Designing the Atmospheres of Nuit Blanche

Across recent decades, the idea of a “Nuit Blanche” or night-time arts festival has proliferated as a cultural regeneration strategy in cities around the world (Evans, 2012). The premise, as the organizers of one of the first such events (the Helsinki Festival’s Night of the Arts) put it, is an event where “every gallery, museum and bookshop is open until midnight or later and the whole city becomes one giant performance and carnival venue” (“Helsinki Festival,” n.d.).  Edensor and Sumartojo (2015) argue that nuits blanche are part of the “intensification of designing regulated, commodified atmospheres,” producing atmospheres and urban spectacles suffused with the tastes of the ‘creative class’ (255-256).  Haiven (2012) similarly questions whether such nighttime festivals are exercises in “’neoliberal civics’ that both seduce and discipline bodies and invite participation and spectatorship in order to consolidate new organizations of space and power” (79). Some scholars have positioned nuits blanche as part of the attention economy, “dominated by an extravaganza of electronic and digital media ... (and) a pull towards machine-like states of attention, objectification, and endurance” (Diack, 2012: 11).  Still others, like Quinn (2005), question whether such events replace “cultural substance … with cultural spectacle ... increasing homogeneity and declining creativity” (874; see also Edensor & Sumartojo, 2015: 255-256).  Much of the academic literature surrounding nuits blanche thus (often justifiably) critiques these events as manifestations of spectacular urbanism, entangled as they are with forces of gentrification and the redevelopment of the city for capital accumulation.

On a local scale, Montreal’s version of Nuit Blanche is part of the overarching Montreal en Lumiere - a festival of urban illumination designed to chase away the winter dark. Montreal en Lumiere is, itself, part of a wider trend towards festivals and spectacles of urban illumination that typically go hand-in-hand with the “screening” of the city.  Screening the city “involves a judgement about what belongs on the city’s walls – what narratives of the space are worthy of being blasted onto its streetscape while others are buffed away – that works in concert with the enhanced visibility of particular spaces and landmarks” (Lynch, 2022: 141).

It's especially easy to see how practices of illumination and screening reflect aesthetic regimes when walking the city by night, when cities like Montreal (often literally) spotlight “must see” attractions within the urban environment, illuminating in sharp relief what they consider culturally valuable. This follows the long history of artificial lighting as a mediating force in urban space (Edensor, 2017; Krajina, 2009), used to shape the mood of places within the city and help (re)organize urban spatial relations (Edensor, 2017; Highmore, 2013). Moreover, Edensor (2017) argues that “Light possesses a particularly rich capacity to defamiliarize familiar places, transforming what is well known into an uncanny realm and thereby suggesting that place may be apprehended otherwise” (115; see also Edensor 2014; Edensor & Sumartojo, 2018). This transformative quality of illumination – and its potential to reenchant the city – likely accounts for its popularity in reshaping urban space to set the scene for things like festivals and art installations.

In comparison to the city by day, the atmosphere of the urban night is fractured by the veil of darkness and the relative emptiness of city streets, characterised by a discontinuity that illumination can help resist (Anderson, 2009: 93). Cities may employ illumination in an attempt to weave a more cohesive ambience through the urban night, thus serving to “unify a diversity of impressions” (Böhme, 2013: para. 4) by staging a particular atmosphere (Bille et.al, 2015). Take the following description of the urban night in Montreal’s Old Port, for example:

Montreal’s nightscape offers the tourist an illuminated highlight reel of what the city has to offer as a destination space. Landmarks like the Notre Dame Basilica are bathed in evocative uplighting, usually in shades of blue or violet, a complement to the warm lighting that blankets the streets, bouncing off the old city’s cobblestones. Across the St. Lawrence River, an illuminated Biosphere – a remnant of Expo 67 – seems positively subtle compared to the vibrant swirls of colour that trace the contours of roller coasters and other rides in LaRonde (a nearby theme park). The recently illuminated Jacques Cartier Bridge connects that carnival to its branded dupe in the Old Port’s Natrel Basin, which recently added a multi-coloured Ferris wheel to its buffet of attractions. (Lynch 2022: 141)

The magic trick of Nuit Blanche is that it aims to string together the spotlighted cultural spaces of Montreal into a city-wide festival. As the official ad copy for Montreal’s Nuit Blanche describes it, the festival “attracts thousands of night owls who live a crazy urban winter adventure by participating in numerous cultural activities throughout the city, showcasing Montréal in a whole new… Light” (“Nuit blanche à Montréal,” 2023). At the same time, however, the open invitation (and receptive crowd) of Nuit Blanche often makes room – however unintentionally – for the emergence of alternative creative spaces in the city.  For every packed museum you might visit, it seems as though there’s an off-the-books, word-of-mouth, speakeasy-style nighttime economy that emerges overnight. (In our case, our word-of-mouth event was the multisensory maze at LESPACEMAKER, which was scouted by Aurélie Roy-Bourbeau).

