Walking in Montréal as a newcomer, each street revealed overlapping temporalities. The neighborhoods I explored sit on the unceded territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka people. What is made visible in the urban fabric, and what is obscured (human and ecological alike)? And how do immigrant, transient, and marginalized presences negotiate these spaces?
Vous êtes ici / You are Here layers painted contemporary maps over historical maps at sites across my neighborhood. Some maps include ecological markers, tracing natural and human histories often sidelined in urban planning and official narratives.
Through strategies of layering and partial erasure, the project reveals how urban space is continuously produced, contested, and revised. As older maps gradually deteriorate, they function as material records of displacement, suppression, and persistence. Walking becomes an act of witnessing, transforming movement through the city into a meditation on displacement, recognition, and responsibility.
