GMU:Humus-Micro-Habitats/Maggy Hamel-Metsos

From Medien Wiki

Originally from Concordia University Canada.

I most often work with interventions and installations in an in-situ process. My interest for living organisms comes from a collaboration project with Julien Racine who's specialized in sounds. We have grown oyster mushrooms on an organ score that we wrote ourselves and hired an organist to play the song with the eaten (silent by then) notes on a performance night in a chapel. We we're inspired metaphorically by the entomopathogenic fungus which is a type of fungus that "zombifies" insects and brings them to their death, a parasite. We thought that if we could let a fungi contaminate a musical score we could then hear the soundscape of the post-anthropocene, since fungus grows on dead matter and will most probably outlast our own existence. I am mostly interested in the poetic touch of decay that fungi brings about. This project made me realize that it really was about giving the right circumstances for another living organism to express themselves, to give them a sort of agency. Unfortunately, the death of our organ kept us from truly rendering this idea physical which has also inspired me to think more on the speculative side of things. Another project to be further discussed another time.

Key words

Nature vs culture/ Decay/ Apocalypse/Post anthropocene/ Translation/ Agency/ Local/ Zombification/ Cannibalism/ Sounds/ Speculative/ Insight/


Link to my portfolio: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1e5EDEC9d_F9qmJXo22jbBcC_M6fHNhUF/view