Sensing the City (Together)

In undertaking a collaborative sensory ethnography of Montreal’s Nuit Blanche, this research builds on a rich field of literature which has taken a sensuous approach to the study of urban rhythms, experiences, and practices of aesthetic management (for examples, see Degen, 2008, 2012; Edensor, 2010; Lefebvre, 2004; Lynch 2022, forthcoming; Truman & Springgay, 2019; Zardini, 2005). Sensory approaches to the city have illuminated the “ocularcentric, rationalist design of the modern city (meant to see and be seen) and the practice of ‘othering’ particular urban sensations – and, indeed, ways of sensing” (Lynch, 2022: 20).  Many have argued that regimes of aesthetic control are effectively designing out sensory diversity in the city and producing “an increasingly sterile urban environment” (Edensor, 2007: 17; see also Sennett, 1994).  These regimes treat elements of urban life that resist being known by the eye – like darkness - as suspicious and undesirable in a modern city (Edensor, 2017) – an aesthetic demand that helps explain the emphasis on illumination as an attractive way to frame the city within a “society of spectacle” (Debord, 1967). The city’s tactile character – replete with hard surfaces and cold materials, its contours smoothed out not to make them more inviting, but to facilitate uninterrupted movement – can create in citizens an embodied awareness that the urban street is for moving through, not for living in (Degen, 2008: 42; see also Sennett, 1994).  The purification of the urban sensescape is a political process (Howes, 2005) involving “powerful cultural judgements regarding what sensations, ways of being, and ways of knowing are acceptable in a ‘modern’ city” (Lynch, 2022: 24; see Classen, 2005; Mack, 2015; Zardini, 2005). However – as our senses bear witness to - the aesthetic control of the city is far from complete.  The soundscapes and aromascapes of the city, for example, often resist falling in line with the modernist ideal of “everything in its place” (Degen, 2008; Diaconu, 2011; Mack 2015). In fact, the city is often “surprisingly resistant to modernity’s demands of standardisation and sanitation” (Lynch, 2022: 20; see Classen, 2005; Degen, 2008; Zardini, 2005).

As Edensor and Sumartojo (2015) have noted, compelling design can amplify the affective, sensory, and emotional impacts of atmospheres—resulting in the creation of what they call “atmospherically charged spaces.” These atmospherically charged spaces, they note, can often be produced “in the service of power, primarily in reproducing spaces of state and commercial significance, to stabilize the meanings and feelings of place and maintain an even, consistent atmosphere” (253). However, if we think of urban spaces as temporary constellations of relations that are open and contingent - as Deborah Massey (2005) does - it is essential that we examine how even more “stabilized” designed atmospheres are co-produced (Lynch, forthcoming). As Edensor and Sumartojo (2015) themselves note, because the public - far from being just a passive audience of spectacle - are actively involved in producing festive atmospheres, these atmospheres may be more resistant to attempts to stabilize the meaning and feeling of a place (259).

Sensory ethnography as a method is ideally positioned to illuminate the contingent atmospheres of sensory design, particularly within the ever-shifting urban environment (Degen & Lewis, 2020; Lynch 2022, forthcoming).  As I have argued elsewhere, “while the sensory experience of the city can be curated by both developers and individuals to some extent … thanks to the unruly quality of certain sensations and the constant dynamism of the city itself, sensing the city will nearly always be a moment of encounter – of sensing, being sensed by, and sensing with, the other” (Lynch, 2022: 24).  The importance of attending to these moments of encounter – between self, place, and other (human and non-human) – and practices of co-production lends us our focus on a relational approach to sensory design.  Sensory ethnography as a method actively attends to the relations between senses (Bull et. al., 2006; Howes, 2003, 2005, 2019), alongside the “social, cultural, historical, and spatial contexts of sensation” (Lynch, forthcoming; see also Classen, 1997; Culhane, 2017; Howes, 2005, 2019; Lynch, Howes, & French, 2020). After all, as Degen (2008) notes, “A focus on the senses offers a way of analysing the relationship between built form and social relations, as senses provide the framing texture for the material and social bond in public spaces” (10).

For this research, a group of ethnographers (myself included) conducted a multi-sited sensory ethnography of Nuit Blanche in Montreal on the night of February 25th 2023. The researchers then produced ethnographic snapshots from across the event, with aim of providing rich sensory description of some of the various spaces and emergent atmospheres of Nuit Blanche.  Incorporating an autoethnographic approach allowed us to attend to moments of correspondence and tension between the notion of the city-as-carnival and our embodied experience of the event, as sensed through our “material premises” (Sobchack, 2004). Travelling with other ethnographers through the city, meanwhile, allowed us to interview one another throughout the night, comparing our lived experience of Nuit Blanche and capturing something of our collective (and sometimes contrasting) sensory impressions in the moment. Our goal was to consider the sensory dimensions of Nuit Blanche and to interrogate the design and experience of urban atmospheres and sensory design across two of our key project sites (the museum and the festival). We wanted to ask: what does it feel like to be immersed in the atmosphere(s) of Nuit Blanche? What happens to the sensory dimensions of the city – and particularly its cultural spaces – when they are bathed in this aura of the carnivalesque? And what role does the public play in co-producing these atmospheres?

Our intrepid group of ethnographers visited a curated selection of sites across the city over the course of the evening. We focused on attending museums in small groups to begin the evening (at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the “Anti-Gentrification Festival” at the Canadian Centre for Architecture [CCA], and the “Art of Slowing Down” at the McCord Museum), with a handful of the researchers branching out to other venues later into the night (the Centre PHI and Pointe-à-Callière Museum in Old Montreal, as well as a multisensory maze at LESPACEMAKER in Hochelaga).  By 2am, our numbers had dwindled considerably, but the last ethnographers standing (Aurélie and myself) finished the evening in the technicoloured, spectacular heart of Nuit Blanche (at Place des Festivals, the key staging ground for the festival).

