My Terrains Vacants Brief Summary

[I was recently invited by Écotone - Espace d'expérimentation to be part of their Terrains Vacants residency. I was also asked to write a brief summary of my experience, as follows.]

The first thing I noticed was how quiet it was (during the first moments of my first week: March 23-29, 2026.) I always listen to music when I work – and when I’m not working as well – but I didn’t bring any music. I decided to leave my computer at home in order to spend time away from the internet. (As everyone knows, I am much too addicted to the internet.) So… I would spend some time in silence. That seemed like a good enough idea.

In my application I’d proposed I would spend the time trying to come up with an idea for a solo performance. Almost all of my performance work has been made in collaboration with other artists. My motivations to make a solo performance were multiple and questionable. I’ve always found working with other people difficult and might like a break from such difficulties. Funding is increasingly challenging to come by, and less people on stage also means less funds required. But perhaps my main motivation is to make work in which I have the agency and freedom to completely change things in the moment, with no one else relying on me, no one who might be thrown off by any sudden, spontaneous changes.

Sitting there in that empty, very quiet room at the La Cité-des-Hospitalières, I quickly came up with a preliminary idea. I thought of calling it A Personal History of Everything and Everyone. I conceived of it as a kind of “composition in real time.” One version of the idea was built around a table full of objects. Each object would connect to a theme. The performance would consist of me picking up objects at random and speaking about the related theme for each one. I also had a desire to speak about current events, so I wanted there to be enough objects that there would always be one I could connect to any current event on my mind. I had way more ideas for themes than I did for objects. Some of the themes I was interested in speaking about included: Oil, Music, Prize Culture, Failure, Books, Chronic Pain, A World Without Money, Solidarity, Depression, Travel, Friendship, Cooking, Regret, Nature, Animism, Honesty, Repair and Liveness. People familiar with my work might notice that many of these themes are the ones I find myself returning to over and over again.

When I came back for my second week (June 15-21, 2026), I began, conventionally enough, by looking over my notes from the first week, and was fascinated by how I now had almost no interest in any of my ideas from the previous round. Upon further reflection, this seemed to me indicative of a larger pattern within my artistic practice. I have a great deal of difficulty staying interested in any idea for very long. In my normal artistic work-life, some outside factor forces me to commit to one idea over another: there are collaborators on the project who I feel a responsibility to, or we get a grant, or I tell people about the idea and they encourage me to pursue it, or we are invited to perform somewhere. Each of things (and others) forces me to commit to an idea rather than abandoning it. Since I basically believe that any idea can result in good work, in the end I’m not so certain it matters which idea I choose. If I had the idea in the first place it probably means I have at least some interest in doing it. Any idea can result in good work, it just depends what you do with it.

I then switched tactics, focusing on the more fundamental question of whether I genuinely wanted to make a solo performance and, if so, why. My basic feeling was that I did and here are the reasons I came up with:
- Freedom to change things on the fly.
- Freedom to speak about current events.
- Honesty about who I am and what I’m able to do.
- A preference for doing something that’s less good, yet more true to me, versus doing something that’s better but further away from my true abilities.
- Making performances cheaply and quickly.
- I want to be alone.

I still don’t yet have an idea for a specific solo performance I want to do, but if I ever come up with such an idea I will likely do it. I have a feeling it might have something to do with being old, and for that to work I still might have to get a bit older. I consider the idea that when the rest of my beard turns white, I will begin the process.

In my day-to-day life, I already spend a great deal of time alone, consumed by introspective thoughts. In a way, this residency formalized this process. There was definitely something existential about it. I don’t really make art for myself, I make art because I have a desire to convey something to an audience. Paradoxically, I find I am most able to convey something to an audience if I follow, as closely as possible, my own personal artistic desires. I now realize that a large part of the Terrains Vacants residency was about being in a space, over time, without any specific goals. I’ve always been fond of the John Cage quote: “The goal is not to have a goal.” I’ve always felt lost, and this residency allowed me to reconnect with my ongoing feeling of existential lostness. And so it continues.



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Does aging make you impatient?

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I don't remember being this impatient when I was younger. Does aging make you impatient? Two things on their way to being finished, and yet I still have to wait.

