Fruiting Bodies 

Sound installation4 chapters sound peice, 12’55’’

Listen on soundcloud

Text: Ioana Lupascu
Sound  Composition : Maoyi
Voice: Lacey Verhalen, Nash Caldera, Afrang Malekian

Bergamo, Italy, BACO (Base Arte Contemporanea Odierna) &

Orto Botanico di Bergamo “Lorenzo Rota”

The installation is a sonic exploration of the interconnectedness of taste, desire, and decay. It takes inspiration from mycelium structures as a means to distribute, and disturb communication means between learned experiences, interative reactions and conclusions in regards to contemporary food consumption, cravings, and taste.

Mushrooms and fungi provide decentralised examples of communication technologies as a model for co-excitance. The technological actualization of the sonic network breaks the aural linearity of resonance, and activates memory and imaginaries, describing a melting together of sonic input and output in an instant of textual unity.

Formally, the site-specific installation is a choreography of interwoven networks of cables embedded into the landscape of the botanical garden in Bergamo. Four sonic chapters are accessible via a multi-point splitter for headphones. Earbuds dressed in fungi-like shapes leak sonic content into the space. The audience is invited to connect and disconnect to the extended structures while noticing the surrounding environment.

The project text takes inspiration from the following texts:
T is for Taste, Colleen C. Myles, musings food feminism fermentation
Bubbling Bodies and Queer Microbes: Dispatches from the Foundation for Fermenting Fervor by Stephanie Maroney & S.E. Nash
Something That’s Dead by Jessica Bebenek

The installation concept is led by Ioana Lupascu and Maoyi Qiu in collaboration with the 2021-2022 Casco coop ~ You fed me when I was hungry: Food Commons and Ecology of Belonging. The Dutch Art Institute.

“ Don’t forget that gut feeling”
You fed me when I was hungry: Food Commons and Ecology of Belonging.
Casco - working for the commons
Dutch Art Institute coop summit 2022

Bergamo, Italy, BACO (Base Arte Contemporanea Odierna) &
Orto Botanico di Bergamo "Lorenzo Rota"