Protocols for Thinking with Lichens
What might thinking through and sensing with lichen offer? How might we think lichenly?
Lichens have survived and thrived in ruins over and over again. Here they are approached as bioindicator, witness and archive. These composite, queer organisms question notions of the individual, of capitalist time and of heteronormative narratives of sexuality and survival.
Lichens have become my guide while delving into artistic fieldwork practices and the notion of ‘material witnessing’. Working with this figure to connect with a remnant of temperate rainforest on Dartmoor and the surrounding peat bogs has prompted me to consider how ecological sensitivities might be woven from living histories, infrastructures and sign givers.
This is an invitation to and experiment with imagining otherwise in the pursuit of liveable worlds.
This is a call to become more lichenly.
Lichens have survived and thrived in ruins over and over again. Here they are approached as bioindicator, witness and archive. These composite, queer organisms question notions of the individual, of capitalist time and of heteronormative narratives of sexuality and survival.
Lichens have become my guide while delving into artistic fieldwork practices and the notion of ‘material witnessing’. Working with this figure to connect with a remnant of temperate rainforest on Dartmoor and the surrounding peat bogs has prompted me to consider how ecological sensitivities might be woven from living histories, infrastructures and sign givers.
This is an invitation to and experiment with imagining otherwise in the pursuit of liveable worlds.
This is a call to become more lichenly.
i)
Attend Gently to Lichen Companions
Attend Gently to Lichen Companions
Think with, through, around, before, after, as - lichen. Don’t think for; they have their own thoughts.
Slow your pace.
Attune your attention so that the calls of the overlooked start shimmering.
Tread gently.
Sit with the not quite knowable. Resist the urge to fully know or understand these companions, this is impossible.
The process of attempting to listen to more-than-human entities and attune to spectral ecologies becomes a practice of working with the unknowable. Lingering in this haziness is necessary for imagining ‘alterliveable’ worlds (Hamraie,2020). As Olufemi states: ‘The otherwise requires a commitment to not knowing’ (2021:17). Or as Laurie Palmer suggests, use: ‘what we think we know about lichens to imagine the possibilities of a world beyond capitalism and the destructive hierarchies that feed it’(2023:6).
Approach gently. Considering lichens as teachers carries the risk of projecting accumulated speculations and desires onto entities that can’t verbally protest.
When using figures to think through, consider if they are also using you. Are you a vessel for the lichen? Are you the thing being thought with when they seed thoughts in your mind that lead to actions? As Palmer suggests ‘because lichens tend to live longer than humans, and because they are practically everywhere, it could be the lichens who are the witnesses, watching us’ (2023:17).
Slow your pace.
Attune your attention so that the calls of the overlooked start shimmering.
Tread gently.
Sit with the not quite knowable. Resist the urge to fully know or understand these companions, this is impossible.
The process of attempting to listen to more-than-human entities and attune to spectral ecologies becomes a practice of working with the unknowable. Lingering in this haziness is necessary for imagining ‘alterliveable’ worlds (Hamraie,2020). As Olufemi states: ‘The otherwise requires a commitment to not knowing’ (2021:17). Or as Laurie Palmer suggests, use: ‘what we think we know about lichens to imagine the possibilities of a world beyond capitalism and the destructive hierarchies that feed it’(2023:6).
Approach gently. Considering lichens as teachers carries the risk of projecting accumulated speculations and desires onto entities that can’t verbally protest.
When using figures to think through, consider if they are also using you. Are you a vessel for the lichen? Are you the thing being thought with when they seed thoughts in your mind that lead to actions? As Palmer suggests ‘because lichens tend to live longer than humans, and because they are practically everywhere, it could be the lichens who are the witnesses, watching us’ (2023:17).
ii)
Wrap Yourself in Everything that Lichen can Offer
Imagine a membrane of lichen thought wrapped around you.
This protective layer of multitudes offers ways of thinking otherwise.
Their trace makes visible the body as archive and indicator.
Note the spectres caught in the folds.
Take this protective skin that is an interface with other and turn it into textiles and garments infused with lichen. Using lichen derived litmus solution, dye overalls, gloves and a headpiece to be worn while sensing with the site. Stitch navigational field notes, instructions, coordinates and lichen etymology into these layers.
Submerge the litmus dyed clothing and yarn in the bogs where the ancient forest once stood. Leave them to react to the sites traces and the acidity of the peat. Let the material witness garments become carriers of submerged fragments and histories. With the yarn, attempt to knit together stories, knowledges and senses, in a slippery understanding of site.
Let the litmus infused layers act as test strip and record.
The indicator garments may contain uncertain time.
With lichen thought as guide, weave trace meshes of sensitivity that knot us into closer relation with the other.
iii)
Resist Capitalist Desires
Resist Capitalist Desires
If drawn into extractive capitalist systems, make yourself as slow and resistant as possible.
‘Attending to lichens can bring you into contradictory relation with the assumptions of capitalist space and time, in which looking closely at no apparent thing, and moving slowly, is suspicious’ (Palmer 2023:2).
Be suspicious.
Pause. Hover. Spend time with the overlooked. Look closely. Return, repeat, stay still, move slow.
Let lichen’s slowness infuse process - through gentle steeping, dying, spinning and knotting.
If gathering for dye or scent making, take only windfall, only from abundance and ‘only that which is given’(Kimmerer 2013:177).
Plan the gathering for after a storm.
Take the abundance as a gift, the scattering as an invitation to continue.
