Prayer-performance: Earth Fungus Blessing (event)

Soil is inoculated with mycorrhizal fungi in a ritual that fuses science and the sacred. "Let’s invite the sacred back into the land" say artists Venus Jasper and Victoria McKenzie. "How can our words, feelings and intentions become powerful sacred tools in the creation of new worlds? What are potentials of the nurturing, continuity, and creative power of soil?"

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This event was part of the show EARTHSHRINE, and it offers a chance to chime in with a fungal rite of gratitude.

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"We gather through word and sound and let the ‘prayer’ become a creative, critical scripting of recollection and gratitude. We piece the past as a means of creating healing and thus future; speaking life into the soil and seeding something sacred (the fungi, the worms, our love). We invoke the sounds and choreography of the diva to allow for spirit to stand in its power. We honour the life-giving force of soil which only the incredible strength of the sacred diva can hold. Through the word then, the body is brought to action, as the community (the participant-audience, the earth, the dirt, the fungi) comes together to inoculate and bless the soil, before we gift it forwards."
- Victoria McKenzie & Jasper Griepink

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Victoria McKenzie
Victoria McKenzie is currently a PhD candidate at University of London, where she researches ecologies of transformation, working at the intersections of ecofeminism, black study, post-colonial thought, traditionalist-scientific notions, climate discourse and philosophies of being. Victoria’s aim is to demonstrate the entangled life of climate whilst developing new methodologies for a unification of Earth.

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Venus Jasper
Artist Venus Jasper creates participatory performances, installations, research & words. They design sacred time and space and work with feelings, histories, and bodies for more information about their practice, motivations, and questions. Jasper is currently based in the Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

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• Prior to the Prayer-performance: Earth Fungus Blessing, Venus Jasper, Victoria McKenzie and Georgia Kareola conversed and shared on soil, sacredness, temple architecture and life during Temple Talk: Is Soil Sacred? taking place at MU Eindhoven, 2022.
• The Prayer-performance: Earth Fungus Blessing was open for all. We are grateful for all who joined. Later, this ritual workshop was adapted for the Earth Craft symposium at KABK, The Hague. Here, Victoria and Jasper made future soil with the students and also interviewed special guest Vandana Shiva, who screened her movie "The Seeds of Vandana Shiva", 2022.
• Venus Jasper also created future soils and compost together with the students of BEAR ArtEZ at the Four Siblings Garden in Amsterdam West as part of the educational course "Future Fields", 2023.
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