First Fridays
MOCA Climate Conversations: Like Lichen & Sharing Slow Perspectives: A Slowness Workshop

For those who care to look, lichen teaches many lessons: connectedness, cooperation, and in the words of slowness researcher Joe Dumit, a more attuned “speed of attention.” Moving slowly like lichen allows us to better live in our bodies and appreciate our world, welcoming wonder into the everyday. Similarly, the work of artist Olafur Eliasson engenders this wonder, extending an invitation to engage your senses in slow appreciation of all that is around you.

Explore the intersections of slowness and perception through two distinct programs: an in-gallery workshop delving into the art of openness and connection, and a conversation on lichen as a model for new ways of experiencing the world around us.

Sharing Slow Perspectives: A Slowness Workshop
Facilitated by Joe Dumit and artist Dorte Bjerre Jensen
The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA
5–6pm

Sharing Slow Perspectives is an opportunity to find a new way to experience the exhibition Olafur Eliasson: OPEN.  Participants will become open to slowness, open to space, open to MOCA, open to others. Sharing Slow Perspectives is relational art that acts as a collaborative artistic experience.

Sharing Slow Perspectives is based on the interactive piece Sharing Perspectives by Danish artist Dorte Bjerre Jensen. It is a performative score that explores boundaries, uncertainty, slowness, togetherness, and perspectives. In November 2019 Sharing Perspectives was  performed at Tate Modern in London, in relation to the Olafur Eliasson exhibition In Real Life. It was felt by one participant to be ”like booze at a party. It basically breaks your inhibitions, and I think a lot of people that haven’t been raised in art are inhibited about how to act, and this is like a way of smashing through that."

MOCA Climate Conversations: Like Lichen
WAREHOUSE at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA
6–8pm

A conversation between anthropologist Joe Dumit and lichenologist Thorsten Lumbsch, Like Lichen will explore slowness in perception, experience, biology, and field work in connection with the exhibition Olafur Eliasson: OPEN. The conversation will be moderated by Christian Cummings, the Executive Director of ecological storytelling nonprofit Non-Human Teachers and a partner in the botanically-minded creative studio Cactus Store Studio.

Dorte Bjerre Jensen’s work is anchored in an evolving artistic inquiry into multisensory relations of ecological attention through movement, manifested as performance, participatory performative scores, installations, workshops and writing. In 2019, DBJ was a part of the research project Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting (EER): between Studio Olafur Eliasson and the Interacting Minds Centre (IMC), Århus university. In 2023-24, DBJ’s pieces depicted human and landscape interdependencies as hybrids between sound, movement and interactive installations.

Christian Cummings is the Executive Director of Nonhuman Teachers 501(c)(3) and is a partner in the botanically-minded creative studio Cactus Store Studio, both of which operate in Los Angeles and in NYC, respectively.

For ten years, Cactus Store Studio has worked in the cracks between disciplines on projects that help broker better relationships between people and plants with a "by any means necessary" approach that includes landscape design, greenhouse architecture, publishing, lectures and events, making clothes for gardening in, outdoor furniture design, and even crafted a perfume that makes you smell like a tomato.

Nonhuman Teachers is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that takes a new approach to ecological storytelling, blending science, art, and the imagination to help deepen the relationship between humans and the natural world. Through its multidisciplinary public programming, immersive botanical spaces, and new nature media, Nonhuman Teachers aims to ignite a sense of wonder about our rapidly changing Earth, not only to make us better citizens of this place but to help us imagine it differently. Before Cactus Store Studio and Nonhuman Teachers, Christian worked for seven years at Cal Arts and for two at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City.

Joe Dumit is an anthropologist of passions and performance, brains and games, AI and computers, contact improvisation and slownesses, drugs and facts. He is Chair of Performance Studies, and Professor of Science & Technology Studies, and Anthropology at University of California Davis. He's a core member of the Experiencing, Experimenting, Reflecting grant with Aarhus University and Studio Olafur Eliasson. His books include Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans & Biomedical America and Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health. He likes lichen and speculation.

H. Thorsten Lumbsch, Ph.D is the Vice President of Science and Curator of Lichenized Fungi at the Field Museum. Lumbsch has been fascinated by lichens (often overlooked but ecologically important) since childhood, publishing his first scientific paper at age 15. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Essen in 1993, and served as an assistant professor at the University of Duisburg-Essen before joining the Field. His publications number more than 480 papers, 20 book chapters, and five books. He has active research collaborations in Thailand, Spain, and Kenya, and is an investigator on research grants in the U.S. Brazil, and Spain. Fieldwork has taken him to more than a dozen countries including Australia, India, Kenya, Thailand, Vietnam, and also Antarctica, and he has collaborated on the description of more than 280 new lichen species. Thorsten is managing editor of the journal MycoKeys, a member of a dozen other editorial boards, and past president of the International Association for Lichenology. In addition to his administrative and research roles, Lumbsch is also active as a mentor to the scientists of tomorrow. He is a lecturer at the University of Chicago, and is active in advising graduate students there and at the University of Illinois–Chicago.

Lumbsch received the Gerhard Hess Award from the German Science Foundation for Outstanding Young Scientists in 1999, and in 2017 he was named a Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researcher. He is an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow, a distinguished lifetime honor within the scientific community.

The program is presented as part of First Fridays at MOCA Geffen, offering special programming and free admission to special exhibitions from 5–8pm on the first Friday of every month.

This program is organized by Kelsey Shell, Environmental and Sustainability Strategist, and Alitzah Oros, Public Programming Associate, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.