Tom Lachance
While the folkloric culture still takes an important place in the collective imaginary by filling multiple purposes, such as reaffirming an identity as an individual or as a group, reviving old memories of a lost time and protecting a cultural legacy, the relation between a contemporary individual, assailed by many other influences led by globalization, and its folkloric heritage is growing more and more distant. Folklore then becomes this old thing with which we can’t relate anymore other than perpetuating clichés at specific times of the year, like during holidays.
My initial idea was to take as inspirations folklores from both my homeland perspective (Quebec) and a foreign one (Ukraine) as a departure to create a whole new imaginary one. As I was doing my research and listening to many samples of these music, it shocked me to realize that I really didn’t know at all what was the folklore of my own country. When I got to the point of composing and focusing more on the materials themselves I had imagined through the process of research than on the purpose of it, I arranged them in my own way of creating a form and reusing or transforming them. The result is that I have not created an imaginary folklore as I was expecting, but a fake one. It is not a real folklore, nor it has the potential to be in an imaginary world. It is only my own distant and modern point of view on a past that struggles to exist in a contemporary world.