performance

Lichen Pipeline performance

| Amy Youngs

Tuesday, April 22, 2025 Lichen Pipeline

  • 3:30pm – 4:30: Join the Lichen Pipeline, a participatory art performance celebrating lichens as important contributors to our terrestrial ecosystems. Come to the center of the South Oval to collaborate with the Lichen Likers as we braid, tie, and link together to embody a kind of sculptural support system that brings lichen and humans together as “biological infrastructure”.
  • At 4:30pm all participants are invited to line up and join the parade to continue extending the Lichen Pipeline further.
  • Location: Middle of the South Oval. Look for our fabric braids and parade float with tree branches

Earth Day Parade

  • Location: Starts from Ohio State University South Oval, behind the Faculty Club.
  • 4:30pm – 5:30pm: Parade starts from the South Oval. We will walk single file along the blue line, which marks the underground stream of Neil Run. Our procession will continue to follow the historic Neil Run waterway, beyond the Ohio Union, and into the neighborhoods to the East of High Street, to end at Iuka Ravine – where the water that once flowed there has left an enduring mark on the land.

Performing in Art in Odd Places

| Amy Youngs

The Fungal Entanglement project is going to New York City! The Lichen Likers have been selected for this year’s Art in Odd Places festival. Look for us along 14th Street in NYC and please do join us in our web, as we seek to discover lichens and other non-humans in the urban environment. We will be there on Saturday and Sunday, October 19 & 20th.

Art in Odd Places (AiOP) 2024: CARE is curated by Patricia Miranda and Christopher Kaczmarek. Curatorial Manager: Valentina Zamora. Producer: Robin Schatell. Founder & Director: Ed Woodham.
Art in Odd Places is an annual festival that presents visual and performance art in public spaces along 14th Street in Manhattan, NYC from Avenue C to the Hudson River each October. Active in New York City since 2005, AiOP aims to stretch the boundaries of communication in the public realm by presenting artworks in all disciplines outside the confines of traditional public space regulations. Using 14th Street as a laboratory, this project continues AiOP‘s work to locate cracks in public space policies and to inspire the popular imagination for new possibilities and engagement with civic space.

The Lichen Likers performing in this festival include: Alex Buchan, Amy Youngs, Anna Arbogast, Doosung Yoo, Jiara Sha, Madison Blue. We are part of a larger human organism, emerging from the Living Art & Ecology Lab at the Ohio State University. We are learning with lichens and drawing inspiration from their resilient, collaborative, and queer lifestyles. Embodying the symbiosis of fungi and algae, we create art that gives voice to this overlooked, communal lifeform. 

Fungal Entanglement: a lichen journey

| Amy Youngs

The Lichen Likers art research group spent the last year studying lichen and practicing creative methods for spreading and sporulating this knowledge. We are learning with lichens and drawing inspiration from their symbiotic lifestyles (a non-binary association of fungi and photosynthetic partners).

Symbiosis, interdependence, hospitality, and caring about our non-human kin were the key concepts for this Fungal Entanglement performance. We practiced audience participation, group movements, and focusing attention on the presence and lifestyles of lichen. The fabric sculpture represents fungi and the way that it grows flexible, symbiotic networks that enable mutually beneficial exchanges with plants and other species.

Fungal Entanglement artists: Anna Arbogast, Madison Blue, Alex Buchan, Xiuer Gu, Elias Marquez, Jiara Sha, Doo-sung Yoo, and Amy Youngs.

Photography: Dev Patel and Amy Youngs

See video documentation