Signaling is a sprawling, networked project made in collaboration with the mycelium of oyster mushrooms, a sound-artist, five performers, many citizen scientists on YouTube, a chef, a designer, a group of female knitters, and the audience. There were elements of the project concurrently on view at Vitensenteret, Kunst Ung Kjøpmannsgata, Trondheim Kunsthall, and Nils Aas Kunstverksted. The primary site of this project at Vitensenteret is an immersive sculpture and sound installation built by and for the mycelium. This work explores ideas of community, caretaking, and mutual systems of support as modeled by the role of fungi in the planet’s soil and oceans. Fungi were the first organisms to come to land — 1.3 billion years ago—and are integral to life on earth. Mycelium is the root-like structure of mushrooms and is responsible for the health of all soil and supports the life of 90% of all plants. Taking fungal relationships as the jumping off point, this project uses various methods, strategies, and practices to ask questions about understanding and relating to the natural world and each other.
Through sculptural installation, sound art, dance, talks, and cooking events, Signaling creates opportunities for entanglement in which encounter has the potential to remake us. I borrow this notion from Anna Tsing. In her book, The Mushroom at the End of the World, she writes, “We are contaminated by our encounters; they change who we are as we make way for others. As contamination changes world-making projects, mutual worlds—and new directions—may emerge. Everyone carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option. One value of keeping precarity in mind is that it makes us remember that changing with circumstances is the stuff of survival. […] staying alive — for every species— requires livable collaborations. Collaboration means working across difference, which leads to contamination.” (Tsing, 2015, pp. 27-28). This work does that through assemblage: it brings together diverse participants— human, fungal, or non-human — to explore how they can inform, collaborate, and contaminate each other. Each contributor brings a history that becomes interwoven with the other histories. Through various forms of encounter, we — both collaborators and audience — can begin to learn better how to co-exist, collaborate, and heal across species. Signaling is a meditation on other-than-human methods of communication and symbiotic relationships. This project lies in the intersection of artistic research and science. It references theoretical, anthropological, and ecological texts while borrowing methods and practices found in architecture, sound art, social practice, and contemporary choreography.
Choreography: Amalia Wiatr Lewis
Sound Design: Øystein Fjeldbo
Performance: Amalie Gammichia, Catarina Gärtner, Rikke Helbo, Ida Mariboe Nielsen, Amalia Wiatr Lewis
Video: C. Thomas Lewis
Video Editing: C. Thomas Lewis
Graphic Design: Natalie Harris
Supported by: NTNU Ocean Week, Trondheim Kommune, Sparebank1, Vitensenteret i Trondheim, Kunsthall Trondheim, Kunstakademiet i Trondheim, Meta.Morf 2022
June 2021
Havet, Trondheim NO
Performed by: Rikke Helbo, Valentina Martinez, Amalia Wiatr Lewis
Music by: Joel Vide Hynsjö
Materials: Magnetic Costumes, Metal Building, Pickup Mics
A film collaboration with C. Thomas Lewis
2020
As in many places in the United States, the right of access to public lands in Rhode Island is in jeopardy. The current Rhode Island law, passed in 1982, establishes the public-private boundary of shoreline as being the “average high-tide line in an 18.6 year cycle”—a line that is impossible for the average beach-goer to identify and one that is changing with rising sea levels. This line is also frequently challenged or dismissed by beachfront property owners who would like their beach to be private. The most recent law proposed in March 2020, if implemented, would secure the public’s right to shoreline by decriminalizing trespassing within 10 feet of the most recent-high tide line, ostensibly making more shoreline into public property.
This performance was held on the beach where, several months prior, I was illegally told to leave. This performance was—quite literally—drawing a line in the sand to designate rightful public property and is a visualization of how an additional 10 feet of public shoreline could be experienced. Members of the public joined in a socially-distanced new game of volleyball.
An interruption to a music show. The music is playing then suddenly goes quiet. Three figures emerge and the audience naturally moves aside. The dancers create a new stage within a stage. The room is quiet, and ears are still ringing. The movement is slow and concentrated. It is performed with care. At times it deforms the body, and at times that is jarring. The dancers find each other in space and time, suddenly linking into unison and then falling out of it again. There is a pattern, but it is not discernible. Your mind keeps trying to put the pieces together, but it can’t. The music begins to play again, moving from a similarly calm pattern to cacophony. The dance remains the same. Then the stage comes down.
2019
Dance performance shot on 16 mm film
White Rabbit, Indianapolis, IN
Choreography: Amalia Wiatr Lewis
Performers: Amalia Wiatr Lewis, Patrick Schuette, Sawyer Harvey
Musician: Landon Caldwell
Cinematographer: Rocio Mesa
A public performance on the Rocky Steps at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
April 2019
Made in collaboration with the dancers: Maddie Hopfield, Anisha Chirmule and Mehgan Abdel-Moniem
OPTIONS is an interactive object-based exhibition showing the work of Emily Culver, Angela Heaps, Jonathan Santoro, and William Udell. Curated by Amalia Wiatr Lewis.
OPTIONS is a space for the development of new performance work that interacts with the object-based exhibition. New work by Chloë Engel, Majestic, Mark McCloughan and Zoe Nelson, and Chloe Marie Newton. Curated by Amalia Wiatr Lewis.
OPTIONS is a dance video made by Amalia Wiatr Lewis with Hannah Declercq, Maggie Donoghue, and Chloë Engel. It is a documentation of the object-based exhibition and an exploration of possible interactions.
Pamphlet Design by Natalie Harris
Little Berlin
Philadelphia, PA
September 2018
This piece asks questions about femininity, domesticity, and cleanliness. This piece looks at all the times being a woman feels powerful and all the times I take on a meekness that someone else wants for me. It is about clenched fists and having agency. It is about all the times I say yes when I don't want to. This piece is sexual and intimate. It travels between states of being a friend, child, lover, mother, acquaintance, and dwells on none specifically. It is non-narrative. It is dance work, with experiments in vocalization. This piece is a solo.
Now then, is an exhibition that explores time experientially, conceptually, and globally. The five artists in Now then, —Samuel Burhoe, Kelli Creutzinger, Angus McCullough, Adrian Paci, Holly Streekstra, and Kasey Toomey— explore the theme through temporary sculpture, ephemeral realities, historical representation, and personal memory. Through a variety of materials and means, each piece catalyzes a transformation, becoming a physical representation of the passage of time.
SHIPS (a screening)
An evening of films about boats and ships.
The Column by Adrian Paci
Kwassa Kwassa by Tuan Andrew Nguyen and SUPERFLEX
The Forgotten Space by Allan Sekula and Noël Burch
Curated by Amalia Wiatr Lewis
Little Berlin
Philadelphia, PA
September 2017
Facing is a dance for 4.
Choreographed by Amalia Wiatr Lewis. Performed by Amalia Wiatr Lewis and Samuel Wentz. Sound design by Susan Kennedy. Video and Editing by India Abbott.
Choreographed by Amalia Wiatr Lewis. Performed by Meghan Herzfeld, Zoe Huey, Amalia Wiatr Lewis. Music by Roi Karlinsky.
Bennington College, VT
May 2014