As the coordinator / choreographer (used loosely) of this multi-sited, collaborative experiment in sensory ethnography, I conducted research across five sites over the course of the evening (the CCA, Pointe-à-Callière Museum, Centre PHI, LESPACEMAKER, and Place des Festivals).  The ethnographic notes below reflect something of the feverish rhythm of my evening (spent weaving the city together into a festival on foot) – very much on-brand for the Nuit Blanche Experience™.  Nevertheless, I have aimed to temper my own impressions with the reflections of my fellow researchers (several of whom resisted the impulse to do “everything/everywhere/all-at-once” that Nuit Blanche seems designed to cultivate, instead building their connection to the city by finding their rhythm with others).

Notes from an Uneven Choreography

From/Towards Home

We begin in the cold, but – as the night has only begun – the air feels bracing moreso than bone-chilling.  To kick off the evening’s festivities, I have ventured out with Rosalin and Carlos from campus to the nearby Canadian Centre for Architecture for the “Anti-Gentrification Festival.” The façade of the CCA has a stately appeal, its stone taking on a buttery hue in uplit sections, and I can catch glimpses through lower illuminated windows of what look like offices.  Still, the air is quiet, the lighting subdued, and there’s little hint of a festival from the outside… barring the marquee by the entrance, of course.  It reads: “FESTIVAL ANTI-GEᴎTRiFICATION NUIT BLANCHE 2023 CCA.” The letters are just curiously disjointed enough to think it’s a statement.  I invite Rosalin and Carlos to pose before the marquee to mark the beginning of the event, but the gleam of the backlit sign dulls their figures into silhouettes.

Inside, we are greeted by an array of staff – a security guard turned parking attendant, some friendly coat check staff, and more attendants at the top of the stairs. The latter direct us to our left, through a corridor of display cabinets. It’s just past 8pm, and we appear to be among the first guests. I’m left with the uneasy impression of having arrived too early to the party (which is to say, not cool enough to be fashionably late).

Tucked into the display cases along the length of the hallway are the materials for an exhibit by curators Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen called Retail Apocalypse, “a time capsule for the entire glorious, messy, self-aggrandizing history of retail” (Fischli & Olsen, 2023).  The display intentionally echoes the experience of “window-shopping” - with pamphlets on Les Grands Magasin and archival photographs on display behind glass casings - but a version intended to reflect back on the social and political dimensions of shopping itself.

We move forward, into a space of transition. The display here is constructed as a porch from the North, to serve as a welcome – and a point of (re)orientation.  Along a zig-zagging plywood barrier are strung the things of everyday life in a buffet of textures: scarves, and fur-trimmed parkas and boots, a deep freeze, a coffee can full of screws (I imagine with some trepidation what it would sound like to tip it over) (see Figure 1).  Bathed in sunset hues, the jagged wall is decked with things that call out to be touched: fur that gleams in the museum lights, rope that frays at the edges.  Its homey, haphazard nature makes the elements of the display – or perhaps the fact that they are on display at all - seem at once familiar and unfamiliar.  According to the curators, the design of the wall intentionally zigzags to create a sense of disjuncture (both from the gallery hallway that leads into it, and to evoke the displacement of Indigenous peoples in Northern communities) as well as a re-orientation of the visitor to the possible worlds beyond (Shaw, Ruiz, & den Elzen, 2022).

Figure 1 The Porch  (Tiffany Shaw). Part of the exhibit Towards Home at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Photo the author’s.

We can hear some conversation buzzing behind glass doors to the right, but we follow the exhibit left – towards the house that The Porch was welcoming us into.  That is to say, the houses – the various notions of home that make up an Indigenous-led exhibition called “ᐊᖏᕐᕋᒧᑦ / Ruovttu Guvlui / Towards Home.”  Towards Home considers Indigenous practices of placemaking and spacemaking, centring the knowledges and experiences of “being at home on the land” (Nango, Partridge, Piirainen & Ruiz, 2022).

Lighting plays a dramatic role in the transition between spaces in the exhibition (by demarcating these different sensations of “home”).  The lighting here, rather than curating a sense of spectacle, is intended to curate atmospheres of seasonality: the idea that you are transitioning through the various seasons of “being at home on the land” (Shaw, Ruiz, & den Elzen, 2022). As exhibition designer Tiffany Shaw explains:

What isn’t physically present inside of the gallery is the reference to land—it’s the landscape that forms each community differently. So changing lighting conditions as you move between galleries is a way to generate that reference. I don’t know if people will notice the lighting changing in each of these spaces, but I’d like to at least think that it will matter for them again physiologically, like another anchor so that they can get into a sense of time of year that each artist is really exploring” (qtd. in Shaw, Ruiz, & den Elzen, 2022)

For one of the other researchers, Rosalin, this contrast was striking.  As she writes: “I was captivated by the brightness and darkness of different spaces. No doors were blocking these spaces. The atmosphere, and its emotional energies, were created through open space. The various aesthetic spaces were separated by intangible, visible borders: lighting” (Benedict, 2023).

This change in lighting is often subtle – a shift from the warm sunset orange of The Porch to galleries hued in the dimmer light of a dawn filtering through unseen trees - but is most recognizable in the transition to and from Offernat (Votive Night) (by Carolina Grahn & Ingemar Israelsson).  Here, another zigzagging moment of passage (a translucent chartreuse shower curtain snaking its way through an inky indigo night) draws a veil between this “home amongst the land” and the next (see Figure 2).

Figure 2 Offernat (Votive Night) (by Carolina Grahn & Ingemar Israelsson). Installation view, 2022. Part of the exhibit Towards Home at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Photo Mathieu Gagnon © CCA.

