A Conversation with Lars Jan

His work deals with questions about the private and collective spheres, and are marked by striking, enigmatic imagery. His 2015 multimedia piece The Institute of Memory (TIMe) was a reflection on memory that integrated family archives with tangible digital structures. In 2018-2019 he presented a theatre work based on Joan Didion’s essay The White Album at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave Festival and at the UCLA Center for the Art of Performance.

A monumental installation inspired by climate change, Holoscenes was a sensation in New York’s Times Square in 2017 as it coincided with the US withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords. Initially presented at Nuit blanche in Toronto in 2014 and later on in public spaces in Sarasota, Miami, London, Abu Dhabi and Australia, the piece features performers moving in an aquarium subjected to cycles of flooding. Proposing a new form of monumental, aquatic art, this living sculpture calls into question the human capacity to adapt to climate change.

She became known on the TV Show Le Code Chastenay, broadcast on Télé-Québec, where she was a science journalist for nearly 10 years. In writing, she collaborates with many magazines, including the magazines Québec Science, La recherche, Nouveau Projet, Curium, Quatre-temps, and many others. Her reports have won numerous awards, both at the Canadian Magazine Awards and the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television. She is also a recipient of the Fernand-Seguin Science Journalism Fellowship and the Lizette-Gervais Award. Between 2011 and 2015, she served as president of the Association des communicateur scientifiques du Québec.