Michel Simonsen is born in 1976 in Montréal, the year of the Olympic games, of a Norwegian mother and an Ukrainian father. During his first young months, they live in a house in Brooklyn, New York City. But they soon come back to settle in Montréal’s east end, where people learn to speak and write in French. Michel successively wants to be palaeontologist, private detective, hockey goaltender. He goes to school as a full-time student for sixteen years, after which he retires. He’ll rather work as newspaper boy, night cashier, pump attendant, signaller on a racetrack, waiter. Under the pseudonym Jean Giscagne, for a couple of years now, he has regularly slipped on his old waiter tuxedo for shows, book or music album launches, award galas, fundraiser evenings and other chic events of the local artistic scene where he presided as master of ceremonies. It also often happened to him to appear in solo as the interpreter of his own creations during poetry and performance cabarets numbers. Michel has an interest in urban spaces that are solidly built. Places or things constructed by man but which, with time, have lost their meaning, apparently forgotten or unused.