One and the Care of Many
New work in Rewild,
MAXXI Rome, curated by Manuel Cirauqui.
Part of S+T+ARTS Repairing the Present commissions
(Above: Video still from Flourish)
One and the Care of Many addresses lichen as a starting point to consider notions of collaboration and care between species. Lichens are a multispecies population; mycelial and algae partners living together in a flourishing and site-specific complexity of architecture and community; like a city. Occupying six percent of the earth and calculably metabolising two gigatonnes per year of atmospheric carbon globally, lichens are both ancient and current. At once micro-terraformers, atmospheric bioindicators, ecosystem cornerstones and discrete non-human storytellers of that blink-of-an-eye millennium in which humans have apexed across the earth.
Above:
One and the Care of Many 2022
UV cured digital print on 400 hexagonal stone tiles, 1.7mx 1.8m
Research and More info HERE
Below: Installation view and detail, Flourish video + wallpaper.
Referencing the Euro-pagan Greenman, mosaics in ancient Roman hortii and 19th century drawings by botanist, Ernst Haeckel, to generate a face of lichens, including newer lichens: the genus of lichen found to survive in space, the lichen absorbing gamma radiation near the Fukushima nuclear disaster and a climate responsive lichen emerging in the warmer winters of the Dutch new forests on recently re-claimed lands. A wall work for the hortus of the late-Anthropocene.
Windows through which the universe shines
Single screen video of immersive projection + sound environment. 2022
Sourced from a real-time visualisation of voxel dataset from the microCT scan of a small hooded rosette lichen (Physcia adscendens), from a cannal wall in Den Haag.
A micro-macro immersive navigation through a 1 cm piece of lichen; a galaxy and a pinhead.
Made with the assistance of the Media Solution Center HLRS
Flourish 2022
Digital video with digital print on wallpaper 2022
A speculative interspecies lovestory; between a fungus and an algae, forming lichen. A view of microrewilding, a microbially led flourishing of nature in the city, at lichen time, where 10 years unfolds in 3 minutes.
Back to website: www.penelopecain.com
a S+T+ARTS project, with partners In4Art, Witteveen +Bos
Digital / CG Design and world building: Charleton Mercelina. Video: Penelope Cain Editing: Penelope Cain+VideoHippies. Featuring sounds by Felicity Mangan. 3D printing: Formlab, School of Arts, Ghent. Without these creatives this would not have been possible.
With the assistance of: Media Solution Center-HLRS High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart, Witteveen + Bos, The Hague; Faculteit Civiele Techniek en Geowetenschappen, TU Delft, Bryologische en Lichenologische Werkgroup (BLWG).