Mycorrhizal Encounters II: In conversation with Xalli Zúňiga

Xalli Zúñiga is a multidimensional, Mestizx artist/academic/curator, who explores mycorrhizal, anti-colonial and feminist art education. She is theoretically and practically interested in the medium of drawing, and in her research she orients expansive, line-making practices toward stimulating people’s capacity for alternative meaning-production in the face of cognitive capitalism. Xalli will be in conversation with Elspeth Mitchell and Lenka Vráblíková. 

This conversation is the second one in the The Mycorrhizal Encounters series of on-line conversations with artists, activists and researchers who work with the versatility of fungi and the resourcefulness of mycorrhizal communities. Through different practices and theoretical approaches of the invited guests, the series connects mycelium and underground root systems to multiple other worlds of intricate entanglements and networks: the fluvial, vegetable and technological branching on the land; the neural pathways in the bodies of some organisms; the global capitalist market; the internet; kin networks and other kinds of affiliations and belongings. For the Mycorrhizal Encounter I, Tereza Porybná talked to Peter McCoy, a US based mycology educator, author and founder of Radical Mycology and Slovakian sound-artist and organizer of mykoLOM festival Jonáš Gruska. Further encounters will feature Tai Shani, a UK-based artist involved in the study of psychedelics, feminist histories, and myth; Zimbabwe-based farmer, campaigner, and educator Chido Govera, whose mission is to promote mushroom cultivation as a sustainable source of food and income in impoverished regions around the world; and US-based anthropologist Anna Tsing, the author of The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. 


Xalli Zúñiga is a multidimensional, Mestizx artist/academic/curator born in Mexico City, in Abya Yala. She obtained a B.A. in Visual Arts at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México U.N.A.M. From 2013 to 2015 she completed the Erasmus Mundus “Crossways in Cultural Narratives” M.A. degree from three universities in Europe: University of St Andrews, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, and Université de Perpignan Via Domitia. Xalli is currently completing a doctorate degree in Art Education and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. Her research in drawing orients expansive, line-making practices toward stimulating people’s capacity for alternative meaning-production in the face of cognitive capitalism. Xalli has conducted experimental drawing workshops in Lusaka in Zambia, and in Chiapas, and Querétaro, Mexico. She is currently undertaking a Ph.D. in Art Education from the Pennsylvania State University, for which she has contributed to the Restorative Justice Initiative at Penn State, by imparting drawing lessons for women at the Center County Correctional Facility in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. You may contact her at xcz1@psu.edu. 

Elspeth Mitchell / elspethmitchell.co.uk / (Leeds, UK) is a researcher, teacher and visual arts producer working on practices and theories of feminism and art. She held post-doctoral research fellowships supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Loughborough University. In 2016, she co-founded Feminist Readings Networks / Réseau Lectures Féministes, a multi-lingual network for early-career artists and researchers at the University of Leeds, University of Helsinki, University of South Africa and University of Paris 8. Since 2017 she has been organising mushroom foraging and feminist reading groups (with Lenka Vráblíková). 

Lenka Vráblíková’s work lies at the intersection of visual culture studies, transnational feminisms and political ecology and currently is a lecturer at the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. Lenka is particularly interested in examining the role forests, mushrooms and their foragers have played in the cultural and political imagination of European heteropatriarchal and colonial modernity. Since 2017 she has been facilitating – together with Elspeth Mitchell – mushroom foraging and feminist reading walks “Out of Office” and is a co-founding member of / Feminist Readings Network / that provides transnational and translingual space to explore feminist, queer and anti-racist thought, art and pedagogy.

The discussion takes place on Wednesday, October 20, 7pm CET. 
Join the online discussion via Zoom: 
https://bit.ly/myccorhizalencounter 
Password: mushroom

The conversation will be held in English, with a recording published afterwards. 

UPCOMING MYCORRHIZAL ENCOUNTERS: 
18. 11., 7PM Chido Govera. Moderated by Lenka Vráblíková and Elspeth Mitchell 
Date TBC Tai Shani. Moderated by Lenka Vráblíková and Elspeth Mitchell 
Date TBC Anna Tsing. Moderated by Lenka Vráblíková and Elspeth Mitchell

For more information, please, contact les@are-events.org

The Mycorrhizal Encounters series is prepared by Lenka Vráblíková, Elspeth Mitchell and Tereza Porybná as part of the Descendants of Fungi and (Eco)Politics of Sharing festival.

The Descendants of Fungi Festival is organized by Woods – Community for cultivation, theory and art in cooperation with Are and the Institute of Anxiety.

The project is realized with the support of the City of Prague, Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and the State Fund for Culture.