15 drawings of conversations
15 cyanotype prints from drawings of conversations
8 photographs of the cyanotype prints disseminated in offices
Server tower hacked into a drawing table
Stenographic transcriptions of meetings
Shorthand manual from given to me by my grand-mother

On the website of Galerie UQO
Podcast by Galerie UQO with Simon Beaudry and Marie-Hélène Leblanc (In French)
Review by Steve Giasson in Esse Magazine (In French)

The artist thanks the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for its financial support.

Anouk Verviers’ project builds on her long-term research into the education system, which she has pursued since 2018 through a series of residencies and exhibitions under the title Au milieu des bureaux empilés (In between desks). Unlike her earlier projects, in which she gathered testimonies from secondary school students about their experiences of education, the artist is here working within a university setting. She attends two series of meetings: those of the senior management of the Vice-Rectorate for Research, Creation, Partnerships and Internationalisation at UQO (VRRCPI), in which the UQO Gallery participates, and those of the Gallery’s own team.

As an observer admitted into these meetings, Anouk Verviers uses a shorthand system she specifically devised to record not the content of what is said—as shorthand is used in courtrooms or the Canadian Senate—but rather the form and tone of the exchanges. The symbols she developed transcribe “ways of using language” rather than words themselves: “attitudes, tones of voice, exchanged glances, and modes of address,” as the artist explains. These symbols and their meanings are presented on the first of the four noticeboards.

The anonymised transcripts of the meetings are collected in notebooks stored in a cabinet designed by the artist as a tool for developing the project (available for consultation through the gallery staff). Verviers regularly creates furniture tailored to projects that bring her into different institutional and community contexts. The trolley conceived for Si deux consonnes…, a converted computer server cabinets, functions simultaneously as a drawing surface, toolbox, and storage unit for the works produced during the project.

These anonymised transcripts also gave rise to a new series of fifteen “conversation drawings” and fifteen cyanotype prints. Resembling diagrams or industrial plans, these works represent each participant as an arc positioned on one of three superimposed planes corresponding to their hierarchical level. Lines drawn between arcs indicate remarks exchanged between individuals, while lines converging toward the centre of the composition represent comments addressed to the group as a whole. The varying thickness of the lines reflects the nature of the interventions: the more a remark disrupts the group dynamic, the thicker the line.

The works are displayed in rotation across the three noticeboards, though visitors may request assistance from the gallery staff to view those temporarily stored within the cabinet used by Anouk Verviers during the project.

A small group of photographs documents replicas of these works, discreetly installed in the offices of the VRRCPI members shortly before the committee’s final meeting in March. During that meeting, the members discovered the works the artist had painstakingly created from her observations of their exchanges; together, they formed the basis of a surprise exhibition organised exclusively for them.

By attending meetings of the VRRCPI and gatherings of the Galerie UQO team over a period of more than two years, and by translating these exchanges into her conversation drawings, Anouk Verviers has transformed the everyday workings of the Gallery—and, through it, the activities of the vice-rectorate in which it participates—into both the material and context of a singular artistic project.

- Exhibition text by Patrice Loubier

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