Palimpsest

R

ue Saint-Denis after the first snow. Paint flakes from the facade of a recently closed cafe. Under the new beige, a blue curve resists—the ghost of a mural I never saw finished. I stop. It’s the kind of imperfection my father would have photographed.

He once wrote, « Un mur s’effrite. Il garde la trace des affiches passées, comme un palimpseste de promesses oubliées. » A wall crumbles. It keeps the trace of old posters, a palimpsest of forgotten promises.

I take out my phone, but the camera can’t catch what he saw—the tension between loss and persistence, the balance between spontaneity and care. What survives isn’t the colour but the act of looking. Imperfect, incomplete.

When I first entered his apartment, three days after he last left it, I found a stencil of Mozart still on the cutting mat, half cut, the blade resting beside it. Around it on the floor lay printed portraits of the same face—Mozart multiplied, auditioning for a wall that would never come. I will never know why he chose him, or where he planned to paint him. The room felt paused mid-gesture, the kind of pause only the living make. He had gone out for a short walk and never returned.

We left everything untouched for days, my siblings and I, moving through the apartment like curators in a museum of intention.

The bed beside the stencil was made, ready for another night of sleep, the pillows aligned as if waiting for dreams about the 27 Club and artists perched on scaffoldings. We left everything untouched for days, my siblings and I, moving through the apartment like curators in a museum of intention. And a museum it was, full to the brim with a unique diversity of colours and textures, of emotions and attention.

When we finally lifted the stencil, it felt like erasing his next thought—the last proof of a man who still had a plan, a wall in mind, a future tense. I still have it, somewhere in the hundreds of papers I brought back, drawings and stories he's left behind. It still smells of new paper and of a foggy April morning up in the trees, his cabane dans les arbres, as he called his apartment in the parasol pines.

He lived in Montpellier, France, 6,000 kilometres southeast of here, where light is carried by cicadas and sparrows. I live where winter and summer compete for the most extreme season. We almost never walked the same streets, my papa and I, yet our routes cross in the margins of things erased: a sign half painted over, a name no one reads anymore, the taste of a ripe melon among the cicadas. We were both, in our way, collectors of the provisional.

So are cities. Cities keep people by forgetting them slowly, by remembering them back for a time only to forget. Their walls store the residue of gestures—paint, posters, repairs—and return them to those, like my papa, who notice. That reciprocity is what I mean when I say the city remembers you back. It’s endurance through time, through decay and revitalization.

My father’s archive is a blog called Sur ma route. The banner still loads: « Qui m’aime me suive »—who loves me, follow me. He meant it playfully, a call to readers, not disciples. He would have insisted on that. Each post is a small act of witnessing: a tag drying on concrete, the shadow of a plane tree, the silence after a festival ends. He wrote about street art, but also about weather, travel, and the ethics of attention. His camera treated walls the way some people treat faces, with tenderness and care.

After he died, I began to read the posts like field notes from a long urban study. He knew intuitively what my discipline names. Where I cite Maurice Halbwachs on collective memory, he walked, photographed, and trusted the street to explain itself.

Translation changes the temperature of his words. In French they feel lighter, following the rhythm of poetry. In English they harden into statements, doctrines.

« L’éphémère est l’essence même du contemporain, » he wrote once—the ephemeral is the essence of the contemporary. Translation changes the temperature of his words. In French they feel lighter, following the rhythm of poetry. In English they harden into statements, doctrines. I keep wondering if I’m mistranslating not his sentences but his tone—his way of never sounding certain even when he was right, of always proposing and never stating. He wasn’t theorizing. He was describing a peeling sticker on a lamppost, one he knew would be gone by morning, ripped, stolen, or taken by the rain.

Reading him now, I recognize the method behind the man: observation as affection, classification as mourning. His posts move from graffiti crews in Montpellier to a collage session in Montreal, from Verdanson’s concrete canal to a cafe window in New Orleans. Everywhere he went, he found the same truth: art begins where permanence ends.

He saw the world without framing it as work, an ease I used to envy. For me, fieldwork became both vocation and pretext. He walked for pleasure, open to awe and the unpredictable. I walk to prove the city cares, that people matter, that trust carries all. Still, when I reread his entries, I hear the cadence that shaped my own.

The map of his city becomes an anatomy of seeing, and I understand that my inheritance isn’t blood or belief but a way of looking that refuses to turn a blind eye to the underlying dynamics of care and control.

