The Global Centre for Climate Action (GCCA) at OCAD U presents: Mycelilal Collaborations & Explorations
A conversation between artist and professor, Natalie Majaba Waldburger (OCAD U) and curator and author, Yasmine-Ostendorf Rodriguez as part of our fall speaker series.
How can we create in mycelium ways in our artistic practices? This is a question that artist and educator Natalie Majaba Waldburger, along with curator and author Yasmine-Ostendorf Rodriguez, have been exploring. Their interdisciplinary work focuses on fostering trans-border collaborations and models of relationality in artmaking as a form of decolonial practice and an action towards social and climate justice.
Both have led a breadth of mycelial exploration. A self-proclaimed mycophile, Yasmine established the Green Art Lab Alliance, a global network that embodies 'mycelial' ways of organizing and being, led research for her book, Let's Become Fungal! Mycelium Teachings and the Arts, which highlights artists and organizations that work in mycelilal ways, and co-created the Future Materials Bank, an open-source resource on materials that promotes the transition to more sustainable artistic practice.
Natalie, on the other hand, has examined the mycelium and mushrooms as a living material and metaphor to explore human movement and migration narratives, resulting in a series of installations and performances.
Join us for an intimate virtual conversation and knowledge exchange where Natalie and Yasmine will share their creative processes, insights, and learnings on applying mycelial thinking to artistic collaboration and practice and why they believe it is important to the work of climate action.
RSVP HERE: tinyurl.com/gccaocadu1
Speaker Biographies
Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez (MA) is a curator, writer, and researcher working at the intersection of art and ecology. She is the founder of the Green Art Lab Alliance (established in 2012); a network comprising sixty art organizations across Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia. The mission of the alliance is to foster relationships that contribute to social and environmental justice, akin to the interconnected nature of mycelium. She has worked for organizations including Julie's Bicycle (United Kingdom), Asia-Europe Foundation (Singapore), and TransArtists (Netherlands). She founded and directed the Nature Research Department at the Jan van Eyck Academie (Netherlands, 2017), the Van Eyck Food Lab (2018), and the Future Materials Bank (2020); a crowd-sourced database of sustainable materials for artists, designers and architects. She is a self-proclaimed "mycophile", interested in exploring the application of a mycological lens in defining fair models of collaboration and (self) organization. Her debut book, "Let's Become Fungal! Mycelium Teachings and the Arts," shares twelve teachings of the world of fungi. It was published by Valiz in 2023 and is being translated into various languages including Spanish. It was selected for one of the Best Dutch Book Designs 2023 and nominated for the Best Book Design Globally 2023.
Natalie Majaba Waldburger’s current art practice is open-disciplinary and seeks to understand the complexities of respectful collaboration and participatory work in the context of anti-colonial research. As a faculty member at OCAD U, Natalie teaches in the Faculty of Art in the Life Studies specialization. Life Studies is a specialization positioned in the Faculty of Art that brings together the arts, sciences, and humanities to cultivate interdisciplinary studio art practices. These pedagogical approaches speak to Natalie’s art research practice positioned at the intersection of sustainability, social justice, and ecologically respectful art practices. In Natalie's most recent work at the bio-art residency at SVA NY Natalie considers living material through an anthropomorphic lens. Working with mycelium and mushrooms, Natalie considers how the distribution of spores converges with human narratives of movement and migration. This biologically-informed comparison evokes “invasion” nomenclatures used to describe waves of immigration, the historical strategies of colonization through cultural appropriation and erasure, and the injection of cultural specificity to domestic spaces and familial relationships. The resilience of spores and their hidden proliferation in the ecologies of domestic spaces evoke the haunted presence of cultural longing and displacement caused by the diasporic experience.