Mycorrhizae,
who form, along with the roots of the Earth’s plants, a mycelium with the entire symbiotic living being called the Mycorrhizal Network. I want to create collaboration and large-scale multi-location exhibitions based on this mycorrhizal model. I am looking for artists and scholars to come together to explore issues related to the forest, the climate, displacement of persons and animals, inter-species communication, plant knowledge, inter-dimensional experiences and spirituality. In particular, I would like to explore shamanistic or spiritual communication with plants, animals (including humans), energies, spirits. witches, spiritualists, energy-practitioners, shamans, mambos and other spiritual workers will be a focus.
In Mycorrhizae Project, I am creating a digital ritual space where these ideas can be explored through art in a collaborative or community way, using the digital landscape created through interaction. I want to create an interlinked forest system of art that echoes the beauty of the mycorrhizal network and the synaptic connections in the brain throughout the human and non-human body. In effect, Mycorrhizae Project becomes both body and ecosystem held within the digital wherein each participant necessarily affects both the whole and each other. It is a world-wide forest system, interlinked not by roots or mycorrhizae but by digital connections operating as such.
In the project’s beginnings, I have started making large textile pieces using recycled/reclaimed plastic as a way of commenting on the destruction of the global environment through plastics and the overall attitude of plant-life as resource rather than entity. Spirit Tree, an installation of recycled baler twine, is also a physical manifestation of spiritual knowledge I have been given through ritualized and dream communication with non-human entities. I conceptualize this knowledge as being “precipitated” from the non-human into the human world and that this “…knowledge did something (to people and the environment) rather than just was something (something learned, transmitted…)…”
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Virtanen, K. , Lundell, E. Honkasalo, M. Introduction: Enquiries into Contemporary Ritual landscapes. Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics 11 (1) 2017, pp.5-17
- Espirito Santo, D. Liquid sight, thing-like words, and the precipitation of knowledge substances in Cuban espiritismo. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21 (3) 2015 pp. 579-596