“Mycelium from varietals, especially suited for mycoremediation in disturbed landscapes, intersperse with altars to historical eco-disruptions to patriarchal structures.”

The organism that is our loose collective, stretched out temporally, have created a video relic of our laboratory on multi-species future dreaming. The performers left traces of their research, creating a layering of detritus (material and energetic) like a forest floor. We are collectively researching queer ecology and the possibility of re-wilded futures through reading, movement, writing, and video documentation.

This is research into connectivity and presence in the midst of disturbance. In the midst of the collapse we face, mycelia offers a way to think through decomposition and regeneration.

As Kathryn Yusoff writes in A Billion Black Anthropocenes, “Material stories are origin stories-stories that reproduce not just arrangements of matter but subjects through divisions of matter…it is to be attentive to what histories of the earth provide a break in analysis of material relations and languages of description that have colonized it, and to begin to make histories that launch a praxis for an insurgent geology into being.”

Disturbed Landscapes is an installation and interspecies performance lab between mushroom+human+machine documented through a video available on our website. This was a collaboration between M Rasmussen and Laura Stinger alongside a collective of local artists exploring similar themes.

Ultimately, they are looking to form an artist-led mushroom remediation team which centers ritual and practice in pulling up toxins from sites around Los Angeles. If you’d be interested in joining, sign up through the form below.

This workshop project was created by M Rasmussen and Laura Stinger with Miles Brenninkmeijer, Camilla Carper, Alexsa Durrans, Paige Emery, Jas Lin, Alice Lang, June Melton, Saewon Oh, and Sara Suarez in response to NOW WHAT open call written by Anise S. Hines Theus, Daleen Saah, Jasmine Lin, and Joal Stein.

M Rasmussen (b. San Jose, CA) is a multimedia artist, exploring the notion of community, body, and land in relation to increasing processes of digitization. 

Laura Stinger makes work in Los Angeles. Working within the realms of research, performance, video and sculpture, their work challenges the border of the body through a lens of queer ecologies.