When a whale dies and sinks to the bottom of the ocean, its carcass creates a complex ecosystem teeming with life. Sabourin’s Whale Fall takes its title from this natural phenomenon which provides a massive influx of nutrients in an otherwise sparse landscape at the depths of this world. The artist’s own great-great-grandfather, Alexandre Sabourin, gained notoriety in 1901 when he found a beached whale on the shores of the St. Lawrence River in Longueuil. Sabourin’s collection of found and created objects weaves in numerous layers of affect, materiality, and storytelling. Each entity is an intricate relic worth inspecting closely, both for its singularity and for its relationship to the whole.
In its historical perspective, but also echoing the recent increased presence of large marine mammals straying further into the waterways near Québec City and all the way to Montréal, Sabourin’s intervention moves between past and present. Whale Fall is anchored by a monumental seashell made of papier-mâché, located at the Maison de la littérature, on the edge of the mighty St. Lawrence River in the capital. Inspired by the artist’s own discovery of a fin whale skull on the Magdalen Islands in 2021, this sculpture plays with scale, texture, and the imaginary. Extending across the river like sediments of a large mammal being washed away by the current, this scattering of Whale Fall speaks to the embodied memories collected as we sift the banks of a waterway, gathering bits and pieces of a continually fragmented and renewed environment.
