If hospitality is about living well together with the multitude of beings with whom we share this world, then inhospitality is to make a place unsuitable to sustain living and regeneration.
For the benthic community, that is, the diverse beings that live on the bottom
of rivers, such as crayfish, nematodes, leeches, mollusks, beetle larvae and the
larvae of dragonflies, blackflies, stoneflies, caddisflies, mayflies, and many more, the aquatic life chronic toxicity value is a measuring device developed by scientists to determine the level of toxicity of their aquatic milieu.
Since the summer of 2020, we have been collecting water samples from rivers in agricultural areas across the province of Quebec. We then filled each bottle to a level corresponding to the river’s inhospitality according to the presence and concentrations of pesticides in the water and their chronic toxicity value for benthic organisms.
The installation includes a video showing the sampling of each river, bottles containing the collected water, a graph and a list of the pesticides present.
Inhospitality of Rivers (2020-ongoing)
