An interspecies embodied research: engaging dance and fungi in unravelling new modes of responding to climate change

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Kingston University - London 2024 -present

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How are we to live in the face of “ecological ruination?” (Tsing 2015: 27). Troubling scientific modes of climate knowledge that promote intellectual comprehension of statistics and graphs through disembodied distance (Verlie 2022), this practice-as-research project explores the potentialities of embodied ways of knowing as an epistemological alternative to grapple with climate change (Barbour 2011). Taking cues from Haraway (2016) and practising response-ability through surprising coalitions, the project argues for a coming together of dance and fungi to mobilise understandings that climate is a “living phenomenon” (Verlie citing Sasser 2022: 06) and that our relationships with the non-human generate the conditions in which we live.

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The interdisciplinary methodology of this research employs the notions of transcorporeal feminism, new materialism, radical ecology, and queer perspectives to disseminate knowledges of the mycelium network to groups of people. It does so through approaches that welcome subjectivity, imagination, and lived experience into the process of learning, as well as connecting it to local landscapes. By positioning the body as part and parcel of our understanding of both personal and collective experiences, it challenges the notion of objectivity that often divorces scientific inquiry from lived experience. So far, activities developed with groups have been:

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Entangled drawing: collective drawing through crayons tied by a string in order to explore bodily sensations of negotiation, collaboration, agency and responsibility.

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Letters to mycelium: addressing mycelium as second person, participants are invited to write a letter to it. This exploration repositions mycelium as an equal agentic being, fostering attitudes of care and imaginative wonders towards it.

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