The first record by The Air Contains Honey comes out this November. It's called The Air Contains Honey Sings Quotes. You're going to like it, but you'll have to (impatiently) wait until November (on the other hand, first single out in September.)

And then my next novel Desire Without Expectation comes out in May 2027. Here are a few lines:

"We were there to set fire to the oil wells. So, as you can imagine, we had many enemies. Setting fire to oil wells almost sounds to me now like the genre of idea an agent provocateur would actively encourage. My thinking on the topic of what’s to be done has changed a great deal since that time. I now believe we have to build something, and we’re not going to get far tearing anything down before we’ve built something up to replace it. As I said, those were different times. I look back down at the cover of the book. I don’t want to be thinking about the past. I’d prefer to be thinking about the future."



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WIELS calls for applications from Canadian artists

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WIELS calls for applications from Canadian artists (Canadian nationals, or those living and working in Canada) for a 6-month residency in Brussels. More info here.


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Three lines from Failure Finds its Happy End

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“We were trying to make a very public society, but no one paid attention, so it ended up being a secret society.”



“In the end we thought maybe our manifesto could be a manifesto of questions.”



“There are so many injustices in the world, you could speak out against them twenty-four hours a day for the rest of your life and still not have nearly enough time.”

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All three lines are from my novel-in-progress Failure Finds its Happy End, which I am currently serializing on my Patreon here.

If I ever finish what I seem to be calling my final trilogy, Failure Finds its Happy End might be the plus one.



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Olivia Laing Quote

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“The plants themselves encoded something utopian for me, a vision of how the world ought to be. At the same time I had a disinclination to act so powerful it felt ordained. It wasn’t just laziness; it was a sense of the pointlessness of human effort, that almost every action had some damaging consequence, and that it was better to simply let things be. […] Staying power had come later, in my thirties; the helpful revelation that there is no mystery to any creative endeavour save for turning up each day and knuckling down to it, hour after tedious or – but this was far rarer – joyful hour. That was when I started making gardens and writing books, the unhappy years of failed dreaming an increasingly unvisited memory.”
— Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise



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"...even more immediacy, connection, and public life in art and in performance."

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"And I’ve always had such a difficult, conflicted relationship with performing. All of the things you say are true: I do like the immediacy, connection, and the idea of a public life that are embodied in the act of performance. And, at the same time, I’m disappointed that I haven’t been able to find or create even more immediacy, connection, and public life in art and in performance. There is a sense of ongoing failure that makes the real moments of immediacy and connection in performance all that much more precious. I feel that I’ve wasted my life and I also feel that I haven’t. In a way, for me the act of performance is embodied in this sentiment."

- Jacob Wren, from Hospitality Matters: Un entretien avec PME-ART with Sylvie Lachance and Geneviève Robichaud


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one big project per year

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Somehow my life has organized itself into one big project per year:

2026: The very first record by The Air Contains Honey

2027: My next novel Desire Without Expectation

2028: The new PME-ART show How Does Change Happen?

(All of these projects somehow make me very nervous for very different reasons.)


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Keep doing the same thing versus Try doing something new.

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Keep doing the same thing versus Try doing something new.

I wrote this down after seeing The Ex play a few nights ago. I had this feeling that they just keep doing the same thing and it just keeps on being good. That for them "doing the same thing" might be the right choice. But I'm not sure. I don't know enough about The Ex enough to know that they keep doing the same thing. And definitely, over the years, they also tried many new things. But I'm always wondering how much my work should change and how. And I'm never sure quite what the best way to think about it is.


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Kawai Shen Quote

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“Despite the suspension of norms in the mosh pit and the lifting of prohibitions on exercising aggression and violence, moshing was never a free-for-all. Like any social endeavour, there were unwritten rules of conduct. Entering a new millennium ushered in by forest fires, warmongering, and a global pandemic, I repeat to myself the lessons I’ve learned. Grasp the hands of the fallen so they are not trampled. Do not tolerate those monopolizing space for themselves. There is something honest and necessary in the proximity that pain causes, in the urgency to stay connected to each other. There can be unity in disorder. Seek it out, make it grow.”
― Kawai Shen, Wavering Futures


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Things haven't gone quite how I planned...

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An update on my attempt to start a Patreon (and the book I'm writing to procrastinate working on the other book that I'm supposed to be finishing.)


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