This is a project about connection and small novelties in the time of Covid-19. It is a participatory happening Inspired by Solarpunk principles, and is taking place during Mental Health Month October 2021.
2021 has brought many of us back into lockdown as the Delta variant ravages through our communities. Sometimes when I’m feeling small, I like to put myself in the shoes of life forms that are *really small* - I look to clumps of mosses, lumps of lichens and algae colonies. These lower-order plants are some of the oldest and most resilient lifeforms on earth. Populating every continent on earth in the most extreme and inhospitable environments, their stoicism and persistence is an inspiration to me. As time stretches on in these isolated conditions, it is easy to start feeling like a lonely spore disconnected from the others. I would like to extend some digital and physical rhizomes out to bundle us back in together. By making some small, shared interventions on our lives for just a week, we might be able to come out of this with a slightly different perspective.
When you join the lonely spores club you will receive a series of four postcards in the mail, with different instructions on the back of them. The idea is you try something out of the ordinary every week for a month, and see how you feel at the end of it. Once a week you are invited to join a zoom with myself and Dianne McClaughlin - Casula Powerhouses' resident art therapist and all round legend. You are also invited to send me some images of the things you create so I can make you a personal digital artwork at the end of the month out of your findings. However there is absolutely no pressure to follow-through on either of these things.