.................VOICE
I love exploring and finding traces of our industrial past. I photograph things that will probably be discarded and structures that may be demolished or recycled. I am awed by these majestic buildings and fascinated by details that are examples of craftsmanship and skills that are rapidly disappearing.

Historian Steven High raised an issue in his latest book ‘Corporate Wasteland’ that got me thinking:“…urban explorers are more interested in aesthetics than history.” This is true because urban explorers are not necessarily historians.

His statement challenged me to develop this web project. I used my oral history research on Italian industrial workers in Ville Emard as a starting point. I went looking through my photos searching for images that conveyed some detail from their stories. I limited my selection of photos to Saint-Patrick Street around Ville Emard because the men I spoke to, worked in the industries along this street. The result is an oral history approach to looking at industrial artifacts. The Latin meaning of this word reminds us that it's not about objects, it's about people. (arte by skill + factum to do).

I decided to use a sensorial point of view as a blueprint to build this project, because this is how we learn about the world around us, through our senses.

All these artifacts are time-specific to the industrial time that once was. The subjects of these photos can’t be removed from their natural environment, otherwise they lose their meaning. I invite you to look at the artifacts only as a starting point and I encourage you to think about the people behind them. That's when they start speaking.

Joyce Pillarella
Montreal, December 2006