This story originally appeared on September 25, 2025 in Community Service, an independent biweekly newsletter featuring a curated selection of art and design events in Montreal.

Marie Ségolène C. Brault is a performance artist, curator and writer based in Montreal. She is also the co-founder of Calliope, an ephemeral reading series, and Espace Maurice, a gallery apartment in the Village.

I first met Marie at Gia Vin & Grill, where I convinced her table to sip $26 tiramisu martinis. Since then, I have been fascinated with Marie’s ability to just go for it, and we’ve since bonded over our love for art.

Could you start by telling me a little bit more about your practice? Both right now and also its evolution since you started.

I'm a performance artist, and a writer for the most part. At first, I was really interested in rituals in my work and ruptures and time specifically due to trauma. I had a traumatic loss in my life, and that led me to explore these moments of cognitive dissonance that happened from grief shock, and use fragmented writing to explore that sentiment, and then realize through this fragmentation that it would open up potentials for new narratives to emerge and regeneration in a certain sense creatively.

At the time, most of my performance practice was ritualistic, video-based, often taking place in nature, and playing with tropes of femininity and symbology and religious inspirations, because I was processing all of that.

When I got to Chicago for my Masters I kept working on these performances, and they became more and more intricate, with multiple parts and installations. I became more interested in the performance itself in public versus the resulting video. At the end of my degree, I became really interested in Christian rituals from ancient Roman times where strangers were invited to share a meal and discuss their spirituality. I was very interested in how hospitality could be integrated with performance and food and sharing.

You know this already, but you're truly a fantastic host. Last time I went over to your house we had martinis and smoked oysters that I've never eaten anywhere else. I think that also really makes sense with Espace Maurice, the fact that you had a gallery in your apartment, you kind of have to love hosting to be able to have people constantly in and out of your space.

And I was looking at a lot of practices of radical hospitality and contemporary art and how they could help heal trauma collectively. I did this show with a friend from school. We ended up doing this meal in the garden of this apartment gallery that my friend had in Chicago. We set up this weird installation, we had white clothes and brought out meals on pieces of wood. It was very romantic.

That's one of the big things that I see in your practice, and in your life really. You take things that can be so ordinary but you infuse it with intention and therefore make it art. How do you take, let's say, a shared meal with people and decide that it's an art piece?

I was exploring this a lot at that time. It wasn't truly what I wanted it to be because having meals and having people participate, it's really expensive. And the financial aspect kind of blocked it. To have to charge someone $250 to come share a meal with me would completely negate the point of what I was doing. But then to try to have the most ethical approach to every single element in the experience and to think of the provenance of the food as an extension of this hospitality action or collective care, it kind of implies that you need to put in that much money. The way I was approaching it before was to interject the meal with readings.

How did the pandemic change your role as a performance artist?

It made me want to stop making art altogether. I kind of got really confused and realized that whatever I was doing creatively wasn't really contributing to the extent that I wanted it to.

What do you mean contributing? Like, community-wise?

Yes, community. I got to a dead end. So I worked for a nonprofit (focused on) food accessibility in NDG and volunteered at Resilience at the beginning of the pandemic. And I wasn't really interested in making work anymore. I figured that, yeah, there was just a limit to how much I could contribute, and it made it feel pointless for some reason.

Tell me more about Espace Maurice. What made you want to open the gallery? Do you think it's related or did it just happen?

Now it feels obviously related, but at the time, I just saw the space and it was so conducive to it, and I remembered my friend had this apartment gallery in Chicago and how cool that idea was. It's very common in Chicago. The history of it is very sedimented in community apartment galleries. There are some really big galleries that started off that way. In New York as well, there's a bunch of projects like that.

What was your goal when you first opened it?

I had a few people I really wanted to work with. I was [and still am] really interested in performance and thought it could be cool to dedicate the space to performance ephemera without ever showing performance itself. That's something I still haven't done. I haven't done any readings or performance events based in this space.

I realized that it was really limiting if I only wanted to work with performance artists in Montreal, because there was not really that many practices that lend themselves to what I was thinking in terms of archival ephemera, how to present ephemera in a space. If I had done that, it would've become so insanely conceptual and people would have engaged with work in such different ways.

I ended up getting really interested in these practices that are way more spiritual, way more intuitive. The painters I've worked with, they have this very profoundly intuitive relationship to their medium that is really not based in concept as much as it is in the act of making.

I realized that I've made work way more in that way, or that it connected to me on a way deeper level than trying to create conceptual work. Although some of them have that as part of their practice too, it's just like the impulse doesn't come from that or something.

I totally understand. It's almost like you create this work because you have to, not because you have something to show by creating it.

I think what ended up happening is just that I kept meeting younger artists or artists that don't make from that place at all, that don't really necessarily think of their process in that way. If you look at the work that's been shown in the gallery and wonder what the true design is, I think there is a very spiritual thing going on.

One of the first times we met was at Espace Loulou for your reading series Calliope. And your reading was still steeped in performance. How do you marry your performance practice with your writing practice?

My writing in my performance work is very confessional. The gestures I do often have me in a sort of vulnerable state. Now it's more humour, but it could also be tragic. I'm less heady about shit now. Calliope was fun and festive.

