DIY Flood

Yourself

When I was a kid and we called each other names in the school playground, yelling “yourself” to an enemy meant giving up: it was the end of the fight. Usually, it was shouted, red in the face with ears ringing. “Yourself!” We knew it, when we said it, that the mirror technique would have no effect: the insults would not bounce back to the other, but instead had managed to seep in, to hurt us. Yourself was a sign of despair.

While talking about DIY culture with Manuel, this childhood memory came back to me. In the 70’s, the DIY movement became popular and proposed a way of liberating oneself from consumer society by enhancing one’s technical and artisanal knowledge. Faced with the difficulty of changing the world, the DIY movement suggested designing one’s own with one’s own hands, on the fringe of the system, through sharing instructions, tips and techniques for building various objects. DIY, do-it-yourself, is normally translated into French as “fait-maison.” Literally, I translate it in my head as do it yourself. IKEA and other multinationals offer a watered-down vision of DIY: with the help of instructions, they ask buyers to assemble their products themselves, inserting the customers’ unpaid work into the production chain. Do-it-yourself. Facing this contemporary recuperation of DIY, I hear in do-it-yourself, the “yourself” of childhood, the anger and sense of helplessness.

Considering the anxiety related to the rising sea levels and melting glaciers, there are many incentives to recycle “yourself,” to reduce “yourself” your individual footprint, to be “yourself” the engine of change. Do-it-yourself. Industries and governments responsible for the environmental devastation are feigning powerlessness: they are placing the responsibility back on us as individuals, also using the mirror technique. Before we can even shout “yourself,” the cry comes back to us in multiplied echoes.

To alleviate the sense of alienation this mirror play causes, individuals channel their energies into various avenues: some optimize their physical fitness, others seek refuge in their domestic cocoon to escape the world’s problems. More radically, survivalists believe they can avoid the impending catastrophe and equip themselves accordingly. In his exhibition, Manuel Poitras recovers various objects bearing these mild to severe symptoms of neoliberal individualism from websites of secondary economic activities and reconfigures them into different fountain-assemblages. These objects, which could belong to every and any one, are thought of as interchangeable vessels of a sculpture-system, held in place through rudimentary hanging mechanisms reminiscent of the DIYaesthetic. Water travels from one object to the next in a nearly closed circuits, perpetually flooding the objects. Perhaps this omnipresence of water is the climate anxiety so widespread today.

In Manuel Poitras’ fountains, the different objects are reduced to their material reality: only their arrangement in the play of gravity and their various levels of permeability counts. Submerged, these short-lived objects, conceived, consumed, discarded or resold at a breathtaking pace, become imbued with the vast temporal deployment of water. Controlled and cyclical, this dramatization of our environmental anxieties paradoxically leads to a sense of meditative calm. The “yourself!” and its cry of revolt seem, for the duration of the sculptures, to be turned into a comforting sound, in the same way machine operators, by dint of being exposed to the constant noise of engines, ultimately find in them a soothing lullaby.

Text by Loïc Chauvin

Bio of the author

Loïc Chauvin is an artist living in Montreal. He graduated from Concordia University in photography in 2019 and since the fall of 2022, has been pursuing a Master’s degree in sculpture and ceramics on a scholarship for excellence. Favouring a multidisciplinary approach rooted in process, his works are often concerned with the tension between illusion and material reality. Through discreet shifts in the ordinary produced with simple poetic gestures, he attempts to communicate the strangeness of living in the Anthropocene. Chauvin thanks Manuel Poitras for the invitation to write the text for his exhibition, and for his trust and support.

Loïc Chauvin thanks Xavier Bélanger-Dorval, maya rae oppenheimer and Valérie Voizard Marceau

Bio of the artist

Manuel Poitras is a visual artist, whose work concerns drawing, painting, engraving, sculpture and installation. The core of his approach is based on the tension arising from the human being’s relation to the nature he inhabits and the objects that surround him. In order to explore the underside and flaws of this tension, his work endeavours to destabilize neoliberal anthropocentrism, which positions the individual-human above all other entities. Poitras is interested in the vitality of elements and matter which, in their distinctive vigour, open up other ways for us to look and listen. In so doing, Poitras’ works propose other modes of being in this world.

Manuel Poitras holds a BFA from Concordia University, receiving the Guido-Molinari Prize for Studio Art in 2020. He was awarded a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to develop the project presented here. He lives and works in Montreal.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Adam Basanta, Loïc Chauvin, Alexey Lazarev, Kelly Jazvac, Brandon Poole, Élio Poitras and Romain Poitras.

Thanks to Eduardo Diaz, my family and friends.

Thanks to CIRCA Art actuel, to Paule Mainguy of Atelier Circulaire, to Natacha Chamko, Peter King and Yan Giguère at Atelier Clark, the Pilotenkueche residency program, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Works:

1. An Ark Encounter

Materials: inflatable canoe, slate roofing tiles, Lego pieces, artificial grass, compressed air tubing, rope, reusable tie wraps, electric pump, epipremnum aureum, water.

2. Floodable knowledge

Materials: books (foundational or emblematic texts of neoliberal and libertarian thought, with a few biographies of people who have contributed to putting those philosophies into practice), chairs, rug, garbage can, vinyl tubing, electric pump, rope, petroleum jelly, water.

3. Entropy of Inside and Outside (North, South, East and West slopes)

Direct printing, under a printing press, of roofing slates from c. 1885 on BFK Rives 180 ou 300 g/m² paper. Upcycled frames. Edition of four. Price on request.

4. Index of Discomfort

Materials: cushions, rope, rug, wood structure, vinyl tarp, rope, vinyl tubing, reusable tie wraps, steel hooks, electric pumps, water.

5. Survival Training Station II

Materials: bicycle wheels, sports shoes, wood structures, rope, reusable tie wraps, plastic storage container, ball, vinyl tubing, electric pump, water.

Except for the vinyl tubing and electric pumps, all materials used in the exhibition are from second hand sources.