2018
Tessa Zettel & Sumugan Sivanesan
Guided walk/picnic
Solo performative picnic/guided walk project & museum display, for the ‘8th Inter-format Symposium: On Rites & Terrabytes’, Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts, Nida (Lithuania), 2018
Developed over a 2-month residency at Nida Art Colony, this site-responsive performative picnic/guided walk was the first appearance of a hyperstitional amateur lichenology society. Set in 2086, our picnic narrative traced possible futures and deep time pasts, around local sites of loss and co-becoming (including the baltic sturgeon & arctic raspberry), combining wondering/wandering, embodied in/digestion and forms of SF (speculative fiction, science fantasy, selective foraging, social fermentation, food sovereignty). At the edge of the sixth mass extinction, the project treats storytelling as a tool for meaning and myth-making, asking what new performative practices might enable us to collectively acknowledge the disappearance of particular species or ecological assemblages.
The Society continues to promote the love and study of lichen in this galaxy and beyond via performance-lectures, installations, workshops, videos, sound pieces, events, and publications.
www.welikelichen.space
