2020-2021
Truffle-nekros (2020–2021) is a sonic fiction of proliferating assemblages growing beneath all surfaces. The project first took form as a live performance, I Want to Start by Talking About Truffles (2020), in which the artist, curled under a blanket, performed spoken words and a portable synthesizer. It later developed into Truffle-nekros (2021), a five-channel sound installation discreetly dispersed across a group exhibition—audible only at specific points through directional speakers hidden behind walls and floors, where the murmurs of the truffle-nekros subtly intervene.
I Want to Start by Talking About Truffles explores how death, as an institution, defines the boundary between the living and the nonliving, and how fungal modes of existence may erode this divide. Drawing on necro-political ecologies and the biotechnological afterlife of bodies, the work reimagines the corpse as a subterranean network of residual life. Truffle-nekros further interlaces mythic remnants, military technologies, and fictional biology—where mycelium becomes a conductive organ transmitting sound, spores, and memory, until voice itself mutates into the only organ of the truffle-nekros.
2020, performance, synthesized sound and spoken words, blanket, 20'00''; performed on November 19, 2020, Dutch Art Institute, Buitencentrum Oldebroek, The Netherlands.
Video by Maoyi Qiu
2021, multi-channel sound installation on loop through directional speakers; dimensions variable.
Realized for From Checkers to Complex Systems, Times Art Museum, Chengdu, China, March 13–June 13, 2021.