Lichen

SPECIMEN: The largest organism on earth is not the blue whale; it is lichen or fungus. The largest known mycelium is almost 1,000 hectares is size.

SYMBIOSIS: Lichen is neither a plant nor an animal; it is a collection of organisms, whose life is based on the symbiotic relationship that exists between several different organisms: fungi, algae and, sometimes, cyanobacteria. Lichen can adapt to extreme conditions.

PROCESS: Lichen grows at a rate of a few tenths of a millimetre per year. Mycelia can be hundreds, even thousands of years old. The processes of these communities are slow, sometimes dramatic.

A question and a proposal

Our time has been called the age of global performance; it has been said that performance and spectatorship define us living at the beginning of 21st century. At the same time we are living in an age of ecological crises, and many researchers consider the extinctions of animal species to be our greatest thread.

How would it be possible to find a way out of the performative society, or at least move to its periphery, and change the meaning of spectatorship?

A proposal: Create a performance with non-human actor(s), or create a performance for a non-human spectator. Other than human, as non-human agents, we mean here beings and processes of “nature”: other animals, plants, phenomena of weather, various durational processes. If you wish to share your experiences, you can do it via the Chronopolitics Facebook page. But public sharing might not be the most meaningful way to approach this issue in the performative societies. You can also contact Maus&Orlovski performance collective by e-mail: Enable JavaScript to view protected content.