Breathe Together ∞ Aspergillus Tubingensis / The Things We Made Next

Last autumn I was commissioned by Assembly for the Future to make a speculative design for The Things We Made Next, a travelling exhibition that visited Alice Springs, Castlemaine and Melbourne as part of Melbourne Design Week. Five designers were asked to respond to an archive of multi-artform ‘despatches’ produced by The Things We Did Next, a gathering of artists, thinkers and cultural operators collectively exploring and describing the year 2029.

My contribution picked up on the F-UN-GUS despatch from File-Set #3, and consists of a commemorative mushroom altar kit celebrating the 7th anniversary of the First Nations Treaties within Continent 7, formerly known as Australia. It includes various ceremonial objects in glazed stoneware ceramics, a hybrid kangaroo grass pestle/aspergillum for grinding or sprinkling, a screen-printed altar cloth featuring Aspergillus tubingensis & other notable local fungi, along with ancillary items like quartz crystal from Mt Isa, pu-er tea, cedarwood and micro-plastic waste. These may be used for festive DIY eukaryotic rituals involving offerings of soil, salt, dried mushrooms and plastic waste, sharing of tea, and burning tree sap or wood fungus. 

Aspergillus tubingensis was named by an Italian biologist-priest in 1729 for its microscopic resemblance to the aspergillum (holy water sprinkler). In 2029 – exactly 300 years later – this particular fungus, which incidentally forms part of the microbial community in fermented pu-er tea – is widely revered for the crucial role it plays in helping to clear our oceans of microplastics. The altar cloth also features depictions of Laccocephalum mylittae (whose underground sclerotium is eaten raw or roasted), Cyttaria gunnii (spherical, edible fruiting bodies), Phellinus sp. (bracket fungus smoked for sore throats), Podaxis pistillaris (Stalked Puffball, a desert fungus used to darken old men’s whiskers), and the toxic phosphorescent ‘ghost fungus’.

In Alice the show first came together remotely at RAFT Artspace; I then had the pleasure of activating my work in person at Castlemaine’s McPhee Broadway Theatre. The exhibition also appeared in the form of large-scale street posters displayed around Melbourne & Castlemaine as part of Melbourne Design Week 2021.

Posters in Mechanics Lane, Castlemaine

Made on Gadigal land with the invaluable assistance & expertise of Susie Nelson (drawing), Leila Khazma (ceramics) and Alba Stephen (screenprinting). Thanks also to Alex Kelly, Elliat Rich & David Pledger for their superlative curatorial care.

The kit is presently being reproduced by Cloudship Press in a very small edition of multiples, get in touch if you’d like to be in the loop.

Photos by Zoe Scoglio

Feminist Infrastructure for Better Weathering

[co-authored with Jennifer Hamilton & Astrida Neimanis, published Oct 2021 in Australian Feminist Studies online]

Big infrastructure responses to climate change seek to protect the heteropatriarchal capitalist status quo. In contrast, this article develops a theory and method of practice-led research to facilitate better weathering. In so doing the article contends that a transformative feminist response to climate change needs alternative, collective, feminist infrastructures. The feminist specificity of the infrastructure proposed here emerges through its proximity to the concept ‘weathering’. As a feminist figuration, weathering attunes us to human embodiment and difference in a time of climate change, where ‘weather’ is not only meteorological, but the total atmospheres that bodies are made to bear. An infrastructure for better weathering thus centres opportunities to acknowledge and account for embodied difference and the differential effects of weather as a specifically feminist design feature. Better weathering is not neoliberal resilience, but rather attention to and redistribution of low-stakes vulnerability as an infrastructural politics. The article proceeds in two parts. We theorise a feminist infrastructure. We then pilot the infrastructure in a series of practice-led research activities. We argue these new infrastructures facilitate low-stakes vulnerability between strangers and so enable better weathering.

