MTL Nord

In the evening of August 9 2008, Fredy Villanueva was shot and killed by police officer Jean-Loup Lapointe, at the Henri-Bourassa Arena, in Montreal Nord. Riots break out next day. The killing of Fredy Villanueva not only stirred up years of social exclusion and discontent, but also brought visibility to current tactics of police surveillance, institutional power asymmetries and racial profiling.

I used counter video surveillance as a tool of reflection, exploring relationships of identity, site, history, and memory, seeking to challenge institutional power asymmetries in documentary practices at the intersection of everyday life, site-specific issues of social justice and political oppression. This ethnographic video study examines site specificity as a complex reflection of the unstable relationship between location and identity in urban landscapes, critically discussing various strategies of accessing the realms of memory, recollection, and identity, which commonly evades ethnographic representation.

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