Glooscap

Glooscap is the name of a town imagined by Alain Bublex and based on a real location, Passsamaquody Bay, situated́ in Canada. He is therefore its ‘inventor’, as when we say in French that an archaeologist finding treasure is the inventor of the discovery. Glosscap does not exist. Nevertheless Glosscap has everything of a real town. Glooscap has never existed́, nevertheless Glosscap has a history, typical of modern North American towns. Faced with the town archives, as produced by the artist, we struggle to distinguish between real and fake, especially when photographs lead us to believe in the existence of an official vehicle, bearing the logo of the town and its ‘Survey and Mapping Department’.

But still, Glooscap is a daydream. A fiction, an almost perfect copy of a possible reality. It is not a utopian town: that would express a desire to transcend the modernist model of towns like Saint-Nazaire (grid layouts, functionalism of buildings and social space…) and therefore be a historical ‘correction’. Quite the opposite, the story of Glooscap, i.e. the historical time stretching from the origin of the town to the present day, is in itself the artist’s subject. What Glooscap tries to imitate is Time.

So Glooscap deliberately offers no direct re-reading of history, of the development of modern towns, of their architecture, of choices made in their planning. Instead it tries to take what is common and disappear in the ‘almost real’, that is to say – in the plausible. But, in the manner of Borgès’s town, it so much resembles the world that it becomes the World.