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The internal impetus to mutate my matrilineal archive has led me to imagine a world that is yet to be and to collaborate with Physarum polycephalum (Slime Mold), an acellular organism that holds the interest of the scientific community due to its computational abilities that exist without a brain. Inspired by its resilience, I explore interspecies collaboration as a way to reimagine archives, kinship, and personal histories. I expand my archive into an evolving organism that blurs the boundaries between human and non-human worlds. The work unfolds as “living photographs” that change daily, shaped by processes of growth and care.
Rooted in eco-feminist theory, I investigate how labor, particularly women’s and non-human labor, is exploited or obscured within capitalist systems and acknowledge our common status of raw materials. I question what we ‘know’ about intelligence to assert the position of women in lineage, and the slime mold as thinkers, innovators, everyday rebels, and aliens who constructed a new world and imagined new ways of being. Here, all of us, the slime mold, the algae, the fungus that infiltrated our environment, my mother, her mother, and I, are as unruly as we can be. The process of growing slime mold has also extended my role to that of a caregiver of a living photograph. Through this work, I propose to reimagine family as an expanded model across human and non-human worlds.
If unconventional caregiving modes are explored, can they be revolutionary?
The longer I stared at the image of my mother and my maternal grandmother’s archive, I could feel the power registered in these images. These images portray my mother as a daughter, a mother, a wife, sometimes a friend but none of them showed who these women were in the world, how did they show up, what did they do.
My mother is a teacher and a local underground activist of a sort, who has convinced multiple parents in our living room to not marry off their daughters and let them pursue their careers. My maternal grandmother was the only working parent for most of my mother’s adult life. She raised four daughters independently by being a worker at the needle factory. She did what she had to do to escape post-colonial poverty and make it to the city. She would sell parandas, hair extensions to buy bus tickets to the city to find a job. Till date, after retirement, she continues to sell hand woven socks and scarves.
Throughout my practice, my aim has been to produce counter-narratives depicting their far sightedness. Each one networked and set up a collective stage for the next generation and that’s how I am here. Expanded by speculation to reframe women in my lineage as more than ideal objects. These women were not naive or bodies without agency. Instead they were far-sighted. Each one networked and set up a collective stage for the next generation and that’s how I am here.