From February 19 to March 1, 2003, Montréal-based artist Sylvie Cotton will undertake a residency project as part of FADO's ongoing Public Spaces / Private Places series.

Promenades is a socio-artistic experiment featuring one-one meetings between the artist and selected participants. Participants will agree to spend between 3 to 8 hours with the artist, either in silence, or looking after the artist while she is temporarily blindfolded.

In addition to these intimate performance actions, Sylvie Cotton will join with Vancouver artist Kirsten Forkert for an artist talk on Wednesday, February 26 at the Women¹s Art Resource Centre. Come learn more about the social, political and philosophical underpinnings of these two artists¹ gentle, thoughtful and provocative public interventions.

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS FOR INTERACTIVE PERFORMANCE ART ACTION

Sylvie Cotton, Art Action and Performance Artist, seeks participants to share with her (individually) in a day of either silence or blindness. Apart from maintaining a mutual respect for the moral and physical integrity of the other, each meeting will have only one condition: to be together in silence; or to be responsible for the temporarily blindfolded artist, or vice versa.

Each meeting will be unique. The activities that unfold will be decided in advance or as the day goes on according to an agreement reached by the artist and participant together in a preliminary telephone conversation.

The project will be documented by drawings made by the artist after each meeting. An evening bringing together all the participants will take place at the end of the project so that they can exchange their impressions of this socio-artistic experience based on trust, instinct and intuition, a divergence form our normal methods of communication, and also on chance.

Proposed schedule: 3 to 8 consecutive hours per meeting