Cesar and Lois
June 5th - July 19th 2021
Opening Reception: Saturday June 5th
Eat the Anthropocene with Cesar & Lois, mycelia and friend entities
Cesar & Lois create artworks with microorganisms and technological networks. Books become substrates for other logical pathways, and texts are written over, eaten, and rewritten. New intelligences emerge.
As with mycelia and their networked relationships, Cesar & Lois and the extended community of Yes We Cannibal probe the connections within our ecosystems, explore knowledge pathways outside of the range of human thinking, and imagine an AI based on mushrooms.
Connections across microbiological organisms offer potential new forms for thinking.
There is an Anishinaabe word for a form of emergence embodied by mushrooms. Puhpowee, Robin Wall Kimmerer tells us, is the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight. The artist duo Cesar & Lois imagines that force is both tangible and nonlinear, something to be explored in thinking about our coexistence with other species, even in shaping our technologies.
Let’s rethink our relationship to landscape and to the landscape’s inhabitants and eat the anthropocene together.
During their residency, Lucy HG Solomon and Cesar Baio, who make up Cesar & Lois, conversed with the Yes We Cannibal community, collaborate with local mycologists and forage in our distinct locales. The gallery played host to a number of artifacts that layer human and microbiological thinking, with books’ pages eaten, grown on and in, and carved according to microbiological pathways. Responding to inputs from the local environment and the ensuing dialogue, Cesar & Lois began to develop a mushroom AI that consumes anthropocentric thinking, rewriting the texts that brought us to the Anthropocene.
PROGRAMS
The public was invited to think along mycelial pathways within the gallery space’s installation, to reconsider texts with participating scholars in a panel discussion around anthropocentric literature, and to forage for mushrooms and create spore prints over text in a public workshop.
June 26th
This panel featured Dr. Chris Barrett, English (LSU), Dr. Richard Doyle aka Mobius, English (Penn State), Susan Main, Cultivate Projects (Washington, DC) and Robyn Reed, Landscape Architecture (LSU), as well as the resident artists Lucy HG Solomon and Cesar Baio. It was pre-recorded and streamed on Twitch and projected in the gallery.
The panel was later edited and published with an introduction and conclusion by Mat Keel and Liz Lessner for a Sacred Plants issue of Anthropology of Consciousness 33(2) in Fall 2022.
July 3rd
A free public workshop entitled Digital Foraging, Analog Mushrooms took place in early July featuring Dr. Logan Wiedenfeld (Alcorn State University).
Pricing and further documentation available on request. Contact gallery@yeswecannibal.org. All work is copyright of the artist(s) 2021.
