Quarantine2

It’s March 2020, in Bristol, UK: in my apartment. One wall is covered with the best pages from my collection of Crack magazines. As the pandemic unfolds, I must leave the apartment and detach myself from England. There’s no way I’m departing without these vintage finds, which have become integral to my everyday environment. I tear out a selection of pages and images, preserving them in a notebook to take back to Montreal.

Once home, confined to a transitional apartment and in quarantine, faced with this new, unraveling reality, I feel compelled to recombine these torn fragments of collaged newspapers. It reminds me of the Nouveau Réalisme of Jacques Villeglé: the act of tearing carries a profound symbolic weight. As confinement blurs the line between interior and inner self, these newspaper fragments that once adorned my walls, now assembled within a defined frame, present themselves as snippets of an exposed diary—a personal chronicle of enforced lockdown (and isolation) that began in England and continued in Montreal. They are the traces of that original moment of chaos from which emerged my visceral need to transform the subjective life experiences into tangible artistic expressions.

Written by Valentin Bec