How is land valued in Montreal? What does our cityscape tell us about the monopoly of financial value? Can alternative forms of value be used to imagine land in a different, more meaningful way?
Using art as a tool for subversion, pedagogy and decision-making, The Shock Value Fellowship highlights and critiques the dominance of financial mechanisms in real estate development and unearths non-financial forms of value with public audiences, leading to the development of a future rent-free housing model. Throughout this process, the theme of “value” is used as a support beam to enact public interventions around the city: whether on the construction site of a future luxury condo mega-project, on vacant lots, or in cyberspace. These interventions attempt to engage a wider public in challenging financialized conceptions of land, speculate on the development of new value frameworks and provide grounds for the de-commodification of land.
The Office of Rules and Norms (ORN) is an arts-based transdisciplinary collective that engages with regulations, the rule of law and cultural norms. These engagements reveal, comprehend, play with, subvert, and transcend current ways of understanding and acting in relation to regulatory forces in order to make room for more equitable alternatives. In its attempts to query legal and behavioral urban infrastructures, the ORN specifically deploys art and design practice, culture, and methods along three axes:
Art as Subversion | Intervening in grey areas of regulation
Art as Pedagogy | Making public various forces and forms of influence
Art as Decision-Making | Reorienting modes of knowing and deliberating
