Using a list of popular play songs as a GPS, I track down memories of older residents and embark on an obsessive stroll with fictional characters in a gentrified, deindustrialized neighborhood in Montréal.“Stairway to Heaven” is a poetic and acoustic attempt to experience the city from another perspective.
[...] By now the song playing is “stairway to heaven”. It is at this moment that I see a long staircase at the intersection of Châteauguay and Ropery. The word enchant is linked to the French verb to sing: chanter . I sing along with Zeppelin “And if you listen very hard, the tune will come to you at last.” A sense of “enchantment” fills me up and I take the decision to climb the stairs. Every childish graffiti and dilapidated tile fills me with astonishment. “Once there was, once there wasn’t,” I can’t get lost anymore. The only possible path is up and it is up there that I take the photographs.
