Un Centre des Histoires
Site-specific project, Old Montreal, 1993

​Walter completed an MFA from Concordia University in Montreal in 1993. Her graduating thesis took a look at the idea of the Museum and the impossibility of representing a singular history of the city. Walter's "museum" occupied a vacant building at the foot of boulevard St Laurent in Old Montreal, where her images of the surrounding landscape were positioned as counterpoints to images of development sites in the area, to consider how ruins are metaphors for what is lost in the pursuit of Western ideals of progress.  

​His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Walter's research included this excerpt from Walter Benjamin's Angel of History published in "Illuminations," translation. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1969.