The focal point of this gallery is an altar - a burl of birch hewn into a place of honour for a handful of flowers, lichen, and dried seed pods (see Figure 3).  It is an offering. The artist, Carolina Grahn, envisions the act of refilling the altar regularly as a moment for the members of the CCA to connect and reflect on their relations (to Indigenous peoples and to the land) (Shaw, Ruiz, & den Elzen, 2022).

Figure 3 The votive altar in "Offernat" (Grahn & Israelsson). Part of the exhibit Towards Home at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Photo the author's.

Unable to resist, and looking furtively around to make sure I have no spectators, I lean into the bowl of the altar and take a deep breath.  To my surprise … nothing.  Well, not nothing … I can smell the resinous tang of varnished wood, but the offering itself escapes me.  I beckon over Rosalin and ask her if she can smell anything.  Like me, she leans in close, but – unlike me – she swears she gets a whiff of the flowers. Carlos, though, cannot smell anything either (leading Rosalin to wonder aloud if she’s imagining the scent of it).  It feels strangely as though the gallery setting has stripped the votive altar of its perfume. 

I am not alone in noticing the de-aromatisation of the exhibition (bar one exception: throughout the galleries, you can catch sappy whiffs of the unfinished wood used to create many of the installations). Reviewing Towards Home at the CCA, Leah Snyder writes of the limitations of the museum setting.  For example, she notes that when Joar’s Sámi Architectural Library – an evolving collection of Indigenous books and research nestled in amongst tanned hides – was previously installed at the National Gallery, it came with a certain pervading aroma:

To prepare the hides that would be used in the installation, tanning areas were set up outside of the National Gallery. When walking towards the Gallery from my own home, on unceded Anishinaabe Algonquin aki (land), the aroma of the fires could be smelled from blocks away. Each visitor entering through the doors carried the scent in with them, altering the sensory experience of the building. Once installed, the hides continued to emit the scent inside. Yet in the CCA configuration, that smell is almost imperceptible—a missed opportunity to more powerfully evoke the land beyond our structures. (Snyder, 2022)

As I navigate through Towards Home, the galleries brimming with transmuted invocations of nature, I am struck by the ambiguous tactility of the exhibit. I feel the stickiness of the river that cuts across one gallery beneath my feet (it’s either painted in acrylic or a thin stretch of blue vinyl), but shy away from stepping in it twice once I notice others in the gallery hopping over it. I hover a hand over a neon simulated fire – part of artist asinnajaq’s installation Nuna – marked with a “do not touch” sign but radiating a scant-yet-perceptible warmth.  I sink into a soft, curved bench beneath Nuna’s gossamer igloo of printed lichen and find myself enveloped in green-tinted light. Another researcher mentions to me later that they were unsure if they should sit within the exhibit’s shelters.  It had never occurred to me that Nuna – with its dreamy textures nestled around a (faux) fire - would be anything but a place to rest and reflect, and yet I’m left wondering again if I’ve touched something meant for eyes alone. [1]

The uncertain “touchability” of the exhibit aside – even as a feast for the eyes and ears, Towards Home curates an evocative atmosphere.  Take, for example, the striking contrasting textures and colours of Asnishinaabe artist Naomi Ratte’s Lost Natures. Intricately carved channels through a wooden plank trail with ambiguous rivulets of deep red beadwork – spilled blood? The lifeblood of rivers, of the land? They demand a closer look even as they whisper of emergency (see Figure 4):

Figure 4 Naomi Ratte's "Lost Natures.” Part of the exhibit Towards Home at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.  Photo the author’s

The soundscape of the exhibit also changes between galleries, working alongside the shifting lightscape to cultivate these various senses of home.  In the winter-white Futurecasting gallery, the sound of iceflows scraping and singing heralds your emergence from the inky night of Offernat.  In the Sami Architectural Library, the sound of wood being felled creeps from a corner speaker.  (On the walk to the metro afterwards, Carlos tells me that the sounds of the galleries remind him of his village in Columbia.  They remind him, in other words, of home).

While Towards Home as an exhibition predates Nuit Blanche, in many ways it engages more directly with the multisensoriality promised by the festival than many of the experiences curated specifically for the festival. The use of lighting, sound, and texture allows Towards Home to curate moments of embodied transition across dreamscapes, landscapes, and homes.  Perhaps, in a way, this is because the exhibition resonates with the notion of home - a place you know not just with your eyes, but in your bones (Tuan, 2001).

The Anti-gentrification Festival

After our journey through Towards Home’s embodied narratives of lanscape, relation, and displacement, it is perhaps not surprising that the Anti-gentrification Festival proper feels like a bit of letdown.  In the front room, an unknown bust - his face covered as if in protest – offers a promising welcome [2], but the atmosphere beyond is at once fractured and sedate. Admittedly, we have arrived towards the end of the workshop and presentation portion of the festival – later in the evening performances by DJs are promised, with cold beer in a cash bar throughout.

As we wander through the rooms, presenters speak about collective action – albeit in muted tones – to a few audience members peppering conference chairs.  The majority of the attendees seem to be lounging on (or standing around) a collection of oversized beanbags, half-watching what appears to be an ethnographic film with no sound.  The colourful neon uplighting on the walls is the most carnivalesque element of the space, and the energy is distinctly unlike the usually frenetic pace of the festival (though one imagines that comes later, given the aforementioned DJs). In some ways, the lowkey atmosphere seems intentional, designed to resist the role of the festival as a gentrifying force – as the latest and flashiest in a series of “creative class” interventions aimed mostly at turning the city into a lifestyle/saleable commodity (Edensor & Sumartojo, 2015; Zukin, 1989).

