Artist Zettel Tessa and working group (The T. Rudzinskaite Memorial Amateur Lichenologists Society)

Therolinguistics Reading Group

The T. Rudzinskaite Memorial Amateur Lichenologists Society is an ongoing collaborative performance/publishing project & semi-fictional association of lichen lovers set 68 years into the future. Founded by Tessa Zettel & Sumugan Sivanesan in 2018 (’2086’), the Society is a vehicle to think speculatively with publics about multispecies entanglements & finitude in the Sixth Mass Extinction. Its cumulative narrative & methodologies have evolved across site-based performance/field trip/picnics, installations, workshops, texts, sound pieces & video broadcasts. At Saari we add a new research wing to our existing internal departments: the Metta Verse Mutual Aid Space Program, Space-Time Fab Lab, Circle of Dearth Scarcity Kitchen & Crystal Radio Lab. Working with Finnish artist & baker Aliisa Talja, our Therolinguistics Reading Group will focus on collective experimental translations of lichen lyrics found on rocks & trees around Saari. Its name refers to Ursula K Le Guin’s ‘The Author of the Acacia Seeds…’ (1974), in which the President of the Therolinguistics Association reflects on the ‘delicate, transient lyrics of the lichen’, the ‘wholly atemporal, cold, volcanic poetry of the rock’, and the words of the earth ‘in its immense solitude, within the immenser community of space’. Together we will employ performative ficto-critical fieldwork & citizen-science methods to investigate more-than-human linguistic phenomena & the overlooked substrata of nature-cultural production. In the world of the Society, it is 2092 when an expanded multispecies/multilingual reading group gathers at Saari Residence Bio Village for walking, baking, sensing, translating & talking around curious encounters with lichen. We will explore sourdough cultures & lichen bread, questioning toxicity & how cultural knowledge travels through bodies. Over 4 weeks we will also produce a small chapbook sharing our experimental translations & wanderings, acting as an introductory guide to therolinguistics.