Maurice Halbwachs wrote that urban memory is a collective phenomenon—held not in individuals but in spatial forms that outlive them. My father understood that intuitively. Yet, when I trace my father’s routes through his photographs, his blog entries, the collective narrows to a single gaze. The map of his city becomes an anatomy of seeing, and I understand that my inheritance isn’t blood or belief but a way of looking that refuses to turn a blind eye to the underlying dynamics of care and control.

Inheritance is not what survives, it never has been. Inheritance is how attention moves through cities and between walls, continuing a conversation the dead can no longer hold.

His city was built on limestone and promises. Walls powdered in summer, heat rising off facades the colour of bread. He walked it the way a surveyor might, except his measurements were light encounters. A laugh shared with a stranger, a ladder held steady.

Through it all, a scar that some see as a festering wound of vandalism and selfishness and others as the breeding ground for the provisional, the uncurated, the spontaneous. Montpellier’s graffiti corridor—the Verdanson—runs like an open notebook through the city, its concrete walls rewritten daily.

« L’art dans la rue est par nature éphémère, » he wrote once. Street art is ephemeral by nature.

He was never nostalgic about that fragility. He admired it. To him, transience wasn’t loss, it was proof that the city still breathed and that he did too. Where others saw vandalism, he saw continuity—the wall as civic dialogue.

His philosophy fit what my discipline later called the informal city—the layer of unregulated, spontaneous gestures that coexist with zoning maps and heritage plaques. He didn’t need the vocabulary. He saw that decay and creation were inseparable forces. He liked to say that everyone was equal in the street, and maybe for a lens it was true. « Tout le monde est à égalité dans la rue, » he wrote once. Everyone is equal in the street. The wall doesn’t ask who you are or once were, it accepts every gesture. But he knew full well that the street is not an equalizer, that it exposes the cracks in the architecture of society. I think what he meant is that the street made him equal in value to those he admired. It stripped everything—everyone—down to the two dynamics of care and control, one that documents and notices, versus one that regulates and erases.

Attention itself is a kind of privilege—the right to linger, to occupy space without being questioned, the right to stand still in front of a wall.

Not everyone can stop to look without consequence like he could. In my alley, a sign reads « Défense de flâner, » do not linger. Attention itself is a kind of privilege—the right to linger, to occupy space without being questioned, the right to stand still in front of a wall. What he experienced as freedom, others do as risk.

The Verdanson that welcomed his camera is also where police patrol at night, its concrete banks are shelter for people without homes, its bridges marked by those the city prefers not to remember. The same wall that carries art also carries warning signs.

I’ve come to think that urban beauty and injustice grow from the same cracks. The politics of the wall is who gets to leave a trace, and who disappears between layers. His blog posts on the Verdanson read like minor ethnographies. The humidity under the bridge, the sound of aerosol shaking, the moss absorbing pigment. He noticed details that academic papers leave out—the heat in the wrist, the echo of traffic above.

One of his essays, Fucking méditation—Graffiti Saves the World, sits halfway between manifesto and prayer. He wrote:

« Les pires ennemis de l’humanité, c’est l’avidité et l’ordre. Ses meilleurs amis sont la créativité et le graffiti. » 
The worst enemies of humanity are greed and order. Its best friends are creativity and graffiti.

It hit me the first time I read it. He didn’t mean chaos for chaos’s sake. He meant disorder as an ethical stance: a refusal to let uniformity erase what’s alive. In that sense, his walks were a moral practice. He photographed not to own, but to witness what was vanishing under efficiency and tidiness, to add a layer to the ephemeral.

Montpellier rewards that kind of seeing. It’s a city that performs its own erosion—stucco peeling, vines overtaking facades, a sense that architecture ages like people do, unevenly. When I visited after he was gone, I followed his routes: Verdanson, Peyrou, Beaux-Arts. Montpellier was the first city I knew by heart and the first to estrange me. I had grown up among its limestone walls, its sun-burnt shutters, and narrow arteries that smelled of dust and jasmine. Returning after he was gone, the familiar turned spectral—the stones lighter, the air too bright, the distances slightly rearranged. I kept thinking I had taken a wrong turn on a street I’d known since childhood. Time and loss had erased its geography.

In summer, heat rose off the facades until the city blurred at its own edges. The walls didn’t decay, they shed. A slow exfoliation of light. Even the graffiti obeyed that rhythm—painted at dusk, half erased by noon.

Montpellier has always built itself on vanishing ground: medieval stone over pavements of the Via Domitia, plaster over promise. The jasmine climbing the balconies released its scent like memory itself—overwhelming, then gone before I could remember it.

