Pollinating Agents - Resilient Beings

Artistic research fellowship Gerrit Rietveld Academie
2019-20

Pollinating Agents is an artistic research which investigates collaborative processes as such, from fluidity and interconnected relationship of elements, to pollination and friction. Led by Marie Ilse Bourlanges and Elena Khurtova, this research unfolds in two parallel directions:

- Pollinating Agents - Resilient Beings, by Marie Ilse Bourlanges
- Pollinating Agents - Remediation, by Elena Khurtova

Resilient Beings embrace togetherness by learning from sparse encounters with wilderness, finding inspiration in other- and inter-species forms of communication and collaboration, zooming into mycorrhiza, cleaning symbiosis and kiss-feeding as models for relational dynamics, looking for strength in surrendering and letting go. 
In the form of artistic essays as interior monologue and archiving of visual and written materials, Resilient Beings outlines a method of intuitively connecting things and thoughts together as a continuous flow from one to another. Stepping aside from a fusional meaning of collaboration, Resilient Beings brings attention to the immaterial space connecting distinct elements. 

As a test-case for mycorrhizal symbiosis, this artistic research gets interconnected to a parallel project on psychogenealogy, care and destruction of archives entitled Mother’s Milk. This project was developed during a residency at 3bisF, a contemporary art centre located in a former isolation pavilion for women of psychiatric hospital Montperrin in Aix-en-Provence : institutional and personal memory gets embodied through repetitive actions of chewing and spitting shredded fragments of archive documents.

Guided by Jeroen Boomgaard & Paula Albuquerque