A unique exhibit by Italian-Montreal visual artist Marisa Portolese is bringing a lost neighbourhood back to life.
“I grew up hearing about il villaggio. We kept hearing about this mythical place we couldn’t find because it didn’t exist anymore,” Portolese explains.
Officially known as Victoriatown, the neighbourhood was located at Victoria Bridge and the Lachine Canal on the south side of Pointe St-Charles, in the southwest region of Montreal.
“Goose Village” was the moniker of choice for its inhabitants. The name is supposedly derived from the geese that the First Nations hunted on the land. Portolese admits that she has not been able to find a source for this story. It remains folklore.
In the early 1900s, the demographic of Goose Village was a mix of British, Irish, French-Canadian and Scottish citizens. By the 1960s, il villaggio had become a tight-knit working class neighbourhood made up of 330 immigrant families, mostly of Italian and Irish origin. Portolese’s parents were one of those families.
But Expo 67 was coming, and the city of Montreal had big plans. In December of 1962, Mayor Jean Drapeau’s team announced that Goose Village was slated for redevelopment. The announcement was followed by a successful smear campaign to deem the area problematic.
“Close to the CNR tracks, this is an area where there is much evidence of juvenile delinquency, lawlessness, sickness and other problems so often associated in the public mind with slum areas,” the Montreal Star reported at the time.
In 1964, the city bulldozed the entire six-block enclave to make way for the Autostade, a football stadium and parking lot built specifically for Expo 67. It was later torn down in 1976.
When Portolese started her Masters in Fine Arts in the late 1990s, she planned to focus her thesis on Goose Village. But she soon realized that the research would be long and arduous. The Internet as a research tool was not even a concept.
So the project was shelved until years later when she came across an article by Montreal Gazette reporter Marian Scott titled “’V’ is for Vanished: Not a trace survives of glorious Goose Village.” Coupled with the discovery of Les printemps incertains, a 1992 documentary film by Sylvain L’Espérance that looks at gentrification in the working class neighbourhoods of southwest Montreal, Portolese was inspired to finally start her Goose Village project.
The project is divided into three phases. The current exhibit at Galerie Occurrence in Montreal is phase one. Phase two will be a visual book slated for publication later this year. And finally, the third and final phase will be dedicated solely to the villagers themselves.
The “Goose Village” exhibit is divided into two spaces. One room offers a visual timeline of the neighborhood, while a 22-minute narrated companion video plays in a loop. Visitors can peruse the images while listening to the narration, or even sit down to watch the video in full.
The centrepiece of the other room is Forfar North, a streetscape constructed from the “expropriation photographs” of Goose Village, shot in 1963 by municipal photographers Jean-Paul Gill and Ludger L’Écuyer that are conserved at Les Archives de la Ville de Montréal.
“Forfar North offers a view looking north towards Mill Street and the downtown core of Montreal, beginning at the corner of Bridge and ending on Riverside Street,” Portolese explains.
Four years into the project, Portolese is still collecting information and stories from those who inhabited Goose Village.
“I want to recreate the whole village. I don’t know how I’ll do it yet. But I’ll get the right people to help me,” Portolese comments.
“This project in particular is the most important project I’ve ever done. There’s an urgency to this because the villagers who lived there are elderly,” she continues.
Born and raised in Montreal, Marisa Portolese is a visual artist and an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University. Her niche is large-scale photographs that illuminate facets of human experiences in relation to psychological and physical environments regarding identity and spectatorship. Her work has been featured in both solo and group exhibitions in Canada, Europe and the United States.
The “Goose Village” exhibit runs until March 11, 2023, at Galerie Occurrence in Montreal. To learn more, please visit www.goosevillage.ca.
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