Walking those streets, I understood that transience was the city’s genius. It survived by performing its own disappearance, graceful and deliberate, as if loss were its native language. And maybe it was, for Montpellier has constantly rewritten itself, never erasing the slate completely, building on the decaying.

Standing in an alley, back in Montreal, I tried to match the texture of the wall to his photo from 2019. The colours were different—more turquoise, less rust—but the same streak of moisture ran from a crack near the base. For a moment, it felt like correspondence: the city finishing a sentence he’d begun.

Months after that trip, I learned that a mural of him had appeared in Montpellier. It stands on Rue Marie Müller, a quiet side street in the Quartier Méditerranée, painted by Bellus Bah in March 2023. In photographs, he’s exactly as I remember him—camera raised, turned slightly toward the light, his face open with concentration. The wall is pale concrete, the background an eruption of colour that seems to breathe. It looks less like a portrait than a conversation between pigments.

He would have grumbled and babbled, had he seen it. He would have hated being elegized, his intimate smile frozen for all to see his gentle core. Then we would have gone home to his tree house, and cried. Yet posthumous homages are not for the dead, they answer the need of the living for continuity, for believing that preserving a face in pigment honours a man who hated attention.

I’ve never seen it in person. I know it only through images friends and strangers send me: a flash of turquoise behind the lens, a new tag looping across his chest, a vine beginning to climb the plaster above his head. Each photograph arrives as a small weather report from a place still speaking his name. JC, they called him. The mural has already changed. At least one change, that I know of, probably many, I hope. Another artist—my father would insist on that label—has tagged part of it, a streak of red and yellow cutting through his shirt. He would have loved that. The desecration of the never sacred. The painting refusing to stay whole, becoming a palimpsest like the walls he photographed.

His image endures the way he wanted art to endure—not protected, but rewritten, layered, open to chance, to the elements. Montpellier keeps answering him in its own accent of decay.

When I look at it now, I imagine the bakery nearby, the scent of jasmine heavy in the heat, the sound of aerosol shaking, mixing with laughter. His image endures the way he wanted art to endure—not protected, but rewritten, layered, open to chance, to the elements. Montpellier keeps answering him in its own accent of decay. One day the paint will flake completely off, the vines will cover the outline of his face, the photos online will be archived and he will be gone for good. Montpellier knew his language better than I ever did. It learned to speak a living tongue where I study it like a dead language that will never be spoken.

I’ve realized that my academic frameworks—temporality, informality, weak ties—were only translations of what he practiced intuitively: attention without authority, care without fanfare. Where I draft typologies of participation or cite fieldwork protocols, he trusted presence as its own form of method. His ethics were local, minute, improvised. He believed the street itself contained the answers. Every peeling layer, every tag erased by another, was evidence of the city thinking aloud.

What I call “participant observation” and “reflexivity,” he simply called walking. His discipline was patience, his rigour, affection. I’ve spent years formalizing what he performed daily: the slow discipline of noticing without intervening. To no avail.

I used to think that scholarship and intimacy were opposites. Now I understand they can be two dialects of the same language. Montpellier’s musical “rose”(pronounced “reuse”) to Montreal’s deep “rose” (pronounced “rôse”). He practiced theory by other means. What I learned in books, he had already tested on walls—proof that knowledge can move through tenderness, and that care, too, is a form of research.

Montreal’s walls have a different kind of light than Montpellier's—less gold, more fuzzy dampness. Where his photographs showed limestone burning white, mine show brick sweating through frost. In winter, colour contracts, the city hides itself. But absence sharpens vision. What disappears teaches you how to look, really look.

My father last visited in the autumn. Leaves mostly fallen, pumpkins starting to rot. He wrote:

« Le charme de Montréal réside dans un équilibre subtil entre l’ordre et le désordre, le soigné et le négligé. »
The charm of Montreal lies in a subtle balance between order and disorder, the careful and the careless.

That line has stayed with me more faithfully than any photograph. He saw in a few days what I’d never named: the city’s refusal to choose between control and accident. Even its perfection is slightly out of square.

When I walk Saint-Denis now, following in his steps, I recognize his phrasing everywhere—the equilibrium between the swept and the forgotten. A mural half restored beside a window patched with tape. Lilac branches pushing through a fence, perfuming the exhaust. Pigeons balanced on the edge of a « À louer » sign.

