Image: Diana Shearwood

He's thirteen and I met him the first day we arrived in St. Henri. He was fascinated with our greyhound - le levrier or chien de course, as they are known here - and announced that he would like to walk him some time. That was three months ago and last night our young dog walker showed up at the door ready to go.

Today he came around again for the pick-up and we got to talking about the neighbourhood and Montréal in general. He was born in St Henri so I asked him, What do you do around here with your friends? And he started to talking about one place that was, in his words, Really Special.

His special place turned out to be an abandoned building along the Lachine Canal where he and his friends had found secret entry - he thinks it was an old brewery, but he wasn't sure. It didn't really matter to him. I asked him what was so special about this building and he said - Well, in this usine you go into a sort of hole and it's very dark - you need a light - so my friends bring a light with them and we can call to each other. But there are windows and you can even go on top. It's fun, but you can never know what's going to happen, so it can be a bit creepy. Like one thing that is creepy is that when you are high up on the ladder you look down and see these little flashing lights below. [I asked him what he thought cause these flashes] and he said, It's maybe the water on the floor reflecting the light way below. It's creepy but it's special. It's very beautiful.

I think that what - let's call him GC so he won't get looked up by the Montréal police - what GC tapped into is precisely what Quartier Éphémère (QE) has been tapping into since 1993 here in Montréal. Come to think of it, GC and QE have been occupying the same spaces for about the same number of years - one of them in a slightly more clandestine manner than the other, it must be said.

Quartier Éphémère was born out of a relationship with the French organization Usines Éphémères, an artist-run association that temporarily occupies abandoned buildings and offers the newly renovated spaces up for artistic use. For over a decade now, Quartier Éphémère has occupied three abandoned spaces in Montréal. One of these projects in particular, The Silophone, was created by a collective called [The User] in an abandoned Silo No. 5 near Old Montréal.

Like GC, [The User] was fascinated by the building's material properties - its creepy beauty - and they began specifically to focus on the extraordinary range of acoustics within the abandoned space. Like GC and his friends probably noticed, the reverberation time for sounds in the cavernous chambers can be as long as 20 seconds. [The User] proposed to 'inject' sounds into the silo and stretch them out - dragging them sensually through the structure in order to transform them into ethereal sonic landscapes. Sound files from the Internet or random, even banal murmurs or cries could be injected through the telephone by anyone around the world using a toll-free number. Once the sound entered the silo, it resonated inside the space and then was rebroadcast back to the person who 'played' the instrument and anyone who had tuned in to listen or was passing by the sound installation set up outside the silo.

I tried to describe all this to GC, thinking that he might think it was neat that other people - artists - thought that abandoned buildings were 'special places' too. He kind of shrugged and asked if we could go walk the dog.

He wanted to show us his building.