OFF-SEASON
''Unlike the tourist season, where these places are functionally integrated to the needs of visitors, their off-season visit resembles a daily pilgrimage, routinized and prosaic: fishermen in pickups, a welder on his way to the shop, workers roaming the dunes for a brief morning chat. Returning periodically as part of some primeval tradition, these inhabitants remind us that nature, beyond its instrumentalization, its trampling and the violence inflicted upon it by industry, intuitively remains a place of great esteem, where people candidly stop to share a moment or observe the landscape. Beyond their tangible anthropization, these places take on a different appearance after being deserted by their seasonal visitors. They become artifacts, tourist installations without tourists, resting beneath an overarching and infinite sky and its ever-changing microclimates, fogs from which trucks emerge, parked opposite of each other so that the rolled-down windows make it possible to share a moment in the fortuitous comfort of the vehicle. Just by being present, regulars create the value of the places they visit. Criss-crossing these invisible paths, they pay tribute to a lonely territory and sublimate, in all their profane mundanity, its ineffable meaning."
Responding to an invitation from MiniMaison Editions, Benoît Paillé hit the road for Magdalen Islands in December 2020 aboard his truckhouse. He went there with the intention of working on his first photography book, still in the editing stage at the time of writing these lines. An accident on January 17, 2021, abruptly interrupted his journey and forced him to leave his truck in New Brunswick while the snow melted. The truck would then return to Rivière-du-Loup, where he would work on repairs for three more months. Benoît finally arrived on the archipelago in November 2021. He would not leave until December of the following year.
This text aims to summarize his experience of Magdalen Islands, at the intersection of his analytical framework and my own personal references. Between the battle to make art, the challenges of insularity, and the human condition, we have tried to reveal something universal. This experience is crystallized in his photography, as attested by the details and sensitivity of someone who takes the time to settle where he lands, observing the wind endlessly observing us, like an eternal and uncompromising whisper. This text, like Benoît's photography, is a tribute to these places and the people who explore them.
Text by Joaquin Sabat
The photographer of explosive character was familiar with this territory, which he had travelled on foot during the summer of 2013, but somewhat idealized the idea of staying here outside of the high season, the pandemic exacerbating the solitude that characterizes the winter of many locals. Living alone in his truck, Benoît is autonomous but no less isolated. It was partly my meeting with him and his adventures with the beautiful people who revolve around my house that provides insight into how this artist residency that was supposed to last a month turned into a year-long journey of cohabitation, artistic collaboration, and love stories.
Benoît and I had a mutual friend. We had seen each other a few times but had never really engaged in conversation. I learned he was a photographer after reading an article by Hillary Brenhouse published by Vice in 2020. When I agreed to let him park his truck in my backyard, I never thought he would stay for so long. Many people come to the house, some stay for a few weeks or a couple of months. In the summer, many plant their tents on our land or squat our living room. We can sometimes be up to ten people at the same time: anarcho-feminists, writers, open-minded people hungry for sensory and intellectual stimulation.
Benoît arrived in the quiet onset of winter. There was therefore something exciting about his visit. He was like a breath of fresh air in the lull left by the end of the warm season. Our cohabitation was not without its challenges, but when we came together in our daily evenings, there was always something euphoric and extravagant in the air, some kind of joy coming as much from the philosophical resonance we felt than the naivety of rethinking the world over the dinner table. As they say, "Comrades care little for forms. They argue openly, confident in the knowledge that they cannot inflict wounds on each other."
And so, we became friends. I saw him come and go, leave and return, jump, scream, cry, laugh out loud, take pictures, play saxophones and synthesizers. I realized fairly quickly that as a high-functioning hyperactive, he is unable to stand still. He needs to play with something: ukulele, placemat, pepper shaker, any object he can get his hands on. When things aren't going well, he goes, mostly. He flees in his truck accompanied by his Mexican dog Pulga, part Labrador, part mutt, a loyal companion who facilitates his encounters and forces him to take long walks where photography results not from a conscious effort but from a simple routine.
During the time we spent together, Benoît explained his way of seeing things. For him, art emerges from life and not from predetermined intentions imposed on it. The experience he has of places is therefore essential to his photography. Walks with his dog, improvised routes, impromptu encounters are all reflections of his way of creating, which does not consist of submitting to preconceived ideas of what he would like to do, but rather stems from what's actually happening in his life, with all the spontaneity, gaiety, and torments that characterize it. From his point of view, creative intention does not precede contributory creative situations: it is the product of a conscious transformation of life that should result in making art common, in the sense of "commonplace" or "mundane," something that requires no more effort than eating, going for a walk, or making love.