Once, years before he died, he came to Montreal carrying a rolled piece of paper in his backpack, in the summer that time. It was not his own work—a word he would’ve hated—but a friend’s, the artist Noon. A collage meant for a wall here, a few feet across. He had written to a local street artist he admired, and they met one evening on Saint-Laurent to paste it onto the facade of Eva B, the thrift store whose exterior is a perpetually evolving canvas of posters and wheat-pastes. I don’t remember why I didn’t go with him. Maybe I even invented an excuse. His eagerness annoyed me back then. It only ceased to annoy me when he ceased to be. He sent me a photo afterward: the piece freshly glued, half-visible among other images—a woman’s face, a fragment of type, a corner of sky.

I think of that wheat-paste whenever I pass Eva B. It’s a living organism now, layered dozens deep, paper over paper, art over weather. His friend’s collage must still be there somewhere, sealed beneath strangers’ work, my dad with it. I like to imagine it breathing quietly under the glue, participating in the slow sediment of the city. It’s his only Montreal address, hidden and intact.

Memory in cities moves the way moisture does through brick—quietly, through cracks barely visible. It bridges lives that never meet, stories that never unfold.

I carry his vocabulary like you would a kitten, carefully and with dedication. Each time I see a new wall, I hear him again: « Tout le monde est à égalité dans la rue. » Here, equality means exposure. Snow, graffiti, and bureaucracy fall on us all in the same slow layers. The wall doesn’t care who paints it or who leaves it bare. That indifference is its fairness.

Memory in cities moves the way moisture does through brick—quietly, through cracks barely visible. It bridges lives that never meet, stories that never unfold. Paint from one decade seeps into another, greetings pass through walls thin as weather. Cities remember in the same way: through proximity without intimacy, neighbours whose steps echo through the walls and whose faces are never seen. What lasts in a city is rarely monumental. It's the faint signal that passes quietly between strangers, words left unsaid, eyes that never meet.

My father’s photographs belong to that web—small gestures bridging distance, transmitting memory sideways, backward, and through time.

Sometimes I take notes in my head in the field-report style I inherited from him. Date, temperature, smell, condition. Then I file it in the imaginary drawers he helped me create to organize my unruly thoughts.

   Site: alley behind rue Marie-Anne.

   Material: brick, cement, posters layered five deep.

   Observation: yellow paint exposed where frost lifted the top sheet.

   Remark: it is beautiful in its decay.

It feels bureaucratic until the last line, and then it becomes devotion. That’s the secret both of us understood: that classification can be a form of tenderness.

Montreal remembers through neglect. Graffiti fades slower than policy. Administrations change and nothing changes. Walls preserve what archives forget. Every spring, the melt exposes last year’s paintings like half-developed film. I think he would have loved that—the city renewing itself through cycles of temporary amnesia. How he would have loved Montreal in the spring. He called transience the essence of the contemporary. Here, it’s also a climate, for now.

I sometimes imagine sending him these notes. He would answer with a photograph, probably of a shadow, or a rant about the economy. Or a thumbs up. Instead I keep walking, testing what the city retains. He documented light falling on stucco, I document sound against brick. But I can never see how he saw. I notice the care more than the spontaneous. I think the city will not remember me like it remembers him.

Once, during the spring melt, a sheet of ice peeled off a wall and exposed a faint layer of blue—the same shade he called ciel d’hiver in his photos, for he had once discovered the blueness of the arctic sky. I stood there too long, trying to decide whether it was coincidence or reply. Coincidence, I decided. He would have disagreed. The water kept dripping down the colour, like a signature dissolving in slow motion. Between us, two surfaces learning how to listen in a way we never did for each other.

After he died, I printed small stickers of his artist’s signature—Old One—and began placing them around the city. I started on my street, near a tag that said « Je me souviens » then moved outward: lampposts, mailbox lids, the backs of stop signs. The front even, a few times. Each one felt like a quiet handshake between cities and kin. It felt thrilling, transcendental. I slipped sheets of them into the pockets of friends leaving Montreal, asking them to scatter them wherever they went—Lisbon, Noumea, Mexico City.

It isn’t memorial work, exactly. It’s continuation. The stickers don’t claim authorship, they restore circulation. His name keeps travelling the way he did—without permission, without destination. I imagine them weathering away, slowly, until the adhesive gives and the wind takes them. That, too, would have pleased him: his artist signature becoming a migratory species, a swallow in the spring, an informal republic of memory, moving wherever attention still lands.

I used to think cities kept the dead alive through what remains visible. Now I understand the opposite: cities inherit our attention, not our body. They remember only the gestures, no matter how small.

