Montreal seeks out graffiti from its literary lights
Last Updated Wed, 26 Jul 2006 17:53:28 EDT
The city of Montreal is about to adorn its streets with some literary graffiti.
Starting in September, the words of 10 Montreal writers will be painted on buildings, billboards and brick walls around town.
Lines from famous Montrealers such as Leonard Cohen, Mordecai Richler, Michel Tremblay and Monique Proulx will go up in places where the public can read them.
The project, from Montreal's Blue Metropolis Foundation, is being called City of Words.
Blue Metropolis, which runs a reading series in the spring, is working with the city to determine locations for the quotes.
"This mural project is an opportunity to create new visual landmarks in Montreal, to emphasize the city's status as a literary and cultural metropolis and to appeal to the community as a whole through literature," said Lucas Lhotsky, director of development and fundraising for Blue Metropolis, in an interview with CBC Radio.
The idea is to put the literary quote somewhere in the part of the city that is immortalized in each writer's work.
The group is seeking buildings with a 20-year lease to ensure the murals stay around for a while.
For example, a quote from Richler's The Street will appear on a mural on the corner of St-Urbain and Laurier, a district that is frequently evoked in Richler's work.
It reads:
"Slowly, unfalteringly, the immigrants began to struggle up a ladder of streets, from one where you had to leave your garbage outside your front door to another where you actually had a rear lane as well as a backyard where corn and tomatoes were usually grown; from the three rooms over the fruit store or tailor shop to your own cold-water flat. A street with trees."
A line from Cohen's Suzanne will be at the Accueil Bonneau near the Marche Bonsecours.
A three-member jury determined which Montreal authors would be chosen for the project. They have chosen six French-language writers, three English writers and one Yiddish writer.
Other works chosen for the project include:
- Poèmes épars by Gaston Miron.
- Le Centre blanc by Nicole Brossard.
- Repérages by Émile Ollivier.
- The Tree of Life by Chava Rosenfarb.
- Main Brides by Gail Scott.
- Les Belles-Soeurs by Michel Tremblay.
The first murals go up in September and others are to be painted over the next two years.
Related
Internal Links
External Links
(Note: CBC does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of external sites - links will open in new window)
