehá:ka and English descent, she strives through her practice to highlight ways of understanding and relating to the worlds around us. Her works, which employ an Onkwehonwe epistemology, invite meditation on the connections woven between us and the land. People from around the world have encountered her work, which is also held in several museum collections.
Artist's website
Andrée Levesque Sioui, or Kwe’dokye’s, deepens her daily relationship with the living world of Nionwentsïo. A songwriter, performer, and poet, she is also an artist committed to passing on the language, oral traditions, and songs of her Wendat community. Through the many facets of her practice, she embodies a figure of relay, passing on knowledge and sharing a way of being in the world. She has sung, performed, exhibited, and recited both in Canada and internationally, and her words have been published in numerous works.
Artist's webpage
Karine Locatelli shares her daily life with the mountains of Charlevoix. Her practice unfolds in many ways, including gathering, fishing, hiking, and drawing. Her relationship with the land is expressed through installations, sculpture, ceramics, embroidery, and ink drawings. Her works avoid the picturesque aspects of the landscape to highlight the poetry of places and the issues surrounding them. Her work has been exhibited throughout Quebec and Canada, as well as in France and the United States.
Artist's website
Kristel Tremblay is involved in her artistic community in Quebec City, on the Nionwentsïo. Her practice explores the relationship with the body by working with representations of the human experience that are both embodied and liberated. Her sculptural works intertwine ancient and futuristic rituals in which the transcended, prosthetic, or mutant body foreshadows a narrative of the future. Her sculpture and performance work has been presented in Quebec City, Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, and Montreal.
Artist's website
Curator Julia Caron Guillemette thanks the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for its support of the project.
In stretches of unclaimed land, tufted vetch spreads its tendrils, attaching itself to neighbouring plants. This is how it grows. Although it may sometimes smother its neighbours and block their light, it also nourishes the soil and pollinators. It’s a matter of each finding its balance with the others, of ensuring reciprocity. What relationships do we bring to others? And which ones do they bring to us?
When we first come into the world, we explore things through our bodies, our senses. With her affective prostheses, Kristel Tremblay reminds us that how we are with others is largely marked by our contacts with the living world and with bodies, but also sometimes by their inadequacies. Furthermore, our flesh, like the organ that created it, is the result of thousands of connections forged among cells.
Before our bodies, there were our parents, and their elders, and so on, back to the beginnings of the world, out of the desire for creation and transmission that we have carried on since. When we enter, Andrée Levesque Sioui welcomes us by asking us to learn her language, to play and sing together. Then, from hand to hand, from thread to thread, she weaves the fibres of her origins and invites us beneath the skirt of the world, where plants and arrowhead shards serve as the great fabric of relations between generations.
Even before our ancestors and still with us today, there is the land. Testifying to her close relationship with territory, Hannah Claus brings with her the grandfathers, stones that have lived to see time pass for thousands of years, which she has moulded out of linen paper. She also offers us a constellation of the sweetgrass that she gathered in her garden through the summer. By sharing this priceless medicine, she opens the way toward a culture of gratitude.
Bringing with her the mountains and denizens of the Charlevoix region – mushrooms, branches, lichens – Karine Locatelli asks us to walk there with them, remembering that we form part of their circle. Her ceramics testify to her deep rootedness in the forest. Beyond the picturesque landscape tradition of her region, she erases neither human extraction and urban sprawl nor the wilderness’s reclaiming of its rights.
Finally, during performative visits, Jacynthe Carrier explores a mountain created from residues of extraction and highway construction. It has been left fallow, and vegetation, insects, and small mammals have taken over. She invites us to rethink our relationship with our body, with what is around us, with others, with gestures, and to put time and seasons in perspective. She reawakens vital movement in us – movement that connects us to life.
Echoing Felwine Sarr’s assertion that, together, “building a living society is the challenge of our age” (Habiter le monde, 2017), we hope here to invite you to collectively reconnect the natural and the social. This way, perhaps we will develop new stories.
— Julia Caron Guillemette
Translated by Käthe Roth
To anchor your commitment in your relationships with the living and non-living things, visit the Pour maintenir l'équilibre page on the curator's website.
This exhibition is part of the POST-INVISIBLES biennial, whose theme for the 2026 edition is What I Carry.
Julia Caron Guillemette builds relationships from Nionwentsïo, in downtown Quebec City. Through poetry and care, her curatorial, writing, and mediation practice is rooted in embodied subjectivity. She takes the issues that affect her as a starting point to cultivate relationships, reflections, and projects, with the intention of sparking dialogue. She collaborates to initiate these discussions with Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, curators, organizations, and institutions across Quebec.
Curator's webiste
Jacynthe Carrier has her roots between the St. Lawrence River and the Akiawenhrahk (Saint-Charles) River in Quebec City. Through her practice, she explores spaces of connection, both between humans and with living beings, as a tool for rethinking the world. She combines everyday gestures, poetry, movement, and the presence of the collective body to create installation and performance works. Her work has been presented in Canada and internationally, and is included in several private and museum collections.
Artist's website
Hannah Claus is part of the urban Indigenous community of Tiohtià:ke | Mooniyang | Montreal. Of Kanien’kehá:ka and English descent, she strives through her practice to highlight ways of understanding and relating to the worlds around us. Her works, which employ an Onkwehonwe epistemology, invite meditation on the connections woven between us and the land. People from around the world have encountered her work, which is also held in several museum collections.
Artist's website
Andrée Levesque Sioui, or Kwe’dokye’s, deepens her daily relationship with the living world of Nionwentsïo. A songwriter, performer, and poet, she is also an artist committed to passing on the language, oral traditions, and songs of her Wendat community. Through the many facets of her practice, she embodies a figure of relay, passing on knowledge and sharing a way of being in the world. She has sung, performed, exhibited, and recited both in Canada and internationally, and her words have been published in numerous works.
Artist's webpage
Karine Locatelli shares her daily life with the mountains of Charlevoix. Her practice unfolds in many ways, including gathering, fishing, hiking, and drawing. Her relationship with the land is expressed through installations, sculpture, ceramics, embroidery, and ink drawings. Her works avoid the picturesque aspects of the landscape to highlight the poetry of places and the issues surrounding them. Her work has been exhibited throughout Quebec and Canada, as well as in France and the United States.
Artist's website
Kristel Tremblay is involved in her artistic community in Quebec City, on the Nionwentsïo. Her practice explores the relationship with the body by working with representations of the human experience that are both embodied and liberated. Her sculptural works intertwine ancient and futuristic rituals in which the transcended, prosthetic, or mutant body foreshadows a narrative of the future. Her sculpture and performance work has been presented in Quebec City, Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, and Montreal.
Artist's website
Curator Julia Caron Guillemette thanks the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for its support of the project.