2022 🎧 ▶️
Fruiting Bodies
Sound installation in 4 chapters, 12’55’’
The installation is a sonic exploration of the interconnectedness of taste, desire, and decay. It takes inspiration from mycelium structures as a means to distribute, and disturb communication means between learned experiences, interative reactions and conclusions in regards to contemporary food consumption, cravings, and taste.
Formally, the site-specific installation is a choreography of interwoven networks of cables embedded into the landscape of the botanical garden in Bergamo. Four sonic chapters are accessible via a multi-point splitter for headphones. Earbuds dressed in fungi-like shapes leak sonic content into the space. The audience is invited to connect and disconnect to the extended structures while noticing the surrounding environment.
Text: Ioana Lupascu
Sound Composition : Maoyi Qui
Voice: Lacey Verhalen, Nash Caldera, Afrang Malekian
* The project text takes inspiration from the following texts: T is for Taste, Colleen C. Myles, musings food feminism fermentation, Bubbling Bodies and Queer Microbes: Dispatches from the Foundation for Fermenting Fervor by Stephanie Maroney & S.E. Nash, Something That’s Dead by Jessica Bebenek.
* Photos by Maoyi Qui
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Mushrooms and fungi provide decentralised examples of communication technologies as a model for coexistence. The technological actualisation of the sonic network breaks the aural linearity of resonance, and activates memory and imaginaries, describing a melting together of sonic input and output in an instant of textual unity.
The installation concept is led by Ioana Lupascu and Maoyi Qiu in collaboration with the 2021-2022 Casco COOP ~ You fed me when I was hungry: Food Commons and Ecology of Belonging, led by "Casco - working for the commons" at The Dutch Art Institute.
First presented at Dutch Art Institute COOP Summit 2022, “Don’t forget that gut feeling” at Bergamo, Italy, BACO (Base Arte Contemporanea Odierna) & Orto Botanico di Bergamo "Lorenzo Rota"