Sometimes I think the internet was his last city. Sur ma route is still online, ungoverned by weather, its entries fixed like posters that never peel. I read them the way I walk: slowly, scanning for traces, for moments of beauty and care. Care for me, mostly. Each post is an act of endurance. He didn’t archive, he wandered.

I see the same Montpellier he walked—the canal, the facades, the shadows—but reassembled into a grid. The archive feels alive, still moving under my finger. There is no dust here. No humidity, no pigeons, only pixels that refuse to fade.

His Instagram profile is still public. It is the closest thing I have to visiting him. 5,000 posts, 1,500 followers. The small metrics of a life that kept noticing. The feed opens like a wall made of light: portraits in bright acrylic, corridors painted with wings, pavement turned into ancient scrolls. I see the same Montpellier he walked—the canal, the facades, the shadows—but reassembled into a grid. The archive feels alive, still moving under my finger. There is no dust here. No humidity, no pigeons, only pixels that refuse to fade. The permanence unsettles me. Hard to believe it survived him, or his ashes in the garrigue. The last post is a mural of a face looking outward, colours bleeding to the edges, as if the wall were staring back. He posted it hours before he collapsed. This post is now a memorial, the place his loved ones—some strangers to me—have gone to say goodbye.

RIP JC. Au revoir JC.

This wall is where people go to find him, now that he’s left the walls of the city. I’ve long wanted to leave a simple “papa,” just to make sure he knows I still think of him, incessantly. That I still think of him as my papa, that he will never be anything else to me.

I sometimes open his page while walking. The glare of the screen mixes with real light, his Montpellier overlapping my Montreal. A mural from Rue du Verdanson glows beside the brick of Saint-Denis, my reflection floats between them like an unintended collaboration. The algorithm keeps suggesting more walls, more colour, as if the city itself were curating his afterlife. He wouldn't like that. He never liked curation.

Now, I document everything, more than I ever did. I used to think that was the difference between us—he moved, I kept—but I’m no longer sure documentation isn’t just another form of loss, the act of enacting the very erasure it is trying to avoid.

Today, I never know if I’m keeping him or remaking him. Each paragraph I read and each I write feel like touching wet paint—risking the shape he left.

He believed in erosion, I believe in record. Between those instincts, memory takes form.

My father believed, as De Certeau once wrote, that walking is a kind of speech act. My father’s version was photography—sentences made of light. Mine is the counter-speech of notes and coordinates, words trying to keep up with what’s already vanishing. Between us runs a single grammar: attention as syntax.

When I write now, I sometimes mimic his rhythm without meaning to. Short sentences. Precise nouns. Light used as verb. He’d call it coincidence. I call it inheritance.

« Je viens partager de la beauté, des rencontres, et même parfois des réflexions. »
I come to share beauty, encounters, and sometimes reflections.

He meant generosity. I hear continuity—the act of keeping the conversation open between those who see and those who will. His Montpellier walls are gone, mine are still being painted. Yet I no longer think of the two cities as separate. They form a single surface folded over distance. When I walk past a wall here, I imagine his shadow extending across the Atlantic, tracing the same gesture. A correspondence written in texture, pigments, and light.

Montpellier taught him that walls speak through erasure. Montreal teaches me that absence has an accent and that accent sings. Where his light was dry and mineral, mine is diffuse, reflective—the colour of signage and thaw. Between them, a dialogue of climates: heat writing, cold preserving. The conversation continues even when one of us stops replying.

Cities reward those who listen obliquely. You never find what you seek, but you learn what the street remembers in your place.

He once wrote, « Sur ma route, je croise les traces de ceux qui m’ont précédé. » On my way, I encounter traces of those who came before me.

I think he meant art, but it applies to affection too. Maybe they're one and the same.

I sometimes wonder if a reader will walk through my version of Montreal the way I walk through his Montpellier—following, not knowing, sensing a presence in the margins. Maybe that’s what cities do best: hold unfinished conversations.

Snow melts here as stucco cracks there. Two climates answering each other, syllable by syllable. When I walk Montreal after the thaw, I imagine Montpellier sweating in sympathy—a single surface stretched across the geography of my life. The walls keep eroding at the speed of our remembering, patient, untranslatable, alive.

Maybe what survives was never beauty or memory, but the attention we pay to what moves long after we stop.

And so the colour will change by morning, your face will fade on rue Marie Müller, vines climbing up your lip, keeping alive the conversation you started.