Contaminated Art on the Plastic Archipelago

Alex Côté Hallée’s work combines performance, land art, and ecological research to explore queer ecology and more-than-human relations. Through riverbank interventions, cleanups, and collaborative practices, he transforms polluted landscapes into sites of care and imagination, producing sculptures, videos, and installations with human and nonhuman collaborators.

This exhibit is the fourth installment of the Botanical Imaginations series, which complicates, diversifies, and proliferates the stories we tell about plants. Series editors: Laleh Ahmad, Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Ellie Kincaid, Rebecca Laurent, Kayleigh Lobdell, Clare Michaud, Nicolás Felipe Rueda Rey

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The Crisis of Sensibility

Along the shores of the metropolitan archipelago of Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang, where concrete crumbles and currents deposit the remnants of unbridled consumption, the scene suggests a world reduced to its threshold, where life appears reduced to mere survival. Yet this world is not defined by persistence alone, but by its capacity to adapt, hybridize, and co-compose an unprecedented landscape.

These riverbanks—often fenced off, polluted, and relegated to the margins of urban life—have become genuine laboratories of interspecies cohabitation. Yet, our gaze upon these spaces is often clouded by a form of blindness: a perceptual habit that attunes us to damage, neglect, and waste, while rendering the ongoing vitality of these milieux nearly imperceptible. As Estelle Zhong-Mengual and Baptiste Morizot emphasize, the current ecological crisis is, above all, a “crisis of our relations with the living,” a loss of sensitivity toward what pulses beneath our feet.

My practice-based research, rooted along the shores of the Skawanoti/Pamskodategw and the Magtogoeg/Kaniatarowanénhne in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang (Montréal), seeks to invert this perspective. Rather than observing life as a passive backdrop, I explore what I call contaminated symbioses: unstable and hybrid alliances among plants, algae, bacteria, plastics, and human bodies. Within this “contaminated diversity,” as Anna Tsing frames it, ecological richness emerges through disturbance and interspecies entanglement rather than purity. Here, one must learn to “live with disturbance” to generate new narratives of repair.

Unearthing Roots: Hydronymy as an Act of Attention

Every botanical imagination begins with a name. To truly connect with a local environment, one must first unearth the histories that colonialism sought to erase. 

The river that Samuel de Champlain named “Rivière-des-Prairies” has names and meanings that long predate his colonial designation. For the Wendat, it is the Skawanoti, the “river behind the island”; for the Abenaki, it is the Pamskodategw, the “prairie river.” I integrate these Indigenous hydronyms into my practice by foregrounding them in exhibition dispositifs, incorporating them into territorial acknowledgements in the accompanying thesis, and using them as non-extractive frameworks for apprehending and imagining the territory—a crucial act of recognition and a step toward decolonizing our imaginations.

Plastic.Nurdles
A double basin made from sheets of polyethylene, polypropylene, and polystyrene nurdles collected along the shoreline of Lapierre Island, water, 2025.

These banks, once places of spirituality and transit for the Mohawk, Wendat, Anishinaabe, and Nipissing nations, now bear the anthropogenic imprint darkened by the Capitalocene. Walking these shores, I realize that native and introduced plants alike grow upon violent memories of forced displacement and industrial transformation. 

This historical consciousness transforms my posture as an artist: I am no longer a mere observer but an inheritor of temporal layers that inhale “the air of our ancestors and that of future generations.” Botany becomes a practice of cohabitation, a way to acknowledge the spirits and materials that entwine us.

Île Lapierre: Laboratory of Altered Life

Île Lapierre, the primary site of my fieldwork, embodies what I call a mutation of the world: a slow but profound transformation under the pressure of human activity. In this ongoing process of material and ecological change, human traces are embedded within the nonhuman environment, reshaping its textures, flows, and meanings over time.

On Île Lapierre, this mutation is written in the sediments, visible in the mingling of organic and synthetic matter, forming hybrid landscapes that are neither fully natural nor entirely artificial. Here, memory is material: each accumulation recalls industrial, colonial, and ecological histories, creating a place where the past is inseparable from the transformations unfolding in the present. 

Once a quarry, later a residual landfill, the island is now fenced off, a restricted space awaiting its uncertain transformation into an urban park. Yet beyond these barriers, vegetal life erupts. There is unparalleled biodiversity: Native wetland plants intermingle with resprouting shrubs, silver maples and black willows persist in small groves, and grasses of former prairie meadows reclaim open spaces. Dragonflies skim hidden pools, muskrats and small mammals traverse the shorelines, while amphibians and reptiles inhabit marshy patches. Birds use the shallows and reed beds for nesting and feeding, while fungi and algae colonize damp soils, forming microhabitats that support insects and other small organisms. Invasive species—Japanese knotweed, buckthorn, and others—push through layers of petrochemical debris, creating a dynamic, hybrid ecosystem. 

Scenes from Plastic Archipelago, a film essay by the author, 2025.

Sifting through the soil, I encounter thousands of plastic pellets, transparent, white, or blue, the progenitors of all forms of plastic. 

Here, the concept of alterlife (altered existence) manifests. We inhabit a chemical promiscuity where industrial filaments entwine with roots. Plastic is no longer inert; it acts, shaping ecology. Microplastics alter bacterial biofilms around roots, changing how plants absorb nutrients. This reality forces deviant co-evolutions, hybrid symbioses where the living and the synthetic fuse. 

In my studio, the “miraculous matter” of polymers becomes a speculative tool. Through the process of thermoforming, an approach that involves heating plastic until it softens and then shaping it into new forms, I transform soiled bottles collected from shorelines into translucent sculptures, resembling deviant corals. Their forms evoke rhizomes and coral structures, embodying a dissident materiality that escapes the nature/culture binary. The artwork is no longer a finished object but a performance to decode, testifying to erosion and material persistence.

