As part of a three-week artistic residency in La Pocatière, supported by Vrille art actuel, multidisciplinary artist Laetitia de Coninck questions anthropocentrism, this vision of the world that considers humans as the gravitational center of everything else. Her performative project Eat like a plant takes a close look at what connects us to the rest of life, human or not, and positions interspecies collaboration as an essential canvas for our lives.
“This residency will lead me to enter into an intimate relationship with the terroir through food, but also through meeting producers,” explains the artist, interviewed ahead of her residency. Laetitia de Coninck is also a market gardener and coordinator of the interdisciplinary research group for plants and the environment at UQAM.
“By trying to do ‘like a plant’, I’m not talking about vegetarianism. It’s more the idea of copying the companionship method of the plant world, because plants interact with each other through their root network, and with the rest of the living world too, which participates in their life cycle,” she emphasizes.
Eager to cut ties with the capitalist system, the performer adopts a lifestyle based on bartering for these three weeks. In exchange for hours spent with various local merchants, whether bakers, farmers or artisan cheesemakers, she receives local foods from her activities. “I will keep an inventory of what I will eat. Will there be pathogens in my diet? Will I have consumed all the necessary nutrients?” she wonders. She cooks her products in the heart of the community garden of La Pocatière, in a small “food-swap”, in the artist’s words. Any possible supplements generated are distributed to her visitors, who are invited to meet her on Thursdays and Fridays from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., and Sundays from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., to learn more about her project.
Performative artistic encounters also punctuate her residency, including a sweetgrass harvest, a herbaceous plant sought after for its fragrance and its use for spiritual purposes. This activity will be carried out in collaboration with Mélissa C Pettigrew, on August 8. “I can no longer make art just to hang things on a wall,” explains Laetitia de Coninck, who wants to reverse the concept of artistic productivity, often linked to material results.
Caring for the Earth through art
In the particular context of her residency, the artist aims to develop a relational aesthetic, a sensitive and metabolic experience by using her body as a transmission belt. “Taking care of the living is living in doing, in attention to oneself and others. It is developing an awareness of the gestures we make, slowing down certain gestures, and becoming aware of them. It can simply be being aware of what we eat, for example,” she illustrates.
Jean-Paul Quéinnec, a professor of theatre at the University of Chicoutimi, notes that Laetitia de Coninck’s approach is part of a much broader artistic movement. “The current discourse is moving away from a certain didacticism. We no longer lecture spectators; we are in a poetic discourse that offers sensations with nature, collaborations with effects of nature, and sometimes a real possibility of wandering with our nature – that is to say, we do not know what will happen.”
In his opinion, Quebec, in both academic and artistic circles, is positioned quite well in these movements. “Quebec is in a mobile, flexible place, which allows attempts at innovation to come. We see this in the subsidies offered by major research organizations. The space-time in which we live now is no longer that of determinism, of fixity, but rather of becoming, of randomness, of movement.”