With Juliette Bibasse, Heather Davis, and Chantier Ecotechnologies

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Chantier Ecotechnologies and Speculative Life Cluster are pleased to welcome interdisciplinary researcher Heather Davis (United States) and independent curator Juliette Bibasse (Belgium).

This activity is part of the serie Environnemental Materials and/as Methods that includes a research residency at the Biolab led by the Chantier Ecotechnologies, dedicated to knowledge mobilization and collaborative approaches in material design. It is presented as part of the 2026 Interdisciplinary Encounters.

Program

1:00 p.m. │ Heather Davis Keynote : Producing Plastic Air

Heather Davis talk will explore how one plastic cup factory produces plastic air, and the consequences for how we think about waste, plastic, air quality, and bodily knowledge. Highlighting workers’ experiences in plastic production and decentring narratives of individual consumer choice, I draw attention to petrocapitalism’s structural violence, where harmful environmental conditions have been normalized and integrated into what it means to build a life in the image of the American Dream. I will explore this through the concept of “private air,” showing how air quality is monitored differently in workplaces than in the general environment.

3:00 p.m. │ Juliette Bibasse Keynote : Creating at Large — prototyping off the grid & slowing down

Juliette Bibasse & Joanie Lemercier crossed the Atlantic in March 2026 aboard a sail cargo vessel, slowly travelling for two weeks from France to New York without flying — a deliberate choice made in response to the environmental cost of air travel. A series of works has been made on board, in direct response to the physical experience of wind, waves, storms and swell, ever-changing light, shadows and reflections, transcribing moments of the ocean into thousands of ink drops and pixels.

At sea, you cannot trust data, even on a high-tech vessel full of sensors. You must observe reality. This journey was a wonderful context to question our growing tendency to use technology to sense the world rather than experience it directly: all the computing power in the world will never be sufficient to model a single drop of water.

In this presentation, Juliette Bibasse will share some of their recent works, the motivations behind this journey and the embodied experience they got from it. Through their studio works and the Solar Lab, their goal is to share a critical understanding of technology and to propose desirable alternatives. They believe the future should not rely on robots and datasets, as these fragile systems feel more like disposable gadgets than a serious roadmap for the future.

4:30 p.m. │ Roundtable Unsettling Sediments: Site-responsive, collaborative inquiry, and public engagement

This round table explores the material and methodological dimensions of a collective bio-based book-making process at the Speculative Life Biolab. Since fall 2025, the group has engaged in an art–science collaboration in Victoriaville, where sediment accumulation in the Réservoir Beaudet is increasingly threatening access to drinking water. The limited-edition artist’s book is being produced using locally collected sediments, algae, and plant matter, and functions both as a research outcome and a site-responsive medium. The discussion will examine how its fabrication and writing operate as a sensory, collaborative method of inquiry, as well as an ecotechnological form of engagement and public knowledge production.

With

• Martin Beauregard, Co-investigator member, UQAT
• Jean-François Côté, Collaborator member, UQTR
• Natalie Doonan, Collaborator member, UdeM
• Jonathan Hope, Collaborator member, UQAM
• Alice Jarry, Co-investigator member, Concordia University
• Marie-Christiane Mathieu, Co-investigator member, Université Laval
• Gisèle Trudel, Co-investor member, UQAM

About the Guest Speakers

Juliette Bibasse

With a background in artistic direction, Juliette Bibasse has a taste for simple and stripped-down aesthetics. Since 2009, she has been applying her skills to the digital art scene, creating connections and opportunities between artists, festivals and cultural actors.

As an artist’s producer, she collaborates on a wide range of projects: digital art festivals, installations, sculpture, and commissions for private events. She represented several international artists for their existing projects as well as new creations. She is now the head of Studio Joanie Lemercier.

Since 2016, she has been working as an independent curator for several festivals and cultural institutions. Since 2019, she has also been an international curator for STRP Festival in Eindhoven. In 2021, she curated a new light parcours for the city of Leuven in Belgium. Based in Belgium since 2013, she has been an active member of the Federation Wallonia-Brussels digital arts scene. In 2019, she co-founded SALOON Brussels, an international network for women working in the art scenes.

Heather Davis

Heather Davis is Director and Associate Professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College, The New School. As an interdisciplinary scholar working in environmental humanities, media studies, and visual culture, she is interested in how fossil fuels have shaped contemporary culture. Her most recent book is Plastic Matter (Duke University Press, 2022.

Davis is an active member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes. She was the co-curator of Plastic Entanglements: Ecology, Aesthetics, Materials (on view at the Palmer Museum of Art, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Smith College and the Chazen Museum of Art, 2018–2020). Davis’ work has been supported through numerous fellowships and grants including at the School of Social Science at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, a Mellon Visiting Scholar in the Environmental Humanities at the Center for Environmental Futures, University of Oregon, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

Cover image : Adobe Stock

Updated on April 23, 2026

Cette publication est également disponible en : Français (French)