Plastic.Archipelago
Exhibition preview at CDEX-UQAM, 2025.

Performance as Investigative Ritual

On April 22, 2025, Earth Day, I orchestrated a 24-hour performance on Île Lapierre with the artistic collective Idylle and the environmental organization Organisation Bleue. Inspired by Joseph Beuys’ Sled (1969), I dragged a wild haul of half a ton of debris around the island’s perimeter.

This performative cleanup was not merely hygienic; it was an activist ritual, a probing of the territory’s resilience. 

The author drags a half ton of debris around the perimeter of Île Lapierre, 2025.

By physically removing these material ghosts—bottles, tires, corroded metal—we posed a speculative question: What botanical futures emerge when the weight of waste is lifted? The traces left in the soil after extraction testify to a memory that the earth cannot erase. 

Documented via aerial and cinematic capture, the artist’s body becomes a living archive of environmental history. Pulling this disproportionate load conveys the Capitalocene’s weight while enacting repair. 

In a final moment, a dozen gulls feasted on the debris—traces of human consumption transformed into food—underscoring the unexpected interconnections and adaptive responses that make this ecosystem complex and alive. 

Ecosomatic and Queer Ecology: The Shore-Body

My practice draws on queer ecological theory, challenging hierarchical dualisms between the human and non-human. Specifically, I draw on journalist Cy Lecerf Maulpoix‘s approach to deviant ecosystems, “a queer ecological framing of environments where disturbance, contamination, and non-normative interspecies relations unsettle dominant ecological categories.” Following Maulpoix, I aim to re-enchant sites with new cues—subtle signals that indicate hidden relationships and processes. These might include the glint of microplastics in sediment, the iridescence of biofilms along a shoreline, the hum of insect activity, the smell of decaying vegetation mingling with fresh growth, or the unexpected co-occurrence of native and invasive species. Attuning to these cues requires fine, ecosomatic attention, attuning inward to discover a populated interiority of bacteria and metabolic processes evolved over millions of years.

The author’s barefoot trek across the melting Lac Saint-Louis in 2024.

On February 27, 2024, during a record-breaking 14.7°C thaw of Lac Saint-Louis, I performed a barefoot, kilometer-long crossing over the melting ice. Stripping away anthropogenic layers, my bare skin became a sensory archive, a body-territory in direct dialogue with ice and mud. Nudity here was not aesthetic but a method of shedding capitalist labor’s vestiges, reclaiming freedom from oppression.

This queering of the shore culminated in the Plages Queers project at Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang’s eastern beach. Ten 2SLGBTQIA+ performers occupied a site where swimming is prohibited due to contaminated sediments. Through their dissident movements seen in the video below—sliding along the sand, contorting into unexpected shapes, tracing the contours of weeds breaking through concrete, and interweaving gestures of reach and retreat, they enacted relations between marginalized bodies and “sacrificed” urban territories. Ruderal plants sprouting through urban concrete became political allies, teaching us how to inhabit marginal spaces with care.

Plages.Queers
Site-specific performance at Plage de l’Est; three-channel video installation.
In collaboration with Jimmy Chung, Claire Pearl, Ève Constantin, Jérôme Tremblay-Lanthier, Danae Serine Barrera, Claudia Bernal, Lula Mengal, Damien Picone, Giverny Welsch, and Fabián Silguero, 2025.

Toward an Ethics of Germination: Ecodesign

Botanical imagination carries a material responsibility. My ecodesign practice, inspired by Cradle to Cradle, asserts that waste should not exist. Every material gathered from the shores—macroplastics, corroded metals, maritime ropes, punctured styrofoam—is reintegrated into a poetic life cycle. Working with plastic entails accepting its paradoxical fragility: It can persist for a millennium yet constantly fragments into invisible micro-particles. 

As part of this protocol, I contributed a donation to Carbone Boréal, enabling the planting of sixteen trees at the conclusion of the project. The artwork returned to the earth.

Radical Relationality as Horizon

Ultimately, Tiohtià:ke’s shores are not biological deserts but sites of speculative botanical knowledge. Plants, in their ability to metabolize our remnants and ally with polymers, are the Plasticocene’s true intellectuals. They teach us that survival does not depend on purity but on our capacity to cooperate amid uncertainty. 

Listening to these contaminated symbioses requires embracing radical relationality. It entails recognizing that we are literally entangled in the material world and that environmentalism must inhabit every breath. By transforming solastalgia—the grief for threatened landscapes and the sensation of losing home—into sensitive and performative experience, we can cultivate ecological futures neither naive nor hopeless but deeply rooted in care. 

Art, by activating cerebral zones inaccessible through scientific data, provides metaphors for inhabiting a grieving world. By attending to vegetal stories written in concrete interstices, we relearn to be attentive inhabitants of a territory in constant flux.

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Featured image: Plastic pellets buried in the soil of Île Lapierre. This picture is a still from Plastic Archipelago, a film essay by the author.

Alex Côté Hallée is a multidisciplinary 2SLGBTQIA+ artist and researcher based in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang (Montreal). Working across performance, land art, photography, and video, he explores ecological entanglements through water, materiality, and embodied research. Alex holds an M.F.A. and is pursuing a Ph.D. in Art Studies, supported by SSHRC and FRQSC. Artistic director of IDYLLE, he has exhibited internationally, including Venice, New York, and the Magdalen Islands, and his work bridges art, environmental activism, and community engagement. Website.