Students at Franklin Pierce University will be in their element next weekend when they hold two presentations of their installation “Art for Water.”

Overseen by New England Center for Civic Life director Joni Doherty and artist Christine Destrempes, who began “Art for Water” as her own installation, students will perform a dance, screen films, hold a water tasting, play music compositions and display their own installation piece, all based on the idea of water.

“Most people don’t know that five million people die every year because of water,” Destrempes says. “Ninety-eight percent of the people I talk to have no idea that people are dying from preventable diseases because the water they are drinking is not safe.”

Destrempes’ own installation piece, titled “13,699,” consists of strings of water bottle caps, exactly as numerous as the title suggests. Viewers can walk among them and be surrounded by them. The number represents the number of people who die each day from water-related illness.

According to Destrempes, the issue is important all over the world because she believes eventually there may be conflicts over water. Even in the U.S., major agricultural areas are experiencing water shortages, which could increase the cost of food production, Destrempes says.

Destrempes became aware of issues around deaths from unclean water through an article in The New Yorker called “Leasing the Rain.”

“It obviously made a really strong impression,” Destrempes says. “I had no idea so many people were dying because they didn’t have clean water.”

Destrempes, a Harrisville resident, spent the fall as artist-in-residence at Franklin Pierce, working with students on their own art projects related to water, including an installation piece.

The students’ installation piece is made from bottles that were retrieved from trash cans and recycle bins around campus. Strung together and assembled, they form a waterfall and streamers around the room.

“They had no idea and they really never thought twice about going to Walmart and buying single serve water containers,” Destrempes says of some students she worked with. “Now some of the films they made talk about plastic waste and the fact that it ends up in land fills and doesn’t break down, and the fact that it takes fossil fuels and three times as much water to make one bottle of water.”

The more students learned, the more interested they became and the more passionate they became about the issues surrounding water, according to Destrempes. The project led to discussions about how the students could change their habits and try to lobby to change the school’s habits regarding water and bottled water.

It also led students to conduct a water survey and a water tasting, comparing tap water, filtered tap water and bottled water by taste.

One phenomenon students discussed involved the “Rindge tinge,” which Destrempes says has to do with the fact that Franklin Pierce water has a high iron content, and she suspects some sulfur as well.

“It doesn’t look that great and it doesn’t taste good either,” Destrempes says.

On March 26, in an installation open to the public, participants will get to participate in the water tasting as well as view the films, hear the music and watch the dance that students developed around water. On March 29, there will be a repeat performance of the dance at the Crotched Mountain Rehabilitation Center.

Destrempes’s hope is that the exhibition will reach people who will then want to do something about water issues.

“Everyone has their own special relationship with water, which is a common substance but it’s also a magical substance,” Destrempes says. “People have strong feelings about it.”

Working with Franklin Pierce, she says, was a great experience.

“The thing that was really remarkable about that experience is that so many different departments on campus got involved in their own way,” Destrempes says. “It was this major dialog about a topic and it was looked at from so many different angles — creative, business and statistical as well as environmental.”

When the exhibition was on display at the college, more than 125 people attended, which was more than double what Destrempes was expecting.

Destrempes own exhibition, “13,699” will be on display at the Heinz Convention Center in Boston from April 9 through 11.

“I would like to get this to the Southwest and go to as many places as I can to talk about this issue,” Destrempes says.