May 4th - 8th 2026

Speculative Life cluster commons EV 10.625

Keynote event: Heather Davis, Producing Plastic Air

May 7 12h30-14h, Speculative Life cluster commons EV 10.625

As a central part of these events, the cluster has invited interdisciplinary scholar (and alumni) Heather Davis as keynote speaker and participant. Currently Director and Associate Professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College (The New School), her ongoing and multiperspectival research on the subject of plastics (Plastic Matter, 2024) serves as an anchoring object of concern for the bringing together of the cluster. 

[Producing Plastic Air] 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 decentering 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.

More about Heather Davis

All are welcome

Student workshop: Environmental materials and/as methods

May 8 9h-16h, Speculative Life cluster commons EV 10.625

Register here

How to mediate the banal? Inspired by Heather Davis’s forthcoming piece, Banal Violence: Breathing Plastic Air, this— organized by grad students from the Speculative Life research cluster at Concordia’s Milieux Institute—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, microscopy, and 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.

All are welcome. Space is limited and requires registration

Juliette Bibasse, Creating at Large — prototyping off the grid and slowing down

May 7 15h-16h, Speculative Life cluster commons EV 10.625

Juliette Bibasse & Joanie Lemercier crossed the Atlantic in March 2026 aboard a sail cargo vessel, slowly traveling 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, storm 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 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.

With a background in artistic direction, Juliette Bibasse has been applying her skills to the digital art scene since 2009, creating connections and opportunities between artists, festivals and cultural actors.

More about Juliette Bibasse

All are welcome

Roundtable: Unsettling Sediments: Site-responsive, collaborative inquiry, and public engagement

With Martin Beauregard, Jean-François Côté, Natalie Doonan, Alice Jarry, Marie-Christianne Mathieu, Gisèle Trudel

May 7 16h30-18h, Speculative Life cluster commons EV 10.625

Please join us  in the cluster commons for a roundtable involving invited scholars Heather Davis and Juliette Bibasse, alongside artists-in-residence from the Hexagram research-creation network.

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.

All are welcome.

Residencies: Résidence du Chantier Écotechnologies X Biolab

May 4-8, Speculative Life Biolab EV 10.835

The Ecotechnology Cluster is a group of seven interdisciplinary artists, writers and researchers, working together as part part of Hexagram, an international interuniversity art, culture and technology network based in Montreal, supported by funding from the Fonds de recherche du Quebec - Société et culture (FRQ-SC), across eight Quebec universities. The group’s current project is a collaboration with the Municipal Research Chair for Sustainable Cities (University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières UQTR, FRQ-SC) and Symbiose - Intersectoral Laboratory in Art, Environment, and Technology (UQTR). The three research platforms are exploring ecotechnological approaches to mobilize academic, industrial, and municipal communities around the challenges facing the Beaudet Reservoir (Victoriaville, QC), particularly sediment accumulation and valorisation, and the impact on access to drinking water for the community.

Book launch & author roundtable

May 8 15h-17h, 4th Space 1400 Maisonneuve Blvd W, Montreal, Quebec H3G 1M8

In alignment with ongoing research at the cluster, we invite you to visit the University’s 4th Space for a book launch event with members and affiliates. The Centre for Sensory Studies is pleased to invite you to an end-of-term gathering and book launch of these three very savvy and savoury books.

Sense-Making: New Sensory Methods for Exploring the Past and Imagining Possible Futures

 Sheryl Boyle, Genevieve Collins, David Howes

La poutine, Culture et identité d'un pays incertain 

Geneviève Sicotte

Eating The Urban Wild: Food and Foraging in Montreal

Natalie Doonan

All are welcome