Zoé
Fortier

In Les poinçonneuses, artist Zoé Fortier adopts a auto-ethnographic approach as she explores her relationship with leaf-cutting bees. Her family’s beekeeping business in the Francophone village of Zenon Park, Saskatchewan, has been working with these pollinating insects, also called megachiles, since the 1960s. Fortier attentively gathers, observes, draws, transforms, and reproduces the traces that she finds of the bees—which make their hives with bits of leaves taken from young shrubs—and creates an archive, both authentic and fanciful, around them. She thus tells two stories that both contradict and yet are superimposed on each other: that of a close interdependent relationship among the human beings, insects, and plants engaged in the practice of beekeeping, and that of the agrifood industry in Saskatchewan, known as the “breadbasket of Canada,” with its profound transformations of the land, exploitation of different forms of life, and identity constructions. Fortier situates herself in the scene, with both sensitivity and humour, to undermine the dichotomies of  city/countryside, natural environment/manufactured landscape, interdependence/exploitation, and thus to revisit our relationship with the living world.