First Fridays
MOCA Climate Conversations: Like Lichen

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. This conversation between anthropologist and slowness expert Joe Dumit and groundbreaking lichenologist Kerry Knudsen 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.

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.

Kerry Kent Knudsen is a mycological taxonomist and lichenologist at the University of Life Sciences in Prague. Kerry founded a lichen herbarium at the University of California at Riverside (UCR) and has published 215 papers and articles on lichens.

The program is presented as part of First Friday 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.