Still, I have the distinct impression of having wandered into a house party just as it was winding down (even if, in reality, it may only have been getting started).  Nevertheless, moments of discordance like this seem to refute the notion of Nuit Blanche as an all-night experience you can wander in and out of… it appears we have arrived simultaneously too early and too late for the revolution.

The Art of Slowing Down

A handful of blocks away at the McCord Museum, some of our fellow researchers are settling into a rhythm of their own.  As with the Anti-Gentrification Festival, the McCord’s primary offering for the evening resists the frenetic pace of Nuit Blanche, offering visitors the option to instead “take a breather from the frenzy of exciting activities on offer at Nuit Blanche” by “revel[ling] in the magic of the sublime landscapes of Quebec and Western Canada” (thanks to an exhibition of photography by Alexander Henderson), join a yoga class, or “go with the flow of a guided intuitive dance activity” (“Nuit Blanche – the Art of Slowing Down,” 2023).  Here, however, visitors’ bodies are invoked to facilitate that resistance, through a moment of respite that citizens are invited to breathe, feel, and dance.

Researchers at the McCord describe being seduced by the expansive surroundings – by the invitation to dance amidst high ceilings, low lights, and black and white photographs of soaring landscapes. What’s more, these were collective moments of respite, premised upon allowing participants to connect not just with their own bodies, but with others (and, through them, the city) amidst the extended urban bustle of Nuit Blanche.

As one of the researchers at the McCord, Amrita, writes:

While tapping my feet in a circle, little did I realize that I am not really dancing alone or on my own anymore-- I am actually dancing with and in relation to others … the dancefloor is a relational temporal space where my hands and body move in relation to others and theirs to mine. As I maneuver my way and move to match the rising tempo of the music, I realize how my place in this world is inherently relational. I exist in relation to the people I share my life with. Simply, my existence is built and entangled into theirs. Having this profound sense of how porous our lives are generated by means of dancing together. Swaying my body in the atmosphere and living my life in the moment to the rhythm of the music I feel incredibly lucky and grateful to be in this moment with others. And I let go, I slow down, I forget and I am in the present. It is in a long time since I am feeling this sense of belonging and of human commonality. (Gurung, 2023).

For Amrita – who arrived in Canada from Nepal in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic – Nuit Blanche was an opportunity to build a sense of relation to the city (not just its architecture, or its spectacle, but its people) in a way she had scant opportunity for prior. Still, another participant in The Art of Slowing Down speaks of her initial discomfort at being so close to so many people, at the crowded “party” atmosphere of the event after so much solo downtime over the pandemic.  For this participant, the event was less a “breather” than a moment of heightened sensation – of awareness and proximity (El Mir, 2023).

In some ways, both of these experiences resonate with my own. After years of pandemic living, Nuit Blanche finds me brushing coat-clad shoulders with strangers on multiple dancefloors over the course of the night, and moments of anxiety tinge my rusty attempts at dancing … but they exist side by side with feelings of joy and connection.  In these moments of dancing together with strangers – in a proximity far closer than the healthy six feet of distance I still maintain in the grocery line – it’s as though I can feel in my body, in my bones, that the city is coming to life again.  We are still here, together …dancing awkwardly, wonderfully, through the long night.

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

To the north of us, a few more members of our research team begin their night at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA). As with The Art of Slowing Down, ethnographers at the MMFA found that other people were often the key driver of the museum’s atmosphere – albeit one that refuted the notion of respite or quiet contemplation. Participant reflections from across Nuit Blanche are often characterized by the sense of being overwhelmed by the crowded space (a sense of uncomfortable closeness heightened by moving through a bustling gallery in winter coats). As Maria writes:

I appreciate the peaceful, quiet, and passive atmosphere that usually characterizes museums. This massive crowd had trampled on that invitation to contemplation. Moving was difficult and looking closely at an object felt like hindering a museum's serial cultural consumption … a kind of "fast-culture" that reminded me more of a drive-through than a place to enjoy art (Vargas, 2023).

In the push and pull of a crowded museum – in and amongst the “hectic choreography” Maria describes - one cannot linger long to reflect on how a piece makes you feel before being swept along to the next.

Still, the MMFA aimed to hit the multisensory brief of Montreal’s Nuit Blanche, offering musical performances, food tastings and wine, all designed to complement the museum’s featured exhibit - ᑐᓴᕐᓂᑐᑦ TUSARNITUT! Music Born of the Cold.  TUSARNITUT! “illustrates… the diversity and breadth of Inuit musical expression in the visual and performing arts” (“ᑐᓴᕐᓂᑐᑦ TUSARNITUT! Music Born of the Cold,” n.d.). Melanie describes one exhibition space in the MMFA where an interactive sculpture shares focus with a pop-up, night-club-esque dance floor - dimly lit, vibrating with an enthusiastic crowd, and punctuated by the beats of a local DJ.  Here, a table of “Inuit delicacies” – “grilled brussels sprouts and blackberry skewers with maple glaze and hemp seeds,” which another researcher observes are not especially reminiscent of Inuit culture – are served amidst the heady aromatic mix of perfume and sweat.

