French
A multifaceted installation + research work started in spring 2025 around symbiotic organisms & experimentation with strategies to escape patriarchy and capitalism.

Symbiosis is an immersive installation. It is an active refuge, a space where one can step away — if only for a moment — from the logics of capitalist patriarchy, colonial ideologies, and warlike, fascist, competitive logics, in order to experiment with other ways of being in the world.

How? By drawing inspiration from lichens, and by propagating their practice of symbiosis.

For 400 million years, lichens have practiced inter-species alliance. This composite macroscopic organism is born from the association between a fungus and a photosynthetic organism — algae or cyanobacteria. Together, they maximize their capacity for survival even in hostile environments: bare rock, deserts, polar regions. Some even withstand cosmic rays, solar radiation, and the vacuum of space.
Lichens are, for me, genuine thinking partners. They unsettle imaginaries grounded in individualism and invite us to envision other ways of forming society.

What if we thought like lichen?

As night falls, the refuge lights up. Equipped with magnifying glasses and UV lamps, visitors are invited to change scale: to observe various symbiotic organisms in detail, discover the biofluorescence of certain lichens, and explore the complex relationships woven between bacteria, fungi, plants, mosses, and other forms of life.

Symbiosis blends plant stabilization and the power of intention, bacteria and mycorrhizae, bryology and lichenology, ultraviolet rays and biofluorescence, counter-powers and marginal knowledge, radical mycology and green guerrilla — to fabricate a space of resistance that celebrates interdependence over competition, care over extraction, fertile alliances over domination.

Observing lichens, in an attempt to put into practice what they teach us. The public is invited to take the time to activate their power of intention: to collectively imagine another paradigm — symbiotic, collaborative, radically mutualist — and then to seek how this thinking can be translated into action.

What could a thought shared by several people become?

What political force could emerge from a crowd that, rather than gathering around fear or the designation of an enemy, chooses instead to dream and experiment together with other ways of inhabiting the world?

Symbiosis offers a space of freedom, resistance, and collective imagination — an attempt, on its own scale, to proliferate other narratives and other practices in the face of the expansion of fascist, patriarchal, capitalist, and extractivist logics that threaten our futures.

To make an ally of lichen.
To make a strategy of symbiosis.
To make a political force of imagination.

Interview conducted by Sébastien Yves Lefebvre filmed in Symbiosis installation

Click to dive into pages 73 & 74 excerpts from the book : In the footsteps of Terre Blanque, a story of spatialities at the heart of the common, written by Loïc Mundinger