CHÂTEAU MIRABEL -MIRABEL AIRPORT

Our first visit to this site was in October 2020. It takes around 45 minutes to drive from downtown Montreal to the location of what once was the world’s largest airport by property area. We got to the site by following Google maps, but there was not much to see. The main structure of this airport - built in 1970, opened in 1975 and shut down in 2004 - was demolished in 2016. The only vestiges left of the original infrastructure are the control tower, the airport’s runway grid, and a piece of the covered walkway which once connected the main terminal with a hotel. It is precisely the abandoned Château Mirabel building that captured our interest. The sounds of water leaking from the building can be heard when the wind is not blowing strongly. Through its windows the curtains of the hotel rooms can still be seen, room lamps, maybe a desk or a table are still laid here and there. The image of the section of the elevated walkway coming from nowhere and going straight into the hotel building reinforces the feeling of nostalgia produced by the brutalist style of the building, and the thought of a vision of modernity that at the end, left nothing but emptiness. In November 2021 we finally gained access to Château Mirabel and its atrium. The building is currently used as a place to store materials and equipment by a construction company building a huge warehouse on the neighboring site.

The old runway is being used as a place to test race cars. Known as the International Center of Advance Racing (Circuit ICAR); this facility features multiple circuits used by NASCAR and Formula 1. It feels like a 4 km playground. 97.000 acres of expropriated land, today mostly empty, that once were farms, homes, shops, cultural centers, and schools. To preserve the memory of the villages of Saint-Augustin, Saint-Benoît, Saint-Hermas, Saint-Janvier-de-Blainville, Sainte-Scholastique, Saint-Canut, Sainte-Monique and Saint-Janvier-de-la-Croix, is the only way through which the former residents of this area have to gain reparation for having been displaced. As the Québécois poet Pierre Nepveu would put it, today Mirabel has become an espace tragique (tragic space), an empty, dehumanized space, where nobody, with the same sense of belonging to that land, will ever return. But as an empty space, this vast field has the potential to become something else. This falls on the shoulders of the present, where we have the choice to decide what kind of memories we want to create for the people in the future. With the history of expropriation of this land, one can only wonder if there were other cycles of expropriation that took place before the communities that were displaced by the Mirabel airport project. Were there Indigenous people who were also displaced in the past in the process of settling Euro-Canadian families? Notwithstanding, by preserving memory and rewriting history we could end the cycle of disrupting human and non-human networks, moving away from the spirit of a kind of progress that first needs to destroy, in order to construct.