Marzia Matarese
Fem_Lab Catalunya-Austria Exchange Grant
December 2024
Marzia Matarese (Naples, 1989) develops her artistic practice at the intersection of mycology and visual arts, using various media such as video, photography, installation, performance, and cultivation methods. As part of Arquea Colectivo, she explores hybrid formats that combine experimental video, micro-landscaping, and expanded cinema. She has presented her work in international exhibitions, such as “In/Visible Signals: Cold Fire” at Rad Myco7 in Mulino, Oregon (09/24), “Nakusaka, la dueña del barro” at the Weilbauer/PUCE Museum in Quito (09/23), and, as Arquea Colectivo, “Diálogos Cuerpo-Hábitat,” at the “Reinventer son monde” festival in Orleans, France (10/23). In February 2022, she participated in the exhibition “La tradició que ens travessa” at Arts Santa Mònica in Barcelona, with the project “Membranas Zombies” (with the collective Muaj!).Her performances with Arquea Colectivo have been featured at notable events, including the Eufònic Festival (Delta del Ebro, 2021), Entropía (Etopia, 2022), Rarefacció (Hangar, 2022), L’Alternativa Festival (CCCB, 2022), Ecoss Festival, Ecosistemes de l’Inesperat (Fabra i Coats, 2023), and Semillero contra el Apocalipsis (CaixaForum, 2023).
Her recent residencies include NoLugar in Quito (09/23), Residenza Ripanu in the Ecuadorian Amazon (08/23), and Lo Mon Contemporáneo in the Hecho Valley, Spain (07/23). In 2022, she received the Hedy Lamarr Grant from Etopia Center for Art and Technology in Zaragoza. In 2020, she became involved in the creation of eemeemee, a network of collectives that share processes and knowledge around DIWO mycology.
About Dreaming about mushrooms dreaming about me sleeping between their gills
Dreaming about mushrooms dreaming about me sleeping between their gills is an embodied research project that evokes the desire to establish a common perspective with mushrooms from which to create language, memory, body and meaning together. The project proposes an exploration of the complex relationships that can be established with a fellow species, appealing to the construction of an extended kinship outside the epistemic framework of human exceptionalism and situated in post-natural (and post-human) queer ecologies. As part of this process, a speculative technique and embodied strategies take shape that intertwine exercises in fiction, biological experimentation and artistic practice.
