Supercolumbine
In May 2006 my youngest daughter and I decided to walk home from her piano lesson via the University of Montreal. I noticed a plaque commemorating the women of the École Polytechnique who lost their lives in December 1989. That moment led me to a plethora of physical and emotional responses that I wanted to understand. I began gathering files for a project that would be a means to explore this particular experience. My project began to take the form of a documentary where I gathered words and images through a blog. This initial idea, like most preconceived notions, seemed to evolve autonomously into images and metaphors that were different from the representational idiom from which they emerged.
In September 2007 someone was shooting people a few meters away from me. I felt guilt for the kids who I could not protect and the irony of my emotional response to the victims of the École Polytechnique became evident. My reaction to the events, now personal, led me to a reconsideration of my initial thoughts.
There is a bizarre corner of the human mind that can twist things. I have appropriated Danny Ledonne’s computer game gateway for this piece because he does somehow try to approach the absurd. I am aware that there have been school shootings by the mentally ill and others as the result of jealousies or the criminal settling of accounts but the most dangerous ones , I think, have been by young people who were otherwise normal to the point of banal. On a computer monitor everything looks equal. What of value systems from such a perspective? Who decides? Who filters? When Kimveer Gill, the gunman at Dawson College confused an electronic universe with reality there were victims in lived experience.
Andres Manniste, 2007