Working with archival documents and the current-day morphology of the Grey Nuns' site, Dr Cynthia Hammond, Dr Shauna Janssen, in collaboration with Dr Jill Didur, will curate a series of installations and performances that speak directly to the rich heritage of a specific urban landscape: the gardens of the Grey Nuns' Motherhouse, now part of the Concordia University downtown campus. Visitors will have the opportunity to explore the lost working gardens of the Grey Nuns. As with other such gardens across Quebec and North America, the Motherhouse gardens were a place where women religious exercised and shared botanical and medical knowledge, as well as met the subsistence needs of a large and diverse community. Combining the histories of landscape design and use, women's role in the creation of the built environment, and creative and critical responses to the often-intangible heritage of women's work, Hammond, Janssen, and Didur's project will also showcase interdisciplinary, creative work across multiple departments and two faculties at Concordia.

Site-responsive art has an innate capacity to explore a place's history and heritage. 'The Garden of the Grey Nuns' will provide a portal into this piece of Montreal's past, making palpable the ways that historical women shaped the spaces of this city. And, as an event that will take place at night, it will provide a space and time of enchantment, as conference participants move through artists' and performers' reflections on the daily life of another time.

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Important note: Delegates need to sign-up for the opening ceremony in order to attend this event.