The solitary places where his truck leads him resemble third landscapes. Unlike non-places, transiting spaces where people pass through without ever eliciting significant social interactions or creating meaningful stories for the narrative threads of their lives (train stations, shopping malls, airports, etc.), third landscapes are characterized by their lack of integration into the productivist imperatives that dominate our capitalist existence (wastelands, vacant lots, rubble, etc.). Scenery from the margins of society, fallows of a world that could have been, these undecided spaces become the privileged scenes of his photographs. Not because they bolster any interest out of the ordinary, but because they constitute what's ordinary to him, the experience of someone looking to park his ten-ton mobile home. Always obeying this pagan maxim aiming to "transform one's life so that art emerges with the least possible effort," his interest comes from actually settling in these places, experiencing their achronic slowness, rather than from a desire to apprehend them as places of conquest on which to deploy our objectifying gaze.
Freed from the noise in favor of the constant and unconditional rationalization of time and space, third landscapes become havens of diversity, thereby demonstrating that the act of leaving them abandoned proves richer than taking care of them. In doing so, we understand that the technicist vision of the universe according to which we must act on our environment for it to embody any value has resulted in our own inevitable impoverishment.
Magdalen Islands are a perfect expression of this contradiction, being simultaneously home to the fishing and tourism industries on the one hand and to a nourishing and encompassing nature on the other. Without representing third landscapes per se, the various parking areas next to the Madelinot ports or on Havre-aux-Basques, the roundabout of the old Havre-aux-Maisons' bridge, the dunes of Anse-aux-Baleiniers or the different dead ends scattered throughout the Islands become, off season, their temporary prototypes. As the by-product of a phenomenological reduction, that which remains is their solitude and abandonment, beyond the powers that organize the predetermined exploration of the territory. Despite the desire to incorporate them by placing signs or distributing fines to squatters, something makes these places ripe for resistance. Their free, generous, and disinterested beauty is revealed only to those who take the time to stop and appreciate them.
Unlike the tourist season, where these places are functionally integrated to the needs of visitors, their off-season visit resembles a daily pilgrimage, routinized and prosaic: fishermen in pickups, a welder on his way to the shop, workers roaming the dunes for a brief morning chat. Returning periodically as part of some primeval tradition, these inhabitants remind us that nature, beyond its instrumentalization, its trampling and the violence inflicted upon it by industry, intuitively remains a place of great esteem, where people candidly stop to share a moment or observe the landscape. Beyond their tangible anthropization, these places take on a different appearance after being deserted by their seasonal visitors. They become artifacts, tourist installations without tourists, resting beneath an overarching and infinite sky and its ever-changing microclimates, fogs from which trucks emerge, parked opposite of each other so that the rolled-down windows make it possible to share a moment in the fortuitous comfort of the vehicle. Just by being present, regulars create the value of the places they visit. Criss-crossing these invisible paths, they pay tribute to a lonely territory and sublimate, in all their profane mundanity, its ineffable meaning.
Conducive to creation, conditions such as isolation, solitude, and boredom are felt occasionally, suddenly intruding into daily life as if to ensure that we are still good-natured, sensitive, material beings, made of rapport and needs: the entirety of our relationships. Despite the customary itineraries of regulars, it is possible to park in one of these places and go three or four days without seeing anyone, especially if one's brave enough to face the wild in bad weather. Benoît's outfit, the orange one-piece that allows him to go unnoticed when he talks about diesel, welding, or construction, rises like a flag through the squall to loudly proclaim this ever-going refusal to give up and be crushed by the weight of a world that does not want us and has made that clear. Every gust of wind wipes clean the constant malaise of being born into a disenchanted, arid, impersonal, and cold universe. Blizzards as far as the eye can see, storms, snow, and rain, the remote gray of a humid and windy December commands to indulge in our projects. Editing, framing, touch-ups, or video games, the idea is above all not to sink into depression or go crazy: stay active, always in motion to escape the insignificance of a life far too incongruous to be true.
In the end, insularity is a state of mind for the "stranger" who comes from outside. The storm resonates, reassures, and secures those who remain uncertain, those for whom the internal deluge is so deeply drowned in the mind's cave that it has become the white noise that composes the lullaby that tunes sleep. The search for autonomy responds to a more essential need: it is impossible to be abandoned when we live alone in the middle of nowhere.
Self-sufficiency avoids this sad and all too familiar fate. Orphaned eyes are filled with admiration for simple and meaningful things; a meaning not acquired, conquered, nor defeated, but simply given. To love and be loved in the comfort of a continuum that need not be feared or defended, is this not everyone's struggle? Through a rebellious lens, these little things that a wandering soul will never be able to appreciate will be admired allusively, reminding us of how strange this universe is to him. Magdalen Islands are a metaphor for this life: isolated in the middle of an ocean of wealth, autonomous but dependent, proud but misunderstood, beautiful and contradictory, reflecting things they will never admit, a paradox in open air.