Access full-text here
(… or visit us online at the Weathering Station)

Extinction archive at 2nd Macao Biennale

The collected archives of the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge & its associated Extinction Club Reading Group travelled earlier this year to Macao for ‘Art Macao: Macao International Art Biennale 2021‘, July – October 2021. They were installed at the Macao Art Museum as part of the main biennale exhibition, curated by Professor Qiu Zhijie and themed ‘Reatreat and Advance of Globalisation’, which provided “a space for reflection and discussion on globalization and individuality, life and dream, remoteness and proximity, security and happiness, among others”. The exhibition catalogue will be out soon.

Many thanks to curator Qiu Zhijie and assistant Embla for facilitating this wonderful opportunity, and again to Song Yi & everyone at the Institute for Provocation.

This project was supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW

Lichen on the airwaves

In August I made an experimental radio piece with Sumugan Sivanesan across time zones and continents for Mustarinda’s Lichen Fest #2, a festival celebrating the 10 year anniversary of this remote forest residency in central Finland. It was intended to take shape as a live performance at Mustarinda House but then 2020 happened, sooo you’ll find it now rather more conveniently on the airwaves of the internet.

Listen to it here, around 40 mins long and best experienced lying down with headphones.

… & for more info on the Society’s ongoing escapades visit our website.

 

 

Reading Together on Extinction in Beijing

I spent the second half of 2018 at the Institute for Provocation (IFP) in Beijing, China, via the Australia Council International Residencies program. Apart from eating noodles, one thing I ended up doing a lot of was reading with others about extinction. You can read more about what we read (and did) on the project blog here. If you’re in China, you can also visit the IFP and ask to listen to the box set cassette tape library of readings that we left behind. The Extinction Club Reading Group is part of a larger project attempting to cultivate what Donna Haraway has called ‘ways of living and dying well together’ in a thick present, a moment when the times of many beings are coming to an end.

The project also involved slowly working towards a handmade book + cassette tape, The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge: An Incomplete Inventory of Extinctions in the People’s Republic of China, which will be a kind of delirious encyclopedia of extinctions in this part of the world, including sound pieces by contributing artists. Meanwhile, research materials and activities conducted thus far were presented at IFP’s Black Sesame Space in a solo show early last year, at the close of the residency. Members of the Reading Group read aloud parts of their favourite texts, I baked lots of things with black sesame in them, and we recorded one last tape live for the Beijing Chapter Cassette Library.

Thanks again to everyone at IFP, all participants of the Extinction Club Reading Group, and everyone else who helped me along the way. I will return to continue this project when the world allows it!

More being with mushrooms, at Saari Residence

2019 was filled with mushrooms. Sweet dessert mushrooms, big fat blue ones, tiny pea-sprout-tasting ones, pretty much any kind of edible mushroom you can imagine. For two months I was an autumn Saari Residence fellow in the Kone Foundation’s country manor near Turku, southern Finland, being taken mushroom-picking by hairdressers, artists, forestry planners, cooks, students, retirees, and other mushroom-lovers, in their favourite local forests. The stories and specimens I collected & dried will eventually come together as a handmade book, sharing different ways of being with mushrooms, released via an experimental distribution model. More soon.

 

Multispecies Storytelling in Sweden

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to present a new performance-lecture in collaboration with Sumugan Sivanesan – on behalf of the T. Rudzinskaite Memorial Amateur Lichenologists Society – at the symposium Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practice, held at Linnaeus University in Växjö, Sweden (Jan 25-27).

Our paper, Speculative Flummery and Cosmic Co-becomings, slipped through a time warp in conference programming to act simultaneously as the Opening Address for the Society’s Annual Convention 2087. Dr Sivanesan joined me in delivering it via spectra-link from the former west. Notable fellow presenters included Vinciane Despret, Kristiina Koskentola, Adam Dickinson, and Dance for Plants.

