Hospitality Matters: Un entretien avec PME-ART

Abstract

The first time I saw PME-ART—a Montreal-based bilingual (French/English) interdisciplinary performance collective—was, I think, in Montreal in 2011; it was in the bilingual show Le DJ qui donnait trop d’information, where the performers took turns playing vinyl recordings as they recounted an anecdote related to each disk. A few years later, when PME-ART took over the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery with Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la mélancolie, a show where they transcribed and rewrote Fernando Pessoa’s unfinished work, Livro do Desassossego, from its English and French translations (The Book of Disquiet and Le Livre de l’intranquilité), I saw in PME’s multilingual rewritings of the book the melding not only of the language of the visual and the literary arts but something of the work of the translator as well.