_Bio Marie-Hélène Parant is a visual artist working with media and digital means. She has a MFA in Arts visuels et médiatiques from UQAM and has developed an artistic language, having created interactive digital tools for the participatory environments of installations and performances. She has coordinated digital events in Canada and abroad through SHARE MTL, an organization that she co-founded in 2005.
_Approach Parant’s artistic work is concerned with interactive programing that plays on the semantics of transitional. Her work also presents a poetic focus on the precarious balance needed in our relationship with the environment. Her installations and performative works invite us into worlds that just seem to appear, come to life and encompass us, and which are created through the visitors’ presence and the attention they give to it. — For seven years, Parant has been engaged in a fascinating journey, merging art, technology, the exploration of territories and communities, the information and the environmental activism that she depicts in Fluxus∞. This is a work that questions the concept of a distancing between nature and culture. The artist likes to include the visitor in her artwork in various ways, in particular through an increased presence of citizens speaking up and taking action on social media, as well as making an impact on our society’s position in relation to environmental issues.
_Project Can art change the world? The artist dares to believe that her commitment to the Anticosti cause (the creation of a Facebook page and two petitions against “fracking” for oil and gas) has helped to influence the course of things and raise the population’s awareness. The debate on climate change and the protection of water continues to this day. In some regions of Quebec, in Gaspé, Lac Saint-Jean, Lotbinière and the Saint Lawrence valley, citizens are worried and divided about hydrocarbon development projects. — For the Symposium, Marie-Hélène Parant will follow relevant news about environmental concerns each day and will participate in related discussions on social media. She also will carry out interviews with visitors on the subject of their perception of climate change and those who would like to talk to her about the concept of solastalgia (the psychological impact caused by deterioration of the environment).
