Becoming Lichen - irregular diary - part 4
Part of Becoming Lichen - a research project by Simon Whitehead
24-27 October 2024
Locator 32; Becoming Lichen workshop.
Locator is a residential community workshop practice. Immersed in Coetir Tycanol woods and other significant landscape ecosystems over the last 32 years, through creative practice we cultivate a sensory porosity to the influence of ‘more than human’ lives. In movement we sensitise to their generous affect and make them familiar to us.
Coetir Tycanol has one of the most diverse lichen ecosystems in Wales and the UK. It is a perfect place to be/come with the multitude of lichen organisms growing on the surfaces of trees and rocks.
In this workshop we asked, How might we learn of bodily/ interspecies collaboration and creative community from these mysterious and ancient beings? To move as lichen was to combine our differences, to be together in ways that we couldn’t if alone, to make something complex, unusual, slow and sustaining perhaps?
12 Dancers/ movers and makers arrived from all over the UK, Wales, Ireland and Greece. We spent 4 days and nights together in Canolfan Pentre Ifan, a residential centre on the edge of the woods. We moved, noticed, wrote, made drawings and food, ate, slept and walked at different times of day and night. We spent deep time with these organisms and each other, lichen life entered our ways and slowed us right down.
Beginning with a walk into dusk and darkness on the first night, and ending on the last morning with a walk to witness the sunrise above Carnedd Meibion Owen, Becoming lichen opened different ambient tones of being together. We were reminded that whilst symbiosis is a lichen thing; incorporating diverse communities of difference, it is also an ecological proposal and maybe, as molecular biologist Scott. F.Gilbert (2012) proposes in his research on symbiosis, ‘We are all lichens’?
