Caroline Hayeur is one of three artists awarded a six-month creative residency offered jointly by the Conseil des arts de Montréal and the Insectarium in 2025. In collaboration with sound artist Myléna Bergeron, she has created a work that celebrates “entomophilia” (a love of insects) through an intimate look at the nocturnal life of the museum’s insects.
Drawing inspiration from her recent black-and-white projects (Radioscopie du dormeur and Un Jardin la nuit), she continued her exploration using infrared cameras. Her videos and photographs reveal the nighttime activities of insects in the Insectarium’s Great Vivarium.
In keeping with its mission to promote the appreciation of insects, the Insectarium supports artistic creations inspired by the rich and fascinating world of insects.
What do insects do at night?
When darkness falls and the doors close at the Insectarium, what do the insects do? Do they sleep? Eat? Reproduce? A Little Treatise on Noctivagant Entomology, is a poetic 15-minute documentary that explores the nocturnal activities of insects, accompanied by a soundtrack by Myléna Bergeron.
Biography – Caroline Hayeur
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Resolutely optimistic and drawing on years of experience in field photography since the early 1990s, Caroline explores themes of human connection and place. She is interested in the different forms and settings of social interaction—friendship, family ties and broader communities—seen through a lens that blends documentary storytelling and visual poetry. Rituals, night-time, primal emotions, revealed intimacy, encounters and movement are recurring subjects in her practice. Acting as a visual anthropologist, her artistic approach can be described as an ethnology of everyday life. |
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Her work spans several disciplines—photography, media arts, community art and photojournalism—combining different techniques to achieve her artistic vision. Many of her projects originate from artist residencies in Québec and abroad.
Caroline Hayeur teaches photojournalism at the École des médias (Faculty of Communication) at Université du Québec à Montréal.
For more information about the artist, visit Caroline Hayeur’s website.