MARISA PORTOLESE

Marisa is currently an associate professor in photography at Concordia university, where she specializes in representation and portraiture, art, and human experiences related to physical and psychological environments. Through photography as an artistic medium, she questions the larger issues pertaining to identity, performance, and spectatorship. She says: “I am interested in the relationship between the fixed photographic portrait and the moving image [...] I try to capture the narrative potential within each still image”. Her current project, Goose village, focuses on retracing her father’s Italian immigrant history in Montréal and how the expropriation of his home neighborhood, Goose Village, affects identity, memory, and community. Linking this family history to the Expo 67 event and poor urban planning of the late 60s, Marisa uses oral history and urban landscapes to reflect on the physical and psychical erasure of working-class communities in the city. Through interviews and visual art, she attempts to reconstruct a narrative of belonging to the city post-expropriation, and documents how the empty space of the former Goose Village neighbourhood can be reappropriated. Marisa also holds prestigious awards, and produced many photography projects that she exhibited in America and Europe.