December 6 special commemoration and exhibit at McGill
On December 6, 1999, the McGill Centre for Research and Teaching on Women, the McGill Womens Union, the Sexual Assault Centre of the McGill Students Society and the Students Society of McGill University itself will join together to remember the 14 women engineering students who were slain at the Université de Montréal ten years ago.
The Commemorative Vigil will begin at 3 pm in Moyse Hall in the Arts Building on the downtown campus. It will be available for those who wish to reflect and remember the tragic event that occurred 10 years ago. At 3:30 pm, the gathering will be addressed by Dr Lauraine Leblanc, author of Pretty in Punk and Professor Barbara Godard, Visiting Scholar at the MCRTW from York University, who is currently doing research on Memorializing. Judy Rebick, past president of NAC and a journalist on Newsworld, is expected, but not confirmed at this point.
Outside Moyse Hall in the handsome concourse of the Arts building an unusual art installation made by Ms Susan Fowler in memory of the 14 women will be on display. As Ms Fowler describes it:
"The installation is fragile: all shadows, illusions and emptiness. 14 names, cut out, tumbling, transforming into a fluttering veil of disconnected letters. Its whiteness may evoke the time of year the women died, its shadows, the darkness of the event, and its absence of colour and constant movement, the lives lost which live on in spirit.
"While I worked on the piece, the women came to feel less and less like strangers and more and more like sisters engaged in playing out their particular roles in the evolution of our culture at the end of the century. For all its quietness, my most constant temptation during the making of it was to destroy its serenity by throwing a bucket of red paint across it. This would have resulted in something more artful, perhaps, something more visually arresting. But I was conscious of not wanting to confuse artworld considerations and opinions with the gravity of the event. I was also held in check by a sense of the futility of responding to violence with violence and in consideration of those families of the victims who want to remember those who died as they knew them in life, rather than by the manner in which they died."
