Environmental Materials and/as Methods: Keynote lectures, round-table, and student workshop
May 7-8, 2026
Milieux Institute Speculative Life Cluster, 1515 St-Catherine West, Montreal, QC. Room EV. 10.625
Milieux Institute Speculative Life Cluster, 1515 St-Catherine West, Montreal, QC. Room EV. 10.625
Design: Francis Ouellette
The Speculative Life research cluster alongside the Hexagram Network (Chantier Ecotechnologies) are pleased to announce a series of knowledge mobilization events; collaborative approaches to materials & methods which bring together the very different research areas of Critical Practices in Materials and Materiality, Biolab, Ethnography Lab, Machine Agencies, and the Critical Anthropocene Research Group.
May 7th, 12:30 – 2 PM | 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, her work 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. She will explore this through the concept of “private air,” showing how air quality is monitored differently in workplaces than in the general environment.
May 7th, 3 – 4 PM | 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 Concordia University 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.
May 7th, 12:30 – 2 PM | 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, her work 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. She will explore this through the concept of “private air,” showing how air quality is monitored differently in workplaces than in the general environment.
May 7th, 3 – 4 PM | 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 Concordia University 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.
May 7th, 4:30 – 6 PM | 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.
May 8th, all day. How to mediate the banal: Student Workshop
Inspired by Heather Davis’s forthcoming piece, Banal Violence: Breathing Plastic Air, this two-day workshop organized by grad students, invites participants to investigate materiality as both object and method of study. Together, we will critically engage with the question of material banality through hands-on investigation and collective creation.
Inspired by Rob Nixon’s seminal concept of slow violence, Davis switches ‘slow’ for ‘banal’, to focus the attention not only on the temporality of environmental violence, as incremental and accretive, but also on its affective and bodily registers. Toxicity scholars have shown that slow violence is both a direct experience and something needing mediation to be understood. We argue that this hard-to-perceive slow violence is even more difficult to communicate when it is also banal.
As part of our commitment to exploring creative strategies for mediating banality, we invite students, scholars, and practitioners to investigate everyday material encounters across Montreal in a workshop. Participants will collaboratively act as gatherers, employing biomaterial capture methods to identify cues of banal violence across the city. Back at Spec Life, groups will interpret their collected data using a range of methodologies familiar to different groups in the cluster, including multimodal ethnography, CLEAR Lab’s DIY microplastic forensics protocol, and microscopy/material analysis. Following this, participants will synthesize their insights through a series of speculative map-making exercises, attempting to situate their discoveries in relation to time and space. The workshop will culminate in the co-production of speculative analog and digital maps, making visible some of the manifold forms of banal violence present in the city of Montreal.
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.
May 8th, all day. How to mediate the banal: Student Workshop
Inspired by Heather Davis’s forthcoming piece, Banal Violence: Breathing Plastic Air, this two-day workshop organized by grad students, invites participants to investigate materiality as both object and method of study. Together, we will critically engage with the question of material banality through hands-on investigation and collective creation.
Inspired by Rob Nixon’s seminal concept of slow violence, Davis switches ‘slow’ for ‘banal’, to focus the attention not only on the temporality of environmental violence, as incremental and accretive, but also on its affective and bodily registers. Toxicity scholars have shown that slow violence is both a direct experience and something needing mediation to be understood. We argue that this hard-to-perceive slow violence is even more difficult to communicate when it is also banal.
As part of our commitment to exploring creative strategies for mediating banality, we invite students, scholars, and practitioners to investigate everyday material encounters across Montreal in a workshop. Participants will collaboratively act as gatherers, employing biomaterial capture methods to identify cues of banal violence across the city. Back at Spec Life, groups will interpret their collected data using a range of methodologies familiar to different groups in the cluster, including multimodal ethnography, CLEAR Lab’s DIY microplastic forensics protocol, and microscopy/material analysis. Following this, participants will synthesize their insights through a series of speculative map-making exercises, attempting to situate their discoveries in relation to time and space. The workshop will culminate in the co-production of speculative analog and digital maps, making visible some of the manifold forms of banal violence present in the city of Montreal.
