Sugar Shack / Cabane à Sucre

Through reinterpretation of maple syrup production and sugar shack traditions, this project addresses notions of cultural and national identity in light of the contemporary context of decolonization. Experiencing the enveloping sweet steam—byproduct of the ancestral boiling down of the maple sap—will be the focus of this participative event. Although the traditional method of evaporation and architectural features of a typical sugar shack are revisited, this evaporator room functions as a multi-sensorial immersive installation. Dehumidifiers contained within a car shelter (Tempo) are used to increase the concentration—still by evaporation—of the store-bought Tetra Pak-packaged maple water.

Dionne’s research and artistic practice have been grounded in his own Franco-Québécois cultural identity and folklore. Because Québec is by far its largest producer, and maple syrup stands as a significant aspect of Québécois’ intangible cultural heritage, sugar shack culture is one of the most defining aspects of Québec’s traditional cuisine. For cultural anthropologists, cooking marks the passage from nature to culture. Thus, as the locus of transformation of maple sap into syrup, the sugar shack becomes a place where a certain coming-into-being of Québécois’ culture and identity are performed through the evaporator. Unsurprisingly, in such a context, maple syrup is frequently referred to as the taste equivalent to the Québécois accent, but its embeddedness in French-Canadian traditions obscures and undermines its roots in a dynamic of colonial exchange. This installation is intended to stimulate reflection that help us to think about the notion of ‘improvement’—the claim that Québécois and Canadian fabricators make about their syrup-making technologies—as a form of unacknowledged colonial appropriation.

The production of maple syrup as an enactment of Québécois’ settler identity, with sugar bushes as affirmations of a claimed ownership of the land, are subjects that are yet to be explored critically. Such a humorous and absurd reinterpretation of the typical sugar shack presents this North American cultural phenomenon in the broader scope of nature commodification: packaging and commercializing maple sap, water or any other ubiquitous natural resources; driving and experiencing landscape as an inert backdrop for human activity; substituting nature with humidifiers, diffusers, and essential oils for aromatherapy.

The sugar shack being a locus for physical and social experience of air and landscape—unceded arenas of human, social and cultural activities—this immersive and participative event aims at reconciling the micro experience of individual sensation with larger discussions regarding identity, culture and ‘socioclimate’ issues.