Mimosa Pudica

I look for disturbance-based ecologies in which many species sometimes live together without either armony or conquest. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World

I thought that each of my words (that each of my movements) would persist in his implacable memory; I was benumbed by the fear of multiplying useless gestures. Funes the Memorious, J. Borges

Mimosa Pudica is a research dedicated to how learning with plants about their memory can inform principles of digital ecologies.

At the core of this research there are two questions that have fueled my artistic practice for over a decade: how do we remember and forget individually and as a society? And what remains of us when we no longer remember anything or if we remember too much? The movement, the space created between the experience of forgetting and remembering, shapes the essence, the core of our mutating, hybrid, multiple identities as individuals and collectives.

Over time, I have sought answers to these questions in the functioning of human memory with the cycle of works Alzheimer Café (2014/ongoing), dedicated to the persistence of musical memories even where neurological degeneration of mnemonic processes has advanced. With La carta ricorda (2020), I observed the fragile memory of papier-mâché dissolving in water. Then, I turned my gaze to machines, to web technologies, in their immaterial (I Never Think of the Future. It Comes Soon enough 2016/ongoing) and material dimensions (Tails, 2023). I looked at the depths of the permanent records produced by these originally decentralized systems and how the issue of data storage intertwines with those of privacy and digital identity. Finally, La Matematica de Segreto (2023, ongoing), is dedicated to how the vast amount of data is used to train generative AIs and to the idiosyncrasies of these trainings.

Now, I turn to the plant world.

Inverting the human-centric perspective, I intend to activate practices of listening, observation, interaction, and learning with plants, questioning how they remember and if they forget. This phase of individual listening will be alternated with discoursive practices, shared experience among plants, biologists, web scientists, philosophers,  scholars from diverse disciplines.