One and the Care of Many draws on lichen as an entry point to consider interspecies collaboration for shared resources, and a role-model and callout for collaborative living between nature + humans in cities.

Lichen is a trade-based symbiosis between co-evolved fungi and algae. Rootless, neither plant nor animal, lichen absorbs CO2 and is an important part of intersecting ecosystems. As a multi-member microbial community, it absorbs water and atmospheric gasses directly through its surface and is an acutely sensitive bioindicator of atmospheric toxins and climatic changes.

This project ranges across the micro to macro; considering what it means to co-evolve symbiotically and what is a microbial-level gesture of care, or even touch. The project considers from a human perspective the wonders and learning potentials around this non-human relationship, and how to invite lichen back into cities. Anthropologist Anna Tsing in writing about the possibilities of hope in ecologies amongst capitalist ruins notes that 'Stories of environmental collapse can paralyse people, but they can also open us up to the world and foster new sensibilities'. This work is a visual storytelling, of science, wonder and hope- through the micro world of lichen. It was created in collaboration with Witteveen+Bos and In4Art to Re-imagine City Nature.

Digital Design and worldbuilding: Charleton Mercelina
World building and programming: Leonardo Scarin
Blender shapemaking: Fabrice Hofmans
3D printing: Formlab KASK Ghent
Sound: Felicity Mangan

With the assistance of :
Media Solution Center-HLRS High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart
Witteveen + Bos
The Hague Municipality
In4Art

Repairing the Present received funding from the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement LC01641664.

Penelope Cain is an artist with a research science background, working interdisciplinary at the science-art intersection, in a speculative an open-ended storytelling mode.

Penelope Cain is interested in landscape in its widest definition, in particular the occupied, extracted and transformed landscapes of the Anthropocene and Post-Carbon.
Informed by her research science background, her art practice is located between scientific knowledge and unearthing connective untold narratives in the world. She works across media and knowledge streams, with scientists, datasets, people, stories and land to connect untold storytellings from the present and near future.