ARTLAB RESIDENCY 2025
On Horizon and (un)Belonging
September 5 – October 4, 2025
Artist
Florencia Sosa Rey
Curator
Camila Vásquez
Overview
As curator of the ArtLab 2024-2025 residency, Camila Vásquez invites artist Florencia Sosa Rey to explore the porosity between her practice of facilitating workshops and the formal dimension of her creation. What if the workshop became an artwork per se? How can the experience of participants be communicated to the public, and is it really possible to share it? Rooted in bodily practices and alternative pedagogies, this residency seeks to explore the liminal spaces between the creative process and the transmission of knowledge.
Taking as her starting point the countryside of the Eastern Townships and her paternal family’s farming past, she set out to explore her cultural roots from a distance and in retrospect. Using experimental and participatory methodologies, she developed two lines of research: on the one hand, reconnecting with a lost family tradition, which was not passed on to her, through contact with horses; and on the other hand, revisiting the sociocultural heritage of her country of origin, Argentina, through folklore. These explorations have resulted in drawings and video works that reflect a process that is both reflective and formal, marked by long periods of observation that give rise to hybrid and mixed works.
Artist
Florencia Sosa Rey works in the visual arts and is based in Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal. Through a multidisciplinary approach rooted in bodily awareness, she uses abstract drawing, performance art, and video to question the socio-cultural history her body has absorbed. Sosa Rey views solidarity and nostalgia as reflexive resources through which to examine hybrid identity, and pays particular attention to the physical and psychic spaces of distance in the transmission of knowledge and interpersonal relationships. In September 2025, they will open a solo exhibition at the Foreman Gallery and participate in a group exhibition at DRAC. Florencia’s work has been presented at the Fonderie Darling, the PHI Foundation, Centre Plein Sud, Livart, as well as in Toronto, Sudbury, Iceland, and in Argentina. Sosa Rey has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, ARTCH, and LOJIQ.
Curator
Camila Vásquez is an interdisciplinary artist of Chilean origin. She lives and works in the Estrie region of Quebec, on the ancestral lands of the W8banaki Nation. She has been active in the arts since 2005 as an artist, curator, trainer, mediator and cultural worker. Her artistic practice is embodied in everyday life and develops into long-term projects that challenge the boundaries separating art from other spheres of life, as well as dominant conceptions of social space and knowledge. Her work has been presented in various art centers, galleries and events in Argentina, Chile, Spain and Quebec, including 3e impérial centre d’essais en art actuel, Centre d’art Rozynski, Galerie B-312, Galerie d’art Foreman, Praxis art actuel, Péristyle Nomade, VIVA! Art Action and DARE-DARE, as well as independently and furtively. Since 2022, she is the coordinator of the Foreman Art Gallery’s Community Art Lab at Bishop’s University.
Documentation
