The exhibition d’un seul souffle, initially presented at Artexte in Montreal from April 14 to June 22, 2023, follows a research residency within its collection. Through a familiar process of digging, collecting and editing, an intuitive yet methodical incursion enabled the artist to visit the entire Canadian artist archive and conduct a very personal re-reading. How to (re)give “body” to archives,
(re)embody their “voice”, translate them differently? Guided by the desire to bring these artists out of their boxes and sometimes out of oblivion, Jodoin treats each one equally – without hierarchy of age, practice, history or geography – in the hope of bringing them into dialogue.
d’un seul souffle took the form of an installation comprising a film collage in which 153 artists and authors are cited from visual and textual fragments, a tribute wall listing their names and a reference document. She weaves an intimate, poetic narrative oscillating between reality and fiction, past and present: the portrait of a mother composed by her daughter through the multiple voices she gathers. The result is a sweeping narrative, a choral and polyphonic song, an imagined sisterhood exploring desire, dreams, lack, the banality of life, old age, memory, mourning and forgetting.