This story originally appeared on September 25, 2025 in Community Service, an independent biweekly newsletter featuring a curated selection of art and design events in Montreal.

Marie Ségolène C. Brault is a performance artist, curator and writer based in Montreal. She is also the co-founder of Calliope, an ephemeral reading series, and Espace Maurice, a gallery apartment in the Village.

I first met Marie at Gia Vin & Grill, where I convinced her table to sip $26 tiramisu martinis. Since then, I have been fascinated with Marie’s ability to just go for it, and we’ve since bonded over our love for art.

Could you start by telling me a little bit more about your practice? Both right now and also its evolution since you started.

I'm a performance artist, and a writer for the most part. At first, I was really interested in rituals in my work and ruptures and time specifically due to trauma. I had a traumatic loss in my life, and that led me to explore these moments of cognitive dissonance that happened from grief shock, and use fragmented writing to explore that sentiment, and then realize through this fragmentation that it would open up potentials for new narratives to emerge and regeneration in a certain sense creatively.

At the time, most of my performance practice was ritualistic, video-based, often taking place in nature, and playing with tropes of femininity and symbology and religious inspirations, because I was processing all of that.

When I got to Chicago for my Masters I kept working on these performances, and they became more and more intricate, with multiple parts and installations. I became more interested in the performance itself in public versus the resulting video. At the end of my degree, I became really interested in Christian rituals from ancient Roman times where strangers were invited to share a meal and discuss their spirituality. I was very interested in how hospitality could be integrated with performance and food and sharing.

You know this already, but you're truly a fantastic host. Last time I went over to your house we had martinis and smoked oysters that I've never eaten anywhere else. I think that also really makes sense with Espace Maurice, the fact that you had a gallery in your apartment, you kind of have to love hosting to be able to have people constantly in and out of your space.

And I was looking at a lot of practices of radical hospitality and contemporary art and how they could help heal trauma collectively. I did this show with a friend from school. We ended up doing this meal in the garden of this apartment gallery that my friend had in Chicago. We set up this weird installation, we had white clothes and brought out meals on pieces of wood. It was very romantic.

That's one of the big things that I see in your practice, and in your life really. You take things that can be so ordinary but you infuse it with intention and therefore make it art. How do you take, let's say, a shared meal with people and decide that it's an art piece?

I was exploring this a lot at that time. It wasn't truly what I wanted it to be because having meals and having people participate, it's really expensive. And the financial aspect kind of blocked it. To have to charge someone $250 to come share a meal with me would completely negate the point of what I was doing. But then to try to have the most ethical approach to every single element in the experience and to think of the provenance of the food as an extension of this hospitality action or collective care, it kind of implies that you need to put in that much money. The way I was approaching it before was to interject the meal with readings.

How did the pandemic change your role as a performance artist?

It made me want to stop making art altogether. I kind of got really confused and realized that whatever I was doing creatively wasn't really contributing to the extent that I wanted it to.

What do you mean contributing? Like, community-wise?

Yes, community. I got to a dead end. So I worked for a nonprofit (focused on) food accessibility in NDG and volunteered at Resilience at the beginning of the pandemic. And I wasn't really interested in making work anymore. I figured that, yeah, there was just a limit to how much I could contribute, and it made it feel pointless for some reason.

Tell me more about Espace Maurice. What made you want to open the gallery? Do you think it's related or did it just happen?

Now it feels obviously related, but at the time, I just saw the space and it was so conducive to it, and I remembered my friend had this apartment gallery in Chicago and how cool that idea was. It's very common in Chicago. The history of it is very sedimented in community apartment galleries. There are some really big galleries that started off that way. In New York as well, there's a bunch of projects like that.

What was your goal when you first opened it?

I had a few people I really wanted to work with. I was [and still am] really interested in performance and thought it could be cool to dedicate the space to performance ephemera without ever showing performance itself. That's something I still haven't done. I haven't done any readings or performance events based in this space.

I realized that it was really limiting if I only wanted to work with performance artists in Montreal, because there was not really that many practices that lend themselves to what I was thinking in terms of archival ephemera, how to present ephemera in a space. If I had done that, it would've become so insanely conceptual and people would have engaged with work in such different ways.

I ended up getting really interested in these practices that are way more spiritual, way more intuitive. The painters I've worked with, they have this very profoundly intuitive relationship to their medium that is really not based in concept as much as it is in the act of making.

I realized that I've made work way more in that way, or that it connected to me on a way deeper level than trying to create conceptual work. Although some of them have that as part of their practice too, it's just like the impulse doesn't come from that or something.

I totally understand. It's almost like you create this work because you have to, not because you have something to show by creating it.

I think what ended up happening is just that I kept meeting younger artists or artists that don't make from that place at all, that don't really necessarily think of their process in that way. If you look at the work that's been shown in the gallery and wonder what the true design is, I think there is a very spiritual thing going on.

One of the first times we met was at Espace Loulou for your reading series Calliope. And your reading was still steeped in performance. How do you marry your performance practice with your writing practice?

My writing in my performance work is very confessional. The gestures I do often have me in a sort of vulnerable state. Now it's more humour, but it could also be tragic. I'm less heady about shit now. Calliope was fun and festive.