Cookbook’19, Montpellier

Next week in Montpellier, with Valentina Karga and assorted local microorganisms and humans, I’ll be presenting our project La fermentation de la terre as part of this show featuring 20 artists and 25 cooks at La Panacée-MoCo, curated by Andrea Petrini and Nicolas Bourriaud. Fermenting live on Saturday Feb 9 with participants inside the gallery!

2086 T. Rudzinskaitė Memorial Amateur Lichenologists Society Field Trip & Picnic

Last month I collaborated with Sumugan Sivanesan on an SF storytelling/political therapy picnic. It was part of Nida Art Colony‘s 8th Inter-format Symposium, On Rites & Terrabytes, and involved a 2-month development residency at Nida, a Lithuanian seaside resort town, in the lead-up.

At the edge of the sixth mass extinction, the project asked what new performative practices might enable us to collectively acknowledge the disappearance of particular species or ecological assemblages. Storytelling was approached as an ambiguous and slippery tool for meaning (and myth) making, with potential to help us navigate, position or transform ourselves in the here and now. Set in 2086, our narrative traced possible futures and peripheral pasts around specific sites of loss and of co-becoming (the baltic sturgeon, the arctic raspberry), combining wondering/wandering, embodied in/digestion and forms of SF (speculative fiction, science fantasy, selective foraging, social fermentation, food sovereignty).

After many weeks traipsing through the dunes, forest and beach, collecting spruce shoots, nettles, raspberry leaves and mosquito bites, talking to local biologists and foragers, concocting jellies and pancakes and fermented sodas, we finally hosted our picnic on Day 2 of the symposium.

For those of you who missed out on this bumper 2086 edition, here’s a taste of what the Society got up to. See you next year, and remember to visit our blog.

Meeting point at Nida carpark

Toasting the locally extinct arctic raspberry, and the alive and well wild strawberry, with wild strawberry kvass (fermented soda).

UFO landing site. Space lichen, astrobiology and Cold War luxuries.

Blinis with un-caviar. One person dollops a spoonful of un-caviar on another’s blini, saying, ‘kosmičeskije sso-sstanivlenija‘ (‘in cosmic co-becomings’).

Flummery! Made with agar and blueberries from the old forest. The Permian mass extinction and microplastic futures.

The Great Tuning Fork

This year the Amateur Lichenologists Society also had a presence in Vilnius, with the opportunity to show some work alongside Žilvinas Landzbergas in the Vilnius Academy of Arts Glass Pavilion, as part of Teleport to Nida.

That’s our life-size baltic sturgeon below (long ago extinct in the wild), the exact length of the last one caught in the Baltic Sea, off a remote island in Estonia.

Thanks to everyone who attended this year’s picnic, and to Nida Art Colony for hosting us!

La fermentation de la terre, Treignac Projet

I’ve just spent a week lacto-fermenting local things underground with Valentina Karga and a host of micro-organisms at Treignac Projet, in the south of France. It happened as part of Entanglements, Embodiments, Positions, curated by Jussi Koitela and continuing his work around Karen Barad’s material-discursive intra-actions. La fermentation de la terre was our first experiment towards making a public underground fermentation facility, conceived as a possible future project for Collective Disaster.

We made: beetroot and carrot pickle (incorporating all the beetroot stalks and leaves), a French variant of kimchi (with chilli, ginger and herbs from the garden, thyme, rosemary, dill..), and pickled eggs, all using ceramic vessels that could be buried in the earth. The largest one, used for the kimchi, was found buried under the basement of a 500-year old stone house a few kilometres away. Stones from the stream running through Treignac served as very good weights, keeping the vegetables under the salty water level.

Since this region has only a thin layer of soil over bedrock, it was not easy to find a suitable place for pit fermentation on the property. Sam & Liz (who run the space, a rambling former textile factory) decided that they could make one by drilling out a patch of concrete in the courtyard. We tried out some underground slow-cooking in the brand new hole, leaving behind a pit that can be used for fires and fermentations.

If you happen to be in that part of the world over summer, you can see (and taste!) the exhibition anytime until 31 August 2018.