The state of our built heritage expresses a deep, elusive malaise, the stigma of which our regions bear. With Boomtown Holy Void, Marie-Raphaëlle LeBlond takes an oblique look at the last great colonization effort in North America: Abitibi-Témiscamingue and Northern Ontario, Canada’s last frontier land.
Between 2020 and 2023, she scoured dozens of abandoned sites – abandoned mines, ruined churches, ghost towns – scattered along the Cadillac Fault. The resulting photographic series, influenced by her documentation of the arsenic crisis in Rouyn-Noranda in 2022, questions the genesis of our living spaces, our relationship to the land, and the impact of exploitative mentalities on the rural landscape.
The installation in the window extends this reflection through a play of thresholds and superimpositions. It blurs the boundaries between image and material, interior and exterior, fiction and trace. Conceived as a place of passage with blurred reference points, it is permeated by a persistent idea of loss.
The complete series is the subject of an artist’s book, Boomtown Holy Void: Epigraphy of the Disposable City, published in September 2025. Sponsored by VU, this project was made possible with the support of Première Ovation.