(image and text borrowed from the Elizabeth Frye Society of Quebec website)

The Agir par l’Imaginaire project:

For several years, the workers of the Société Elizabeth Fry du Québec (SEFQ) have been exploring artistic creation with criminalized women, incarcerated or in the community, and have seen that these different activities offered to the women are met with great interest.    From art therapy to creativity workshops, from contemporary dance to screenings of documentary films, these women have been able to benefit from these activities by expressing themselves and engaging in self-discovery, self-validation, learning, undertaking, and exploring.

Witnesses to unique and sometimes very moving moments, the workers have unified themselves with the desire to make this experience public and therefore sensitize the community to the reality of criminalized people.   These meetings were the seeds of a small project, Agir par l’imaginaire, which today has become an enterprise implicating Engrenage Noir projet LEVIER (a non-profit artistic organization), a dozen artists. a hundred women, and many prestigious sponsors such as Condition féminine Canada, the Canadian Arts Council, Ministère de la Culture, des Communications et de la Condition féminine et la Ville de Montréal, la Fondation du Grand Montréal, la Congrégation des Sœurs de Sainte-Anne, la fondation Thérèse-Casgrain and la Fondation Solstice. This project is a real challenge to coordinate taking all of the different partners into account – participants, artists and prisons – and has been on-going since the summer of 2008.

To read more about the project … click here