THE TRAUMA SURROGATES

This is one of the video segments from the larger project No Claim to the Blue-Green Bloom, about the colossal toxic mine and a quiet revolution of care for damaged earth. It references the bioremediation capabilities of mushrooms—their remarkable ability to remove contaminants from an ecosystem.

Might be cool to install the sculpture suspended from a tree and light it? It has hung as a sculpture with the full video in galleries, and I performed at one opening reception to activate the sculpture and “set it up” with the long silver tube. The performance as I have done it is only about 5 minutes and is basically what happens in the Trauma Surrogate section, so if you wanted performance, think I would have to reimagine it as an interactive/participatory component.
The exterior of the sculpture is waterproof (special effects-grade gelatine covering the wire, paper, and tempera-painted gauze) but on the interior side the paper, gauze and tempera is exposed so if rain plans still have things outside, I’d have to address that.

ADAPTATIONS FOR CAPITALIST RUINS

This chapter of the No Claim to the Blue-Green Bloom video looks to the extremophiles (microbes able to exist in conditions deemed extreme and inhospitable for humans) to propose strategies for approaching unwieldily messes left behind by extraction practices.

I’ve performed the microbe in a couple different capacities as well, most recently at the Creative NS Awards. For this performance I made a banner (VIVE LA MORE-THAN-HUMAN REVOLUTION) and postcards with a visualization exercise typed on the back, that aim to shift the understanding of ourselves as individuals, to individuals who are also ecologies and who are part of ecologies. I sewed a little zipper in the microbes I could hand out cards. Tricky thing with this costume is that I can’t see except out of the bottom directly at my feet.

CHOREOGRAPHIES FOR CAPITALIST RUINS

This is another accompaniment to the Extremophile video. It is just a loop of the Extremophiles dancing, playing from a tablet built into in a small mirrored box. Box is installed on the wall at kid height. When you look inside the microbes repeat kaleidoscopically… it was to mirror the expansive worlds I saw when I spent time looking at microorganisms under the microscope. No text, just something visual to discover. I have two of these boxes, the larger is about 12” x 8” and it’s in the pictures below. They had to go on a plinth because we weren’t allowed to drill into the wall).

VISUALIZATIONS TO RECLAIM THE POWER OF SHAPE-SHIFTING

I’m throwing this one in here, it is another side/accompanying piece to the larger project. It is shown alongside a version of the “More-than-Human Movement” visualization exercise on the postcard above, but when that text is attached to this video, and not the microbe and banner, it starts with:

You were born with the power of shape-shifting
You are a Shape-shifter

…and then goes into a slightly different version of the text.