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, 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 (proceso/investigación)
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 (proyecto fotográfico)
Kin (2023- 2024) 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 (proceso/investigación)
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)
Metabolic Affair: Re-Rooted Bodies (2024) es una bioficción especulativa en forma de performance que explora la relación metabólica de dos años entre el micelio y la artista. La performance indaga el deseo de compartir cuerpos y territorios en un enredo afectivo, cuestionando cómo podemos crear lazos más allá del intercambio de poder, la alimentación, la domesticación y la desterritorialización. Un dispositivo SF* recoge los impulsos de ambos cuerpos y los restituye en lo que se ficciona como un texto que describe una conversación generada en otro espacio de cognición.
SF* se refiere explícitamente a la definición polisémica formulada por Donna Haraway: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far (Haraway, 2013).
Créditos y agradecimientos:
Sebastián Jara Bunsen, desarrollo del hardware y de la programación del dispositivo técnico.
Merche Jara Muns (Obrador Urpa), apoyo en la creación de las piezas de cerámica.
Metabolic Affair: Re-rooted Bodies ha sido presentada en Mz* Baltazar’s Lab (Vienna) en el marco de la residencia Fem_Lab.
El intercambio Fem_Lab Cataluña-Austria es una colaboración entre Mz* Baltazar’s Lab y Hangar Barcelona, promovida por la Delegación del Gobierno de Cataluña en Europa Central, con el objetivo de apoyar el intercambio artístico entre una artista mujer* de Cataluña y el colectivo Mz* Baltazar’s Lab.