The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish: The Understory of the Understory

5-6 December 2020
Online at themind.fish

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Beginning on World Soil Day 2020, The Understory of the Understory is the fourth instalment in an ongoing series of festivals on consciousness and intelligence across species, part of the Serpentine’s General Ecology project. This year’s festival featured participations from artists, anthropologists, architects, scientists, ecologists and writers from all over the world.

The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish is a long-term research and festival project by Lucia Pietroiusti (Curator, General Ecology, Serpentine Galleries) and writer and editor Filipa Ramos with Holly Shuttleworth (Producer, Serpentine Galleries) and Kostas Stasinopoulos (Assistant Curator, Live Programmes, Serpentine Galleries). Visual identity by Giles Round.

Participants included: computer scientist Andrew Adamatzky, decomposition ecologist Lynne Boddy, musician YaYa Bones, poet Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, poet Sean Cho A., techno-botanical coven The Coven Intelligence Program (efrén cruz cortés, Margaretha Haughwout, Suzanne Husky), anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena, anthropologist James Fairhead, artist Adham Faramawy, podcast Future Ecologies, artist Elaine Gan, anthropologist Tim Ingold, artists Karrabing Film Collective, poet Asim Khan, theologian Simone Kotva, poet Daisy Lafarge, architect Yasmeen Lari, architect Thandi Loewenson, anthropologist Long Litt Woon, soil scientist Alex McBratney, plant ecophysiologist Angelica Patterson, anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli, science-and-technology studies scholar Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, artist Asad Raza, artist Giles Round, biologist Merlin Sheldrake, artist Ayesha Tan-Jones, artist Leena Valkeapää with Oula A. Valkeapäa, architect Sumayya Vally, journal The Willowherb Review and poet Jay G Ying.

Listen to this episode from Serpentine Podcast on Spotify. What are earth, land, soil, ground and dirt? Join us in that place which is simultaneously ground, land, soil and Earth, that is to say, where diverse species come together, collaborate, communicate and constitute one another but also where complex systems of redistribution of toxicity, logics of extraction and geopolitics meet.