Chanelle Lalonde 

Chanelle Lalonde (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Art History at McGill University (supervisor: Dr. Christine Ross). Chanelle completed a Master’s degree in Art History from Concordia University (2018), where she focused on community-based art and the aesthetic strategies employed by artists specifically concerned with the deterioration of marine ecosystems. Her current research, which is supported by a Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship, explores the work of contemporary artists who attend to human-nonhuman relations in the context of ongoing environmental degradation and climate change. More specifically, it considers how aesthetics of listening are increasingly present and ethically relevant in contemporary ecological art. Contact: chanelle.lalonde@mail.mcgill.ca. 

Projects   

The Ecological Ethics of Listening in 21st Century Art (doctoral dissertation; ongoing) investigates how contemporary artists are increasingly developing practices of listening in their engagements with nonhumans. By critically re-examining the idea of sound as a privileged mode of access to the world, and as an inherently relational force in human-nonhuman relations, it identifies the potentials of attending to the act of listening itself, rather than to sound, for nurturing ecological ethics in art. It considers how aesthetics of listening, as they are developed in selected artworks, work to assert nonhuman subjectivities that settler-colonial and capitalist infrastructures and modes of perception strategically work to suppress. The project is supported by a Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship.    

Oceanic Literacy in Contemporary Art (MA thesis; Concordia University, completed 2018) focused on two creative projects: Basia Irland’s Ice Receding/Books Reseeding (2007-ongoing) and Pamela Longobardi’s Drifters Project (2006-ongoing). It argued that though such practices are largely guided by acts of ecological remediation (from restoring watershed ecosystems to removing thousands of pounds of plastic from the ocean), the aesthetic and display strategies used by the artists more transformatively call for a widespread receptivity to nonhuman “voices.”  

On the Potential of Didacticism in Architecture (led by Dr. Carmela Cucuzzella and Dr. Cynthia Hammond, 2018) consisted of a seminar and a publication sponsored by the LEAP (Laboratoire d’étude de l’architecture potentielle), an interuniversity research team based in Montreal and funded by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Société et Culture. The project investigated the value of didacticism in architecture, public art, and urban infrastructures, as well as its power to influence social, cultural, ecological, educational, and economic issues. Information at: https://bit.ly/38e8BYL. 

Discrete Monuments: Urban Ecology in the Point (2016) was a collaborative project that studied the history of community engagement with green spaces in Montreal’s neighborhood Point-St-Charles, and sought to make visible the histories of plants that persists in the seemingly lifeless lots along the CN railway. The project, which emerged out of Dr. Cynthia Hammond’s graduate seminar (ARTH611 Industrialization and the Built Environment: The Right to the City) at Concordia University, resulted in an on-site display of research and creative responses to urban and postindustrial ecology.  

Publications 

“Amphibious Architecture: Didactic Devices in a Dialectic Space.” In Cahier de recherche du LEAP: On Didacticism in Architecture/Du didactisme en architecture, edited by Cynthia Hammond, Carmela Cucuzzella, Sherif Goubran, and Chanelle Lalonde, 2019. 

Activity 

Upcoming Presentation: “Beneath the Surface and into the Planetary: Listening to/for Coexistence in Contemporary Sound Installations,” ISEA2020 (International Symposium on Electronic Art): Why Sentience?, Montreal, Quebec, October 13-18, 2020. Information at: http://isea2020.isea-international.org/.  

Presentation: “Ruins of the Future: Oceanic Plastic’s Performed Temporalities,” Grierson Colloquium on Communication, Media and Infrastructure, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, February 22, 2019.  

Presentation: “Mourning Extinct and Endangered Birds in Contemporary Art,” Potential of Ecocriticism Graduate Symposium, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, February 8-9, 2019. 

Presentation: “Ecological Artists as Communicators: The Politics of Listening,” Conférences Hypothèses, Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Quebec, September 26, 2019.  

Art and Writing Residency: Joya: arte + ecología. Joya is an international arts led field research center and residency located off-grid in the Parque Natural Sierra María, Los Vélez, Andalucía, Spain. It promotes collaborations among artists, curators, writers, ecologists and environmental activists. The residency took place in December 2018. Information at: https://joya-air.org/.