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…

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,…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

mushroom days at the end of the world

This (european) autumn & winter I was lucky to be in Finland – where it gets really cold – in the Australia Council residency at HIAP, Suomenlinna, a 19th century fortress island in the central harbour of Helsinki. I arrived in September, just in time for the last weeks of…