A coffee with… Caroline Monnet | The Art of love

It’s almost a miracle to be able to catch Caroline Monnet between two engagements and three exhibitions abroad.

Just in 2024, the multidisciplinary artist traveled between Paris, Berlin, Los Angeles, Boston, Venice and Toronto, in addition to stopping in Ibiza for a month to write. The year that begins will be just as nomadic. “It’s exciting, we meet lots of people, we learn, it’s rich, but it’s sometimes difficult on the body. You have to be careful,” says the 39-year-old traveler to the travel convert that I am.

But don’t worry, this article won’t cover the best way to collect Air Miles points. If I wanted to meet Caroline Monnet, it was to talk to her about a subject that was both political and intimate. Because I would like to know how we can raise a child today to be more in tune with indigenous culture, history and causes than their parents.

My generation, that of the X, was largely immersed in a climate of incomprehension, even ignorance on this subject. With an Anishinaabe mother and French father, Caroline Monnet grew up in this same culture, while proudly carrying her dual cultural identity.

We both had a redemptive shock when we saw Alanis Obomsawin’s documentary Kanehsatake: 270 years of resistance. A film that debunked preconceived ideas about the Oka crisis which had such a marked impact on Quebec in the early 1990s.

Caroline Monnet, who, at age 10, saw other Indigenous people on screen for the first time, then wanted to take the camera to tell stories. “I understood the power of the media, then of communication, to change the world or, at least, to educate and raise awareness,” she says today, sitting at the bright Butterblume café in Mile End, a stone’s throw away. from his workshop.

I saw the film a little later, in my early twenties, and it made me realize the extent of my ignorance. I told myself that it was not too late to complete my own education, a path that I have been following ever since and which became much broader after the emergence of the Idle No More movement and the holding of the Truth Commission and reconciliation on residential schools. Since we collectively have access to both the shadow and the light of indigenous reality.

“Unlike past generations, children will not be able to not know what happened. Not knowing that Canadian history is not all rosy. That there was the history of residential schools, colonization, forced reserves, Indian Act. These are parts of our history that we talk about a lot now as well as their consequences,” says Caroline Monnet.

This education in history – which has long been lacking – is only a first step, says the artist, who believes that it is important to connect with the indigenous world other than on an intellectual level. “It can be as simple as learning a song in an Indigenous language. Or even knowing how to say hello in the language of the nation to which the territory to which we live is linked,” she gives as an example.

Art, she adds, also provides a thousand opportunities to create this more personal, more felt connection. “I have always seen artists as sociologists. Our role is to study the world around us, to reflect on what surrounds us and to offer avenues for dialogue,” she adds, noting that this conversation is well underway.

“It’s happening a lot through literature and music at the moment. I am delighted when I hear that young people are reading Law of Michel Jean at school or even when children know the poet Joséphine Bacon”, says the woman who signed the video design of the theatrical version of Lawdirected by her sister Émilie Monnet and presented to a sold-out crowd at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde last fall.

“Art allows us to put Indigenous people back into our collective imagination in an authentic way. For a long time, we were in this imagination in a stereotypical, even romanticized way. But now that we are giving space for Indigenous people to express themselves in their own way, things are changing,” she believes. And it will be for the benefit of the youngest.

There are tons of works and artists from indigenous culture that she would like to introduce to children and adolescents. She has a weakness for Nutritionthe book by Mélissa Mollen Dupuis, illustrated by Elise Gravel. For comedy Reservation Dogs by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Watiti, presented by CBC, or for the drama series For you Flora by Sonia Bonspille Boileau (ICI Tou.tv). She fell for the music of Afro-Wendat artist Joseph Sarenhes, the poetry of Billy-Ray Belcourt and the installations of Nico Williams, also an Anishinabe.

If Caroline Monnet recognizes that there is sometimes anger which is expressed in a “healthy way” in indigenous art, she believes that it is first and foremost love which emerges from this increasingly rich and increasingly varied.

“I understood through my work that I wanted to put a lot of love into it and not necessarily point fingers,” she says.

She also feels this love every time she collaborates with other indigenous and non-indigenous artists on projects. “For there to be real encounters, there is nothing like working together,” she says.

She also poured a ton of love into the magnificent mural, titled Wabigon (“a flower blooms” in Anishinaabemowin), which is located just outside the exhibition that the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art is devoting to the titanic work of director Alanis Obomsawin – yes, the great Abenaki director who was at the heart of an awareness for Caroline Monnet as for the author of these lines.

The title of the exhibition, which runs until January 26, is also in synchronicity with our caffeinated meeting. Children need to hear another story. It’s off to a good start.

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