MARYSE GOUDREAU

LA CONQUÊTE DU BÉLUGA 
Les Éditions Escuminac | 2020

︎  30 CAN $ (slow shipping included for international orders) 
︎  22 CAN $ (slow shipping included for orders to Canada)


LA CONQUÊTE DU BÉLUGA (CONQUEST OF THE BELUGA) is a hybrid book that spans 150 years and travels across Canada to explore the history of the emblematic beluga. Maryse Goudreau uses official transcripts from the House of Commons to create a biting and heated stageplay where actors meet images of nursing belugas discreetly inserted into envelopes. Political theatre here takes the form of a book that leads to a beluga breeding area, an aquarium, and a margarine business, opening a window for readers/viewers to a North that might be unknown to them.

Through the appearance of women’s voices in the debates and the maternal behaviour of the belugas, a shift occurs from image to image, and we are compelled to change our relationship to the living world. Here, the conquest of the beluga is also the conquest of narrative, bringing to life fragments of history in a struggle against oblivion and disappearance.

︎ Information sheet

HISTOIRE SOCIALE DU BÉLUGA
Les Éditions Escuminac | 2016

As a hybrid artist’s book, Histoire sociale du béluga (A Social History of the Beluga) brings together the photo book genre and theatre, exploring the history of the beluga in Québec via excerpts from members’ debates at the Legislative Assembly between 1929 and 2015. Judiciously chosen texts showcase the evolution of how the beluga is perceived as it voyages through time and infiltrates the political sphere. Each appearance of the emblematic sea mammal is taken from transcripts that in some sense define their era, recounting the catastrophic saga of the threatened beluga, itself becoming a symbol of biodiversity in decline. An immersion into politicized language, Histoire sociale du béluga transforms debates and speeches into narrative, with the goal of saving the beluga from oblivion, and bringing it into shared history.

︎Information sheet

FLAGS | 2012

An artist’s book created around one of Maryse Goudreau’s first social artworks: an investigation that led her to understand wharves differently, through hands-on experience in a community context.

︎ Digital version

L'APPEL
SAGAMIE édition d'art | 2012

The monographic book L’Appel (The Call) brings together participatory artworks produced around several wharves in Eastern Canada between 2011 and 2012. Here, Maryse Goudreau uses various photographic and installation techniques in order to create works that carry on the memory of these gathering places doomed to oblivion as a result of overused sea and woodland resources. L’Appel marks a turning point in Goudreau’s practice, a new approach focused on social issues and a dialogue with identity and tradition.

︎  35 $ (slow shipping included for Canada)

︎ Information sheet
︎ Forword

MEMORY IS A WEAPON  | 2012

A limited-edition artist’s book, Memory is a Weapon transforms a selection of postcards chosen by Goudreau. She draws from her father’s maritime-themed collection, printing and erasing the central part of the image from each card, leaving behind only the margins. While these frames indeed reaffirm a folksy fetishization of local culture, they also evoke a tangible emptiness that disrupts our relationship to photography and publishing, inciting us to seek out that which lies behind the image.