Milieux Mixer #1: A Walk Through Research-Creation

Join us for the inaugural session of Milieux Mixer, a new series where Milieux members shed light on their creative process through short, 10-minute presentations hosted across different lab and cluster spaces throughout the Institute. The event aims to provide insight into research conducted within the Institute in a cozy and festive atmosphere.

For our first session, presentations will take place in LePARC, the Biolab, and TAG. We will meet in LePARC for the initial presentations and move across spaces together.

🎟️ Limited Capacity: To keep the atmosphere intimate and allow space for conversation, seating is strictly capped at 8 attendees. Please RSVP to secure your spot!

FEATURED PRESENTERS AND PROJECTS:

Cristina Jimenez: Paper Score from the performance series “Intimate Gestures”. 

Description: A body and three brown paper rolls lie on the floor. While the performer plays with the paper as a second skin with its own flows and constraints, the invitation for audiences to wrap, touch, read, listen and move opens a moment of relationality and embodiment. Paper Score explores motility and tactility through physical theatre and participatory acts. This work is based on Anna Halprin’s fragment of Parades and Changes (1965). 

Context: As part of my doctoral research-creation project, Intimate Gestures is a three-part performance that proposes the concept of Molecular Theatre and its relational (in)tensions. I develop performative pieces, often one-to-one, that involve diverse objects and materials to consider sensory proximity, intimacy, the things’ affect and the intra-connectedness of matter, humans, organisms, and bodies. Under this perspective, bodies are transanatomical and structured as continuous processes linked to memory, otherness, and corporeal perception, which is a collective act. 

Polina Shubina:  Moving with the St. Lawrence: experiments in embodied ethnography and guided movement workshops 

I want to share my ongoing exploration of movement and embodiment in the context of environmental research. I will talk about a series of guided movement workshops that I gave as part of research-creation and art&science projects at the shoreline of the St. Lawrence River and aboard sailing vessels. This evolving practice is inspired by several movement languages and practitioners, such as Continuum, Gaga, and Lara Kramer’s work, as well as methods of environmental and sensory ethnography. 

Jacqueline Beaumont: Reliquary: A presentation threading together my 8 years of research practice at Milieux 

Reliquary reflects on my origins in the field of bio-design through bacterial pigmentation, textile craft, and sculptural object-making. The presentation will focus on my research as a process of affection cultivation, a relational interdependence, mediated by laboratory protocols, microbial kinships, biopolitical negotiations, sterilization, and the communal reciprocity and support that have shaped my work. Reliquary approaches semi-living media as an apparatus to mutate our desires for growth, preservation, impurity, and material transformation.⁠
 

Erin Hassard: I need an A-Mesh Network 

In the years since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the United States, the safety of online communication for abortion and reproductive health care seekers has become more concerning; more issues are raised about online privacy and security, particularly in regions where restrictions and abortion bans are on the rise. This raises questions about new options available in accessing essential services in an era where Big Tech platforms and surveillance make online communication increasingly more perilous and its security unreliable. By using LoRa companion devices over Meshtastic and Meshcore network channels, this prototype abortion referral service mapped out and documented the challenges and practicality of accessing essential healthcare referral services through longe-range radio technology. A private channel was set up to ensure the packets received and submitted were encrypted. The prototype evolved into a methodological conundrum that begs the question: in a world of online platform communication, is it possible to privately communicate via text at a distance without any online engagement? 

📅 November 5, 2026 

⏱️ 5-6 PM 

📍 LePARC Performance Lab EV 10.785

By attending this event, you consent to being photographed, filmed, or recorded. These images may be used by Milieux Institute on its website, social media, or promotional materials.