Symbiont: Collective Threads of Ecological Study

Jiatong Yuan(@2819yjt) – In her iconography textile installation, by weaving personal narratives with larger societal frameworks, she critically examines how women’s bodies have historically been linked to state-controlled population policies. From history to today, the decision of whether or not to have children and how many children to have has been subject to the macro-control of “population policy” under a patriarchal system. She raises a critical question: If saving the earth is based on controlling women’s bodies, then what are we saving the earth for? Additionally, she investigates how population and labor, as well as Earth’s resources, interact between Western hegemony and various governments.

Juliette Suchel (@juliette_suchel) – Suchel’s work blends personal archives, animation, and collage to unearth hidden and forgotten colonial histories. Drawing from her own family’s experiences in Algeria during French colonization, her pieces reflect on the painful legacies of colonialism and the potential for historical reparation through the act of remembering and storytelling.

sarah koekkoek (@trickyruth)– Soil Study is an ongoing series of discursive experiments, processes, interventions and conversations with soil memory. Multidisciplinary artist sarah koekkoek has been exploring these studies over the past ten months through a variety of artistic mediums including, sculpture, photography, screen printing, movement and choreography. Bringing memories held in her own body to converse with the historical and biological script that is written into the chemistry of soil, these memories collide, converge, weep and rejoice together. With reflective surfaces the viewer is lured to notice memories, moments or stories they carry with soil as an offering to contemplate inherent and embodied ecological knowledge.

Kai Edwards (@kaiedwardsart) – Tools of COMY arose from Edwards’ Queer Science Fiction project The Caretaking Outpost for the Mycelial Young in the form of hand built ceramic vessels. Envisioning a future of fungal co-evolution, their work blurs the lines between species, genders, and questions nuclear family dynamics, queering what it means to be kin. Their speculative work imagines a post-binary world that antiquates its bygone Capitalocenic era. COMY nurtures ideas of care in the face of our changing worlds. Kai Edwards is a multidisciplinary artist working with ceramics, storytelling, sound and in collaboration with living mycelium to produce thought provoking work that asks the question of how life would look if we were deeply fungally involved.

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Instagram:@symbiont.show