Here, too, there is dancing – and the dancers become, in a way, part of the exhibition. As Melanie writes:

As I listen to the sounds of the music—a powerful electronic mix of alternating bases and snares layered with the haunting tones of Inuit throat singing—visitors bob to the music and turn their heads to gaze intently at images and lights that dance across a screen behind the DJ platform …bright orange and yellow squares, greens and purples, pictures of Canadian territories, images of indigenous peoples- some archival and others stereotypical caricatures collected from children’s cartoons.… As the images dance across the screen… visitors fervently joining the display by dancing freely, their bodies make strange angles as they twirl and bend somewhat self-consciously (probably because they never danced in a gallery before I think to myself), effectively performing the music through their bodies. (Schnidrig, 2023)

In Transit

Back at the CCA, Carlos, Rosalin and I exit the Anti-Gentrification Festival, quickly moving from the cold clear night into the gasoline-scented and sallow fluorescent-hued bowels of an under-street tunnel: our only path to the nearest metro station.  The walls are decorated with a patchwork of graffiti and the greige patches of paint that half-heartedly cover them. (Deborah Landry [2019] calls these signature blocks of grey paint – which hide the “visual pollution” of graffiti behind something uglier and more banal - “redaction murals”).

Carlos is particularly struck by the practice, sacrificing his hands to the cold in order to take photos of the urban redactions:

There were signs of erased tags, and some new ones that still resisted the gray painting... Some social groups are telling you that they were there, and that they do not care about the pretty or grey aesthetics that the city wants to portray in other parts of the urban realm. But it surprised me because Montreal is supposed to be a city of artists, that supports the cultural appropriation of urban spaces. (Olaya Diaz, 2023)

For Carlos, these encounters with mundane aesthetic control push back against the image of the city as one big carnival – either as a feast for the senses, or a living creative space.  For some, the boundaries between the city and gallery (or museum) are porous. Particularly on Nuit Blanche, the discrete “cultural” and “artistic” spaces of the city can bleed out into the streetscape through sanctioned festive atmospheres.  But the city’s underbelly – buffed and grey - reminds us that restrictive notions of what does or doesn’t belong in the (not-so-creative) commons of urban public space are used daily to police the aesthetic boundary between “art” and “pollution” (Landry, 2019).

We emerge from the Place des Armes metro and climb the cobblestone sidewalks to its matching public square. (The signature cobblestones of Old Montreal are uneven at the best of times, and they take a special sure-footedness amongst the ice and snow to avoid wobbling). The square is scattered with huge, illuminated snowflakes (or are they stars? crystals?), holding audience before the stately Notre Dame Cathedral (see Figure 5). They’re impressive enough, but they could be one of any number of light sculptures that dot the cityscape during Montreal en Lumiere. They blink out the more stately illuminated statues that pepper the square - even the illuminated cathedral pales in comparison.  I reach out to touch one of the sculptures, expecting it to be woven wicker, but find it plasticine, like a corded telephone wire.

Figure 5 Montreal en Lumiere at Place des Armes

On our way through Old Montreal to the Pointe-à-Callière Museum, I find myself playing tour guide of the assorted Cité Mémoire projections we pass on the walls of the old city - the reason, even with a terrible sense of direction, I know these streets by heart (or by foot). As with Montreal en Lumiere, these projections turn the “through-spaces” of the city into a larger-than-life event (Lynch, 2022), adding to the narrative continuity of the city as (illuminated) festival. I talk while walking, though, since the night’s deepening cold has started to seep into my travel companions’ bones.

Pointe-à-Callière 

We make it to the Pointe-à-Callière Museum just as a crowd has let out, and so we find ourselves in one of the rhythmic discordances that inevitably occurs when one is hopping across a city’s worth of events (like the long, slightly awkward beat on a dance floor as you wait for the next song to play).  A clock on the stage counts down to the next performance as more and more people funnel into the museum lobby. It’s unclear how we move from here into the museum proper, and the ticking timer would seem to promise something worth waiting for, so we wait.

Our reward is a performance by the Chan Lion Dance Club, composed of a drummer flanked by two lions (their bodies animated by two dancers each) “sleeping” at his sides. In honour of the (Lunar) New Year, the MC invites use to hold one hand in the air and try to seize the luck that will apparently radiate outwards when the lions awaken (even if we cannot touch them, he notes, we are all connected by energy). However, a moment of discomfort ripples through the crowd as we realize (seemingly en masse) that the gesture could easily be mistaken for a fascist salute. I, like many others, spread my fingers wide and press my palm outwards to make it clear that I am grasping, rather than saluting. 

When the lions shake themselves dramatically from their slumber, they look impossibly soft and plush (with coats with vibrant yellow and red faux fur, interwoven with sequins, and soft baubles on coiled antennae lending their faces a bit of extra animation). They bat their feathery eyelashes at the crowd, leaning down out over the stage for a scratch below the chin or along their crested brows from a more-than-willing crowd member.  The audience, meanwhile, is vocally appreciative, oohing and ahhing as the front legs of the lions (in truth, the only legs of the dancer animating each beast’s front half) rear up in the air. The MC was right, in a way: the energy of the performance, punctuated by the kind of drum beat that echoes off the back of your ribcage, channels through the crowd.

By the time the performance wraps – but not before we are reminded that, after the show, “we can shop all night long”– I am nearly running late for my next event at the Centre PHI, and so I leave Carlos and Rosalin to explore the Pointe-à-Callière on their own.

The Centre PHI

The line to get into Centre PHI snakes out the door, along the street and down the block. The temperature has dropped even further now, and it is bitingly cold with the windchill, so people huddle together.  Cigarette smoke slips through the air, and people chatter and stamp their feet to pass the time and keep warm, some of them occasionally toppling slightly from the narrow sidewalks.  The line moves quicker than expected, and – before Aurélie arrives – I am swept through the door, my hand gets stamped, and I am up the stairs into the violet haze of the space.

