Dreaming about mushrooms...
Dreaming about mushrooms dreaming about me sleeping between their gills is an artistic project of embodied research that evokes the desire to establish a shared perspective with fungi, from which to create language, memory, body, kinship and meaning together.
The project explores the intricate relationships that can be established with another companion species, calling for the construction of an expanded kinship beyond the epistemic framework of human exceptionalism, situated within queer (post)natural and more-than-human ecologies.
As part of this process, embodied speculative technologies take shape, intertwining exercises in fiction, biological experimentation, and artistic practice. Dreaming about mushrooms […] is articulated through multiple tentacles that, like the hyphae of a mycelium, gather and connect different moments of research and creation.
Metabolic Affair : I eat you, you eat me
Research Process (2022 - ongoing)
In Metabolic Affair. I eat you, you eat me (2022 – ongoing) the research focuses on exploring the possibilities of establishing a metabolic bond with fungi. Starting from experimentation with matter and tissues, it aims to investigate metabolic processes as a means of connection between the organic and the affective, appealing to metabolism's capacity to function as a system of memory and language. Using organic matter from one's own body as food for the fungi, the circulation of something more than just energy is explored through the trophic processes of assimilation and transformation of matter. Throughout this process of bodily feedback, a proximity becomes evident which, through an exercise of material reciprocity, shows other ways of building kinship relationships.
Kin
Photography (2023- 2024)
Kin is a series of photographs that portray the bond established with the fungi throughout the various iterations of Metabolic Affair. Alluding to the common practice of taking family portraits, it is an acknowledgment of the kinship established through reciprocity in cultivation and the intertwining of matter. The reflection focuses on how the practice of cultivation addresses the implications of maintaining a lasting bond of cohabitation. Across generations of cultivation, I have photographed myself with the fungi growing by feeding on my hair, the same ones that, during my absences, I entrusted to friends or my mother for their care. This process also includes observing how the relationship strengthens over time: the adaptation of the mycelium to our conditions and our adaptation to theirs.
Estudios para Larynxs
Research process (2023)
In September 2023, I had the opportunity to undertake a residency at NoLugar, a non-commercial gallery in Quito, Ecuador. During this period, I dedicated myself to exploring various methodological and material possibilities for the development of Larynx, a project that at the time was in a germination phase. I worked with a mixed technique that included creating plaster molds, applying tattoo techniques, experimenting with biomaterials, and drawing.
Larynx imagines the creation of a living sculpture based on a hybrid communication organ, taking the form of what fungi would conceive as a human larynx. The project's goal is to question and dispute the normativity of anatomical models, as instruments of technoscience to define and control bodies.
Metabolic Affair: Re-Rooted Bodies
Performance, textual narrative, three-channel video installation, bio-electronic transduction device (2024)
Metabolic Affair: Re-Rooted Bodies (2024) is a speculative biofiction in the form of a performance that explores the two-year metabolic relationship between the mycelium and the artist. The performance delves into the desire to share bodies and territories in an affective entanglement, questioning how we can create bonds beyond the exchange of power, nourishment, domestication, and deterritorialization. An SF* device collects the impulses from both bodies and restitutes them into what is fictionalized as a text describing a conversation generated in another space of cognition.
SF* explicitly refers to the polysemic definition formulated by Donna Haraway: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far (Haraway, 2013).
Credits and Acknowledgments:
Sebastián Jara Bunsen, development of the hardware and programming of the technical device.
Merche Jara Muns (Obrador Urpa), support in the creation of the ceramic pieces.
Metabolic Affair: Re-rooted Bodies was presented at Mz* Baltazar’s Lab (Vienna) as part of the Fem_Lab residency.
The Fem_Lab Catalonia-Austria exchange is a collaboration between Mz* Baltazar’s Lab and Hangar Barcelona, promoted by the Delegation of the Government of Catalonia in Central Europe, with the aim of supporting artistic exchange between a woman* artist from Catalonia and the Mz* Baltazar’s Lab collective.