Someone once asked, “Did you ever notice that the first piece of luggage on the carousel never belongs to anyone?”
The idea behind Passagers/Passengers — which celebrates Québec City as a confluence of human movement — is to pick up that first piece of luggage… and go with the flow.
For this interactive installation, created on the occasion of Québec’s 400th anniversary, the Société du 400e anniversaire de Québec turned to well-known filmmaker Patrice Sauvé — working on his first multimedia project — to develop the concept and content, while gsmprjct° was entrusted with the design and scenography. The setting is an imaginary airport, the ultimate transit area, in which the visitor becomes a passenger. Airport signage and cues, pictograms that are understood internationally, play a unifying role throughout the installation. And of course, the suitcase, the emblematic travel accessory, is the key object.
As they enter, visitors pick up a suitcase that they carry throughout the space, setting it down in specific locations to trigger audio-visual content — images, testimonials, words, music, and stories of the people who lived, and who still live, in Québec. The suitcase, which symbolically holds everything that travellers have brought with them to the city over the past four centuries, becomes a mechanism for encounters with the waves of people who have passed through or stayed on to shape the city’s image.