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…

Valentina Karga: Energies in Common

[First published October 2018 in HFBK’s Lerchenfeld Issue 45] It was some months before I realised that ‘banana-mami’ was in fact ‘banana mummy’. Valentina had been talking about the energetic powers of pyramids for a while, building and testing them for herself, placing ordinary bananas in their centres to see…

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…

The Disappearance of the Sea and its Fantasmatic Recovery in Berlin, of all places!

[Originally published in Dear un 22/2/18] I’m looking through a tiny window at the silvery surface of the sea roughly 10,000 metres below. I don’t know where I am, or which ocean this is. After five straight days of lectures, workshops, panels, exhibitions and performances at Berlin’s transmediale festival, I…

Making Time as book

Making Time made a book! It’s a preserving cookbook, collection of notes and correspondences, set of drawings, reflection on the project so far and a few more things in between. We did it all by hand, from producing content to (riso) printing to cutting and stitching, which meant it took…

documenta 14: art of the (im)possible

­­­ [Originally published 2017 in Broadsheet Journal 46.2] The fourteenth edition of documenta opened for the first time in Athens this April, two months ahead of a second opening in its customary home of Kassel, Germany. The exhibition is subtitled ‘Learning from Athens’, and is marked as much by its dual location…

Micro-economies and self-publishing in Mexico

Some months ago I was invited to join Marjetica Potrč’s ‘Design for the Living World’ social design class in Mexico. I worked with them in Belgrade a few years ago, where I was struck by their total immersion of pedagogy with life and social action (they’ve just been nominated for a…

Sitting around digital fires | (no)action(no)space in Schloss—Post

Last year I took part in the beginnings of (no)action(no)space, a collaborative research platform distributed over time and space, involving a shifting group of about 7 artists and initiated by Laura Bernhardt. We first gathered around a ‘real’ fire at the Bodensee lake in spring; some months later these shared conversations and…