We need to speak in spores is a collective exercise in attunement, empathy and collaboration where the public is invited to think like fungi. Taking place outside the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington (VAC), participants will be presented with an “event score” — a set of simple instructions that will prompt a series of group actions, meditations, and thought experiments to explore the emergent effects of encounter.

In her book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing discusses the mycelial potential of the “assemblage,” an open-ended gathering that holds the possibility of becoming a “happening,” where the collective’s power, ability and imagination become greater than the sum of their parts. She argues that this transformation can only occur through contamination and says, “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.”

Taking cues from fungi’s integral role in a forest’s health, such as facilitating interspecies communication and resource distribution, the participatory event will repurpose a selection of research papers, essay selections, news stories, poems, mythologies and will “compost” previous artistic elements from Sahar Te’s curatorial program Incubator, originally installed in the VAC Loft Gallery in fall 2021. Through a process of exchanged “assembled contaminations,” participants will discover and co-produce their own collective, attuned language.