A joint project of the Société Elizabeth Fry du Québec & Engrenage Noir LEVIER

Social exclusion and the poverty of criminalized women are important  preoccupations of the Société Elizabeth Fry du Québec.  On the one hand we observe the poverty of women due to systemic and personal factors and on the other hand, the criminalization of women for reasons of poverty continues to marginalize and impoverish them.  Our organization has developed many services to combat these phenomena including programs of artistic creation that invite women to express themselves on the subject and to sensitize our community to their reality.

For several years, the workers of the Société Elizabeth Fry du Québec (SEFQ) have been exploring artistic creation with criminalized women, incarcerated or in the community, and have seen that these different activities offered to the women are met with great interest.    From art therapy to creativity workshops, from contemporary dance to screenings of documentary films, these women have been able to benefit from these activities by expressing themselves and engaging in self-discovery, self-validation, learning, undertaking, and exploring.

Witnesses to unique and sometimes very moving moments, the workers have unified themselves with the desire to make this experience public and therefore sensitize the community to the reality of criminalized people.   These meetings were the seeds of a small project, Agir par l’imaginaire, which today has become an enterprise implicating Engrenage Noir projet LEVIER (a non-profit artistic organization), a dozen artists. a hundred women, and many prestigious sponsors such as Condition féminine Canada, the Canadian Arts Council, Ministère de la Culture, des Communications et de la Condition féminine et la Ville de Montréal, la Fondation du Grand Montréal, la Congrégation des Sœurs de Sainte-Anne, la fondation Thérèse-Casgrain and la Fondation Solstice. This project is a real challenge to coordinate taking all of the different partners into account – participants, artists and prisons – and has been on-going since the summer of 2008.

This project is an artistic one, more specifically, community art, the definition of which is most often a co-creation between an artist and a specific community group.  In the case of women in conflict with the law, the goal is to provoke reflection, an exchange, a debate -- in other words, social change.  Through art, this project gives the women a chance to examine the social exclusion and resulting state of poverty of incarceration as well as the criminalization of poverty.  The process of co-creation necessitates a real ethical concern regarding the sharing, exchange and implication of the women and invited artists.  The challenge is in the work of collaboration between the two where the decision-making power of the collaborators is equal and where the consensus results in a final product which is satisfying to all.  The creators goal is to create a work of art to share with the public with the idea of provoking a reflection about the necessity of the desired change.

So, Agir par l’imaginaire has three main parts :  creation,  distribution and the follow-up of the participants.  First of all, the workshops are varied:  video, photography, sound, writing, slam, dance, performance, and singing have all been done with the women of Maison Tanguay, Joliette Insitution and Institut Philippe-Pinel.  The creation is done in close collaboration with artists specializing in the various disciplines and who have been specifically trained regarding this project by the organization Engrenage Noir LEVIER.  The creation part of the project is the moment where we discuss and reflect on the above-mentioned problems but also where the participants develop or practice different skills such as teamwork, communication, self-affirmation, self-esteem, etc, directly linked to certain individual factors that can lead to social exclusion and hence povety.

Because the public is an important part of the process, an exposition – not only of the finished product but also of the process of creation – is put into place.  This is comprised of two parts:  an inaugural event as well as a series of expositions in different places through the province of Quebec.  The inaugural event is also an occasion to meet and discuss the systemic problems related to the incarceration of women and their resulting social exclusion.   This is why we envisage the immediate intergration of a round table including the public, professionals in the milieu, universities, artists, participants, and ex-inmates.  In addition to being a space of reflection, the exposition is an extension of the creative process and also an occasion for the women to rejoin the community on a different foot.  Offering a space to criminalized women to expose their art is symbolic of giving them a place in society.

All of the women participating in this experience are invited to stay in contact with the SEFQ for the year following their participation in a workshop in order to benefit from individual and group follow-ups given by the worker in charge of the project.  The goal of the worker is to establish a plan of intervention with the participants and to accompany them in their attemps to reach their objectives.   The goal of this approach is to use artistic creation as a springboard to motivate women to improve their social condition.  We believe that artistic creation may have an incitative effect on women and encourage them to mobilize to live a more satisfying life.  As with the project creation part, this follow-up is a way for our organization to intervene in certain personal difficulties that bring women into poverty.

Without claiming that art is a sure manner in which to help criminalized women return to society, nor a solution to the systemic problems related to their incarceration, we sincerely believe that it is a process that merits exploration and one that has real and lasting effects on each participant -- not only the incarcerated women but also on the artists, the community, the Société Elizabeth Fry du Québec, Engrenage Noir LEVIER and our partners.  This is why we warmly thank everyone who believes in this pilot project and who has chosen to assist us for the next two years in this out of the ordinary adventure.