The atmospheric design at Centre PHI seems to rely on a combination of colourful uplighting (emanating from neon strips along the floor) and heavy doses of both fake fog and dance music.  After the relative quiet of the street outside, the music - mixed with the sound of people trying to talk over it - is nearly overwhelming. So, too, is the artificial fog-laden air, and people cough to push it from their lungs as they move out the door.  It has no perceptible smell, but it lends a certain tangible thickness to the tangled yeasty-and-sweet notes of open drinks, and blends with the faint hint of cigarette smoke that wafts into the space from outside.

When Aurélie arrives, we move further into the space, into a room where a multitude of blinking lamps twinkle over an illuminated floor, ringed by people chatting amiably.  At first, we wonder if the lights blink on and off to the beat of the music, so we try to follow the rhythm with our eyes.  The music and the lights do not synchronize, but – if you weren’t paying attention – the effect could easily have you fooled.  The space seems to have no apparent meaning, but it’s definitely “a vibe.”

As it turns out, our designated activity – the Centre’s Habitat Sonore, a space for intentional listening that was meant to be our own moment of “quiet” respite amidst the relative sensory onslaught of Nuit Blanche – is not being offered. Feeling the pulse of the music radiate though the space, it’s hardly surprising – the activity seems at odds with the Centre’s other proffered attractions for the evening - but it’s still a bit disappointing.

Instead, we dance, and I am struck (for the first but not the last time this night) by the novelty and curious delight of dancing with strangers after so long - an experience made even stranger by the fact that we have our cold weather gear still on. Aurélie describes the peculiarity of dancing in a winter coat and yet finding it neither hot nor heavy (Roy-Bourbeau, 2023).  We’re far from the only ones dancing in our coats, and I imagine - rather than hear – the nylon rustle of puffer jackets rubbing against one another on the dance floor. I shake my attention from my odd attire, and try instead to feel the music and to find my rhythm in and through the crowd.

We don’t linger long at Centre PHI, but on our way out the door we find an exhibition wall advocating for the multisensory turn in the arts.  On the reverse of the wall is a relief in the style of ancient marbles, but with carved-out geodes of blue calcite along its length (see Figure 6). I remark to Aurélie that I’m very tempted to touch it, and I lean close to inspect the crystalline portions. A security guard, appearing in the doorway as if summoned, sternly reminds me not to touch. So, only the visual appeal of texture, then – not the actual touch.

Figure 6 A closeup of Daniel Arsham's Blue Calcite Eroded Sarcophagus with Nereids (2019) displayed at Centre PHI.  Photo the author’s

A (seemingly less sober) patron, hot on my heels, makes a point of “not touching” the sculpture.  The last thing I see on our way out the door is him holding a finger an inch away from the sculpture, openly goading the security guard. 

LESPACEMAKER

From here, we meet Melanie at the metro to make our way to LESPACEMAKER for the “hypersensorial labyrinth” they have in store.  When we find the warehouse-turned-maker space on an unassuming street in Hochelaga, I am struck first by the warehouse’s colourful exterior, and then more emphatically by the fire pit outside. In a night full of illuminated installations, none seems quite so beckoning as an open iron fire pit to chase away the cold.

As we walk inside, the warehouse has the look of a junk yard-turned-wedding venue – various rusted scraps seem frozen mid-transformation, but the pathway is studded with lines of warm Edison bulbs fit for a garden party.  It’s still enough of a warehouse that even “inside” is still quite cold.  We climb an iron staircase rendered so questionably rickety by rust that it seems to sag beneath our feet, and, from there, we pass through heavy plastic flaps and into the maze. 

True to its multisensory promise, here we finally have the freedom to touch (as Aurélie notes) and the maze touches us back as we wind our way through. In one section, long tendrils of cut rubber run their weedy fingers through my hair, the sensation spine shivering and discomfiting. At times, I also feel too tall for comfort, as I’m met eye-to-eye with shards of mirror suspended in a web of rope. At other times, I lean into the uncanny tactility of the space, hooking my finger through one of a string of plastic fingers hanging from the ceiling, and shake gently as though to seal an unspoken pact.

The space smells of wet paint and stale air, and something rubberized, vaguely metallic. The spiced promise of chai tea also permeates the maze, but it never seems ready to be drunk. Exhibits are still in progress as we work our way through, and quickly we become part of the art. At some point, I am invited up onto a platform to help paint a landscape scene. It occurs to me as I pick up a brush that this is another thing I have scarcely done since the beginning of the pandemic – paint – and certainly not on a raised dais. The act of painting in the maze is collaborative, but it is also performative. I daub the already-saturated brush between colours, find a piece of the sky to make my own, and add hues of lavender and red amongst the blue. I come away with splotches of wet paint on my hands, drying to patches of acrylic second skin that I will wear for the rest of the evening.

Aurélie and I dance here again, at times watching our performance reflected in the mirrored wall behind the DJ, and, at others, getting lost to anyone but ourselves in the haze of the smoke machine. As with before, it feels freeing to share the air with others, to share a moment with others, even if there’s still a flash of hesitation at the outset.

Figure 7 Dancing through the fog at LESPACEMAKER

By the time we exit the maze, all we can collectively think about are our aching feet.  That is, until we are swept into the majesty of the quiet, sparkling night.  As Aurélie writes,

Nous sommes alors reparties, de retour dans le froid et le ‘’silence’’ de la ville qui est rarement

réellement silencieux. Sur le chemin vers le métro, nous avons aperçu la brillance qui émanait

de la neige lorsqu’elle est illuminée par les lampadaires des soirs d’hiver et entendre nos pas

dans la neige croquante (Roy-Bourbeau, 2023).

