Biography

France Trépanier is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, author, researcher and consultant. Of Kanien’kehà:ka and French ancestry, she has been engaged in the decolonisation of art well before the word was in vogue. Her work as an artist and curator has been presented in Canada, the United States and Europe. Some of her works are in the collections of the Musée de la Civilisation in Quebec City and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria in British Columbia. She uses drawing, performance, installation, video and, more recently, augmented reality into her artistic process of reappropriation and resilience. She has contributed, as co-chair, to the work of the Indigenous Curators Collective of Canada and was present at the first exchanges among indigenous curators in Australia, New Zealand and at the Venice Biennale in 2017. She is co-author of Understanding Aboriginal Art in Canada Today. Several of her essays, articles and research reports have been published. She has been an advisor and consultant to numerous arts institutions in Canada.

Mémoire de l’eau (2023)

As an artist, France Trépanier explores the role of memory in shaping both personal and collective identities : the memory of the land, memory of dreams, the memory of the spirit world. She draws inspiration from Chickasaw elder Eber Hampton’s concept that ” the memory comes before knowledge”. For her, this work of memory takes the form of an artistic transmission of stories, ways of being and connections to the land. La mémoire de l’eau (The memory of water) is a work that brings together an ancient technique, encaustic, with an emerging technology, augmented reality. It is an encounter with the memory of the water around Tiohtià:ke (the island of Montreal). The work reveals how the waterways – rivers, lakes, marshes and streams – recall the ephemeral presence of canoes during the days when people traveled in harmony with the land. The time before the arrival of the sailing ships from Europe.

La mémoire de l’eau (The memory of water), 2023 (pigments, beeswax, damar resin and augmented reality).