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In my most recent performance workshop series, entitled “The National Bird,” I examine different migratory animals, establishing the premise that wild creatures can legally cross territorial boundaries without checkpoints, anytime and anywhere. The performance entails a series of exercises invoking the natural behaviors of these creatures, using our bodies as the primary medium. These performative exercises attempt to illuminate the privilege nonhumans have in terms of the choice of travel, location for settlement, and the ease of traversing borders, both the physical and the imaginary.

Cesar & Lois talks and walks viewers through what it means to think across borders that delineate systems of knowledge. We will consider a manifesto written by microbiological entities and partake in a meditation on thinking across different types of borders – as mycelia. Within the workshop we will approach “Thinking like a Mushroom” as a collective, by walking and talking through non-neural modes of thinking that exist in and across nature. What happens when human knowledge passes through a network of interconnected conduits, capable of ecosystemic synapses and the communications that flow from these? Artifacts of mushrooms fruiting on books are introduced for contemplating crossing the borders of knowledge – integrating fungal and human knowledge systems. The workshop challenges participants to consciously adopt fungal properties of being and thinking. With the imagery of mushrooms growing on books and a guided meditation that contemplates thinking like a mushroom, we will collectively consider microbiological logic as a source and system for understanding. Cesar & Lois asks what borders can we cross in our collaborative thinking, and, importantly: What happens if we insert fungal systems into human knowledge systems?

Moving through space and time. Stories arise, unfold, fall away - interwoven threads of the present. Listening, looking, walking.