Place des Festivals

Aurélie and I queue up for the free hot chocolate, nearing 2am: last ethnographers standing. The illuminated Ferris wheel at the heart of Place des Festivals rises before us like the spirit incarnate of the city as carnival, a celebration of the kind of spectacular infrastructure that defines Montreal’s Quartier des Spectacles (see McKim, 2012).  Someone ahead of us in line drops a bottle of wine; it shatters and spreads like blood along the pavement.  Across from us, people scream periodically as they hurl themselves down (Tim Hortons-sponsored) tube slides. I feel the bite of the cold on my cheeks, and - for the first time all night - I pull my scarf up over my nose to fend off the chill. An illuminated sign declares this area the “Quartier Gourmand,” (see Figure 8), which feels like too grand a promise for powdered chocolate mixed with boiling water. Still – whether it’s the warmth or the sugar – the hot chocolate is instantly restorative.

Figure 8 Promising big in the Place des Festivals

We wedge ourselves into a crowd of people who are gathered in front of the Place des Festival’s main stage for a set by an (unknown-to-me) DJ. Here, we are the closest we’ve been to anyone all night, penned in on each side, rippling with the crowd.  The gentle crush of bodies is part (tame) mosh pit, part huddling for warmth.  We sway here with strangers, moving with them whether we want to or not, and yet I am buoyed once again by the feeling of being in and with the crowd (even as a I have to guard my hot chocolate from being sloshed).

Winding our way around the stage, we find the interactive cube installation CONTROL NO CONTROL.  According to the artists’ statement, Studio Iregular’s CONTROL NO CONTROL is:

a big LED cube that reacts to everything that touches it and every movement performed on its surface. Streamlined patterns and generative sound emerge as interaction occurs. … A sort of socio-digital experiment, the piece explores the relationship between participants and interactive installations. It tests the artwork’s ability to intrinsically “instruct” the audience that ends up gaining control of the piece. … people all over the globe tend to behave the same way around the cube, and all seemed to spend a lot of time engaging. This in turn suggests the ability for the artwork to manipulate the public as well, highlighting the back-and-forth blurred nature of the control relationship (“CONTROL NO CONTROL” n.d.)

Figure 9/10 CONTROL NO CONTROL (Studio Iregular) at the Place des Festivals.

When a hand (or a body) is trailed over its surface, CONTROL NO CONTROL casts a stream of scattered light and sound in its wake (see Figure 9/10). Aurélie notes that it seems as though it’s tracking our movements, rather than our physical touch, which would explain why we can activate it through our mittens, and why someone rolling their body along it leaves a trail (rather than a series of illuminated points).

We could (as the artists provoke us to do) reflect on how our gestures with CONTROL NO CONTROL are disciplined by the particular affordances of the installation, perhaps ultimately following a limited number of patterns when viewed at scale.  But there is something about the embodied experience of being there that transcends this question of “instruction” or “control.”  Here, we are touching and playing with the city, trying to find creative ways to engage with it (even if, ultimately, we are mirroring the dance steps of others).  People seem genuinely delighted to interact with this curious black box, and it’s hard not to get swept up in the enchantment of the moment, of watching people roll and run and dance along the sides of the cube, lighting up the dark. There is always something magical about people making meaning together, but here, in the dead of night, in the freezing cold, it weaves an improbable spell.

Reflections

For all the evening’s frantic pace and curated spectacle, the sensory ethnographic reflections our team collected on Nuit Blanche reveal moments of possibility, connection, and reorientation in our relationship to Montreal’s cultural spaces.  The festive atmospheres of Nuit Blanche help disrupt – however briefly – the typical aesthetic arrangement of the museum.  Norms of comportment – around quiet contemplation and the distance between the display and the observer – seem to soften (if not quite dissolve) when the multisensory allure of these spaces becomes the key attraction.  Sometimes this shift is jarring, but it nonetheless raises all manner of interesting questions. How do you dance in a museum? What should an exhibit taste like? Can you smell a history of relations? Can you touch the art, or can the art touch you?

The creation of the city as festival on Nuit Blanche is ultimately an uneven process – one that illuminates (often literally) the disconnect between the temporary, idealized portrait of the city as open-air gallery and the ongoing regimes of aesthetic purification that discipline the senses and work to define what kinds of artistic expression are allowed in city streets (and on city walls).  This disjuncture is amplified, as Haiven (2012) notes, by the fact that the values that supposedly animate events like Nuit Blanche – “experimentation, freedom, creativity, sociality, possibility” - are seemingly confined to one night a year (91).  Ultimately, however, it is citizens who do the footwork of weaving the city into a festival on Nuit Blanche, moving within and between the city’s sanctioned cultural spaces and its more ephemeral exhibitions, dancing these spaces together through the cold and the dark into festive atmospheres. Therein, I would argue, lies the potential of such events to cultivate our embodied awareness of other ways of being in the city.

In sensing Nuit Blanche, our research team reflected on elements of alienating spectacle and discordance, but we also encountered moments of re-enchantment and opportunities to attune our bodies to the rhythms of the city as a dynamic site – a place of becoming that we at once make and make sense of in relation to others. As such, our reflections reveal how the festive atmospheres of Nuit Blanche – designed and curated though they may be – are also thoroughly embodied, contingent, and co-produced with others.

[1] I am comforted later to read asinnajaq’s description of what she intended the bench to feel like: like a bed of moss laid across a slate rock. (Shaw, Ruiz, & den Elzen, 2022)

[2] I could peer at the plaque to unmask the fellow, but it seems uncouth.

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