Beyond Silent Fall 

Nutshimit__Becoming River

2025, 8m 30s, 4K video, Innu-Aimun and French with English subtitles

Poem sung for the Muteshekau-shipu River | Magpie and for all rivers, all waterways, our Nutshimit: the blood that flows through our veins. This river gives life to the Innu community of Ekuanitshit, whose ancestral territory it is, and to the regional population, both of whom have, by resolution, granted the status of legal person and appointed themselves as its guardians. It now has nine rights: 

 

1. The right to exist and flow

2. The right to respect for its vital cycles

3. The right to maintain its natural biodiversity

4. The right to maintain its integrity

5. The right to preserved banks and floodplains

6. The right to feed and to be fed by aquifers and tributaries

7. The right to be free from all contamination

8. The right to regeneration and restoration

9. The right to take legal action

Performance by three generations of women: Rita, Uapukun and Zélya Mestokosho; Tiziana Mollen; and Bénédicte Bérubé, who is married to the river.

DEEP BREATHING

2025, 4m, 4K video, French with English subtitles

Song for the loss of oxygen in the deep waters of the Estuary and Gulf of St. Lawrence | Magtokoek. Bénédicte Bérubé performs in a luminous fish dress that indicates the rising zone where oxygen is becoming too scarce. This zone, described as hypoxic, where fish can no longer breathe, continues to rise from the estuary bottom. The zone is fed by warmer currents and nutrient runoff from the chemical fertilizers used in agriculture and from urban wastewater. A song to awaken and inspire change.

For a preview of these videos, contact the artist

Video: RED

2024, 20m 20s, 4K video, English with English subtitles, also available with French or Spanish subtitles

A performance at a supermarket with six lyrical singers, women wearing portable structures which address current socio-economic and environmental issues, while vocalizing and appropriating the artist’s libretto without any further musical accompaniment. Familiar opera arias carry words that echo the issues affecting our lives today. An unusual yet fairy-tale critique of consumer society, this performance rattles viewers as much as it charms them. Thomas Piketty’s name and reference to his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century are uttered in a spoken word manner, enhancing the manner in which the performance comments on today’s world issues. He revisits historical data as we are now facing income disparity between classes as steep as it was before the French Revolution. 

It's a challenge both for the professional classical singers - Michal Aloni, Bénédicte Bérubé, Kimberley Lynch, Monika Mazanka, Tamar Simon and Andrea Wyllie - who step out of their normal routines, and for us, the viewers, who are swept up in an unprecedented experience that contrasts with our everyday lives. 

 

 

Singers are wearing structures by the artist:

Michal Aloni: Too-Big-to-Fail (2014)

Bénédicte Bérubé: Water Carriers (2024), an audio-reactive structure

Kimberley Lynch: Increasing Income Gap (2014)

Monika Mazanka: Overfishing (2015)

Tamar Simon: The Haves-and-the-Have-Nots (2014)

Andrea Wyllie: Animal Population Decline (2015)

Dominique Paul thanks the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and Ville de Longueuil for their financial support, and the Marché Metro Plus Famille Domingue for its parnership.

 

View trailer here

Link to the full video is available upon request