SDC du Village / Manifesto

Every year, the Société de Développement Commercial du Village gai (SDC), or The Gay Village Commercial Development Society, organizes Aires Libres with the aim to promote this famous Montreal neighborhood. In summer, Aires Libres transforms Sainte-Catherine Street East into a pedestrian street and open-air gallery.

For the 2011 edition, Paprika was invited to think up the Aire Banque Nationale located in the Amherst Park. To inhabit this great vacant space we had to design a large-scale installation. We planted a series of tubes recalling English garden mazes and crowned them with luminous letters of different sizes. At first sight, the passers-by saw the installation as a simple forest of tubes. However when they were strategically placed, the luminous letters lined up before them and formed the quote “A time will come when you can express yourself freely”. Taken from a manifesto, the sentence reminds us that everything takes on its full meaning in community.