FRUITING BODIES QUEER ECOLOGY COLLECTIVE PRESENTS 'RITUALS FOR... SEEDING'

Fruiting Bodies is a growing collective – currently made up of 11 Australian-based artists – envisioned to nurture and hold space for a range of exploratory practices that encourage resonances between ideas and ways of working and moving together with shared concerns and enthusiasms.

The series of free public gatherings and readings, “Rituals for...”, are an invitation to cultivate generative, ongoing, freewheeling and diverse conversations about activist and ecological potentials of queerness and neurodiversity as practice rather than identity. Through rituals of sharing, attunement and reciprocity, we ask how ecology queers us through attention to and extension of other, more-than-human ways of being with, and thinking with, the earth.

When: Thursday 18 April from 5:30-7:30pm. Free, RSVP required.

Fruiting Bodies facilitators Nataša Čordašić, Adele Wilkes and Andrew Goodman invite you to an evening at TERRAIN to participate in a plant connection tea ceremony followed by a reading of excerpts from ‘Strathern beyond the Human: Testimony of a Spore’ by Chinese-American anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing.

Please feel free to bring a small offering - a seed or seedling, leaf, flower, story, object, image, scent, etc. that speaks to your connection with the ecosystem you inhabit, and/or the more-than-humans that share it.

Facilitators:

Nataša Čordašić is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting, performance, and installation. Her practice focuses on employing materiality to address social issues, developed from empowering gestures within the landscape of trauma healing. Most recently, she responded to the call of a passion flower vine. Together, they built the Peace Centre and its outposts – several small gardens / test sites, that lead their experimental research.

Adele Wilkes is an artist and researcher whose practice spans moving image, sound, photography and installation, focusing on experimental, expanded and poetic modes of documentary and cinematic storytelling. Her work particularly engages with spiritual and queer ecology, animism, consciousness and ethnobotany. Recently, Adele’s project, The Poison Garden, was exhibited at NGV Australia and Buxton Contemporary, and her work exploring trance rituals was shown in festivals in Malaysia and Australia.

Andrew Goodman is a visual artist and writer whose interests range from consciousness and generative algorithm design to process philosophy and ecology, and whose work encompasses concepts from science fiction fabulations, philosophy of science and activist ethics. Andrew is co-editor of the 3Ecologies book imprint (Punctum Books), author of Gathering Ecologies: Thinking Beyond Interactivity (2018), and The Secret Life of Algorithms (2024) and is currently researching a book on rewilding and ecological ethics.