Pologne-en-Québec
by Kinga Michalska and Sarah Chouinard-Poirier
3-channel video installation
48min loop, Canada, 2025
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Synopsis:
How can we live and work together despite precarity, exclusion, and exhaustion? How can we manage errors and conflicts, move beyond the logic of virtue, and sustain long term commitments?
Pologne-en-Québec is a video work co-created with a group of friends invited to participate in a role-play game of an unlikely cross-cultural alliance set in the world of an eerie but homy community with confused ethics. Through collaborative storytelling the actors formed and deformed alternative versions of themselves to bring to life a delirious utopia nicknamed “Pologne-en-Québec” : A failure by design.
Years later, the characters confide to the camera trying to make sense of their experiences. Through this narrative, the artists explore and purge their own anguished desire of queer rural life to discover the hidden defects growing back in the garden of good intentions.
CREDITS
With: Alegria Gobeil, Frédérique Chassé, Johnny Forever Nawracaj, Lari Jalbert, Mai Bach-Ngoc Nguyen, Marcela Szwarc, Michael Martini, Mycelium, naveed L. salek nejad
DOP: Kinga Michalska
Camera 2: & Baco Lepage-Acosta
Editing: Kinga Michalska
Additional editing: Jadis Dumas, Lucas Villegas, Paul Chotel
Puppets: Marcela Szwarc, Lari Jalbert
Set design: Lari Jalbert
Music: Gambletron
Sound design: Paloma Daris
Mix: Emilie Blaise
Colors: Marianne Lévesque
Production assistants: B. Brookbank, AM Trépanier
Post-production: Centre Prim
Produced with financial support of: Axeneo7, CALQ, CAC, CAM, Centre Prim
Photo documentation: vert soleil green sun, installation view, AXENEO7, 2025, Photo credit: Kinga Michalska and Sarah Chouinard-Poirier
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by Kinga Michalska and Sarah Chouinard-Poirier
3-channel video installation
48min loop, Canada, 2025
Synopsis:
How can we live and work together despite precarity, exclusion, and exhaustion? How can we manage errors and conflicts, move beyond the logic of virtue, and sustain long term commitments?
Pologne-en-Québec is a video work co-created with a group of friends invited to participate in a role-play game of an unlikely cross-cultural alliance set in the world of an eerie but homy community with confused ethics. Through collaborative storytelling the actors formed and deformed alternative versions of themselves to bring to life a delirious utopia nicknamed “Pologne-en-Québec” : A failure by design.
Years later, the characters confide to the camera trying to make sense of their experiences. Through this narrative, the artists explore and purge their own anguished desire of queer rural life to discover the hidden defects growing back in the garden of good intentions.
CREDITS
With: Alegria Gobeil, Frédérique Chassé, Johnny Forever Nawracaj, Lari Jalbert, Mai Bach-Ngoc Nguyen, Marcela Szwarc, Michael Martini, Mycelium, naveed L. salek nejad
DOP: Kinga Michalska
Camera 2: & Baco Lepage-Acosta
Editing: Kinga Michalska
Additional editing: Jadis Dumas, Lucas Villegas, Paul Chotel
Puppets: Marcela Szwarc, Lari Jalbert
Set design: Lari Jalbert
Music: Gambletron
Sound design: Paloma Daris
Mix: Emilie Blaise
Colors: Marianne Lévesque
Production assistants: B. Brookbank, AM Trépanier
Post-production: Centre Prim
Produced with financial support of: Axeneo7, CALQ, CAC, CAM, Centre Prim
Photo documentation: vert soleil green sun, installation view, AXENEO7, 2025, Photo credit: Kinga Michalska and Sarah Chouinard-Poirier
