BLACK LAKES by Simon Nicoloso

Book Launch Friday 20 Nov 6-8pm
Published by Editions Révolues

With Black Lakes, Simon Nicoloso observes what remains when a region loses the industry that has defined it for more than a century.

Between 2022 and 2025, he travelled five times to the Thetford Mines region, south of Quebec, once the world capital of asbestos. People live there, as they always have, alongside a mineral that has been banned in more than sixty countries.

Black Lakes is less a book about asbestos than about a land left in limbo, where danger has become ordinary through constant exposure. An indistinct state, neither post-industrial drama nor territorial rebirth, where threat and everyday life coexist.

Two texts accompany the photographs. Chroniques d’amiante : du mythe à l’effondrement, by Alice Loum and Valentin Bansac (MATTERS.xyz collective), investigates the mythological imagination surrounding this fibre, once celebrated for its almost magical properties. In-Between, a field account by Simon Nicoloso, explores distance and habituation: what becomes of fear when you live alongside something that should give rise to it.