Note à moi-même / Maison Mobile

Clara Cousineau and Espace Transmission

Clara Cousineau, an artist in the second artch cohort, is a member of the family behind Espace Transmission, a gathering place dedicated to the creative community of Montréal and beyond.

This space responds to a need shared by Clara and her brother, Alexis Cousineau: a common, inclusive, and lasting space where creation can emerge, develop, and be passed on.

Today, Espace Transmission houses artists’ studios as well as a multipurpose room, designed to support the different stages of producing and presenting a work, thereby helping to nourish and promote contemporary creation.

Note à moi-même / Maison Mobile

Maison Mobile grows out of my action-art project Note à moi-même, a line of research begun around memory, forgetting, transformation, and the traces left by objects and places.

In Note à moi-même, I am building a collection of yellow objects found in my daily life, which I transform with a square perforation. The gesture consists of intervening on existing objects, altering their function and appearance, while keeping the trace of what has been removed from them. The small house at the heart of Maison Mobile first appeared as a new form of this research.

The house entered my family’s history through my brother, Alexis, who bought it to be closer to the territory where, for several years, he has done seasonal sea urchin fishing in the Cacouna area. He lived there for three years, following his fishing seasons. Already in a significant state of disrepair when he acquired it, the house was eventually meant to be demolished.

When its disappearance became concrete, my brother offered it to me as a space for residency and creation before its demolition. This situation opened up a particularly fertile space of exploration around an object whose function, history, and presence were about to vanish.

At first, the house was therefore integrated into Note à moi-même as the most monumental object in the collection. I chose to immortalize it in this transitional state by covering it entirely in a bright yellow. This colour, already present in the body of work of Note à moi-même, becomes here an intervention on a different scale. It covers the traces of the past while detaching the house from the territory where it was anchored. Rather than blending into its surroundings, it deliberately becomes extremely visible.

It was during this transformation that the project gradually took a new direction. The house ceased to be only a fixed object destined to disappear and became a subject to follow along a journey that will upend its trajectory. Its actual displacement gave rise to the idea of an experimental short film of which it will be the main character. A small opening cut into the wall of its bedroom becomes its point of view on the world. A camera placed behind this opening records the landscapes, movements, and encounters that come its way. The house’s physical displacement thus brings about a displacement of the gaze on its function.

First a dwelling, then a space for creation, an object in the Note à moi-même collection, a sculpture, and a capture device, the house gradually becomes a character and a living memory. After sheltering the lives of its inhabitants for nearly 60 years, it is now its turn to inhabit the world, to observe it, and to experience it.

The trajectory

The house, used as a residency space, first left its original anchorage at the end of Grève-Leclerc before heading to Trois-Pistoles, onto the grounds of the Maison du Notaire, where I presented an exhibition on the genesis of the project through photographic, sculptural, and interactive research.

Having become a sculpture in transit, it then left the art center to cross the Saint Lawrence River aboard the Héritage 1 and was moored at Les Escoumins, before taking to the road again toward Baie-Saint-Paul to join the program of the Symposium d’art contemporain in summer 2026. Set up facing the river, on the opposite shore, it opened its doors to the public for a week, then continued on its way to Montréal, passing over the Jacques-Cartier Bridge.

It is now installed in the parking lot of Espace Transmission, where it will remain temporarily before moving into the exhibition space in summer 2027, accompanied by the short film Maison Mobile, which traces and documents its journey from its point of anchorage.

Written by Clara Cousineau