1312 obstructions to the right to demonstrate
On April 5th, 2013 I was, like nearly 300 other people, « souriciée » by the SPVM during a demonstration against the iniquitous P-6 regulation. Surrounding us for hours, the police refused us water, access to the toilets, the warm clothes we were brought.
Shortly after my arrest, I became the representative in one of 16 class action suits filed in response to these abusive and arbitrary arrests. 10 years later, a settlement was reached: the city of Montreal will pay $6 million to the arrested.
The city has also acknowledged its wrongdoing. But the apology was halfhearted and disappointing, stuck in an era where words like intersectional and systemic scare the powerful. It took a lot of media coverage highlighting the fact that the apology was buried in a corner of their website, in a PDF document with no date, no header, and no signature, for Valerie Plante to finally pay lip service to it, restricting the deprivation of our basic rights and police brutality to the year 2012.
For this project, I wanted to give their text the existence in the public space that it has been denied by imagining a "translation" of the city's apology, from my perspective.