Once described by Carl Linnaeus’ as the ‘poor trash’ of vegetation in his 1753 Species Plantarum, lichens are constantly overlooked in biological sciences oriented around economic botany. However, as John Ruskin insisted, ‘the lessons to be learnt from these overlooked phenomena lie precisely in their unrecognized power’ (Frost 2011: 10). Despite their resistance, lichens have been sucked into circulation for capital on a relatively small scale; through harvesting for medicinal use and primarily in the form of dyes. Since the 6th century lichen has been extracted for Orchil, a purple-blue dye. It was used to colour yarns and illustrated manuscripts. While slow and expensive to produce, one of it’s main uses was as a cheaper alternative to the rare and expensive Tyrian Purple. It became known as the poor mans purple. With specific processes this blue-violet dye can be made to change colour depending on the pH level with which it interacts. This became the litmus test strip.
Resistant to being cultivated and farmed on a large scale, lichens impose their own pace.
The slow procedure of soaking the lichen in ammonia to ‘ferment’ would take a minimum of three weeks. As the process is so long, from the growing and gathering to the steeping in ammonia, its use with fabrics was quickly discarded with the introduction of synthetic dyes. In resistance to capitalist use, lichens make this process of dye extraction difficult and slow.
Lichens refuse to ‘submit to capital’s demands at any relevant scale’ (Palmer 2023:7).
They grow too small and slow and wild.
They will grow in capitalist ruins.
Yellow: boil dye from windfall lichen. Blue: industrial lichen derived litmus solution. Pink/ Browns: litmus dye reacted from burial in the peat bogs.
iv)
Approach the Land as Animate
Assume lichens know you are here and are watching you.
Expand notions of sensing
Include the sensual, the gesture and the echo in processes of site sensitivity.
The land is alive with shimmer. Approach it as the vibrant entity it is, rather than an eco-system service or functional tool for capitalist extraction. Land has rights and holds memory.
To engage with the land as animate disrupts colonial extractive narratives. Look to Indigenous scholars and knowledge systems that challenge notions of the earth as an inanimate surface to capitalise from. ‘Much Indigenous thought radiates from an invocation of a sentient topography, a land that is aware of human presence’ (Marker 2018). Land relations are built on commitments to ecologies, relationships, ancestors and future generations, through which systems of passing on ancestral instructions are maintained. This connection of ancestor to future generation is a tightly knotted thread of obligation and care—one that is often lost in western knowledge sharing.
‘Vegetalise your sensorium’, as Natasha Myers (2024) calls for when emphasising the importance of attuning to the liveliness of more-than-human beings. For her project with filmmaker and dancer Ayelen Liberona, Becoming Sensor (2015 - 2019), they worked with Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledge, asking - ‘what modes of awareness need to be cultivated to pay attention to the lands that have been witness to all the transformations taking shape around them over millennia’ (Myers & Liberona, 2019).
Encourage learning through many forms of curiosity, proximity, duration and feeling, by drawing attention to other logics, organisms and temporalities.
Expand notions of sensing
Include the sensual, the gesture and the echo in processes of site sensitivity.
The land is alive with shimmer. Approach it as the vibrant entity it is, rather than an eco-system service or functional tool for capitalist extraction. Land has rights and holds memory.
To engage with the land as animate disrupts colonial extractive narratives. Look to Indigenous scholars and knowledge systems that challenge notions of the earth as an inanimate surface to capitalise from. ‘Much Indigenous thought radiates from an invocation of a sentient topography, a land that is aware of human presence’ (Marker 2018). Land relations are built on commitments to ecologies, relationships, ancestors and future generations, through which systems of passing on ancestral instructions are maintained. This connection of ancestor to future generation is a tightly knotted thread of obligation and care—one that is often lost in western knowledge sharing.
‘Vegetalise your sensorium’, as Natasha Myers (2024) calls for when emphasising the importance of attuning to the liveliness of more-than-human beings. For her project with filmmaker and dancer Ayelen Liberona, Becoming Sensor (2015 - 2019), they worked with Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledge, asking - ‘what modes of awareness need to be cultivated to pay attention to the lands that have been witness to all the transformations taking shape around them over millennia’ (Myers & Liberona, 2019).
Encourage learning through many forms of curiosity, proximity, duration and feeling, by drawing attention to other logics, organisms and temporalities.
‘Curiosity is an attunement to multi-species entanglement, complexity, and the shimmer all around us’
(Rose 2017: 11).
Measurements and numbers offered by science to indicate extinction cascades fall short of relaying the complex tangle of relations that are disintegrating. In attempting to grapple with the ungraspable scale of loss, Deborah Bird Rose uses the notion of the shimmer of life, learnt from the Aboriginal people of the Victoria River region in Australia’s Northern Territory. Shimmer is understood as the lively presence of complexities, intricate details, and multi-species knottings that form the biosphere, as well as one’s capacity to see and experience ancestral power. It is Rose’s hope ‘that an encounter with shimmer may help us better to notice and care for those around us who are in peril’ (2017:52).
Pay attention to the shimmer and assume the shimmer is watching us.
Pay attention to the shimmer and assume the shimmer is watching us.
The Site -
Return again and again. Become familiar but not presumptive. Stay curious.
Approach a last remnant of ancient temperate rainforest. Branches and roots knot and tangle around each other, emerging from a carpet of granite boulders almost completely obscured by green. Every surface drips in lichens, mosses and epiphytes. Remain on the edges as the the ecosystem has become too fragile. Observe, record and slowly gather lichen.
These remaining trees sit relatively isolated in a moorland dip, hugged on one side by the East Dart and surrounded by swathes of wetland. This land is one of remnants; beautiful and bleak moorlands holding pockets of ancient woodlands, damaged peat bogs, and echos of bronze-age stone circles. Layered with moss quilted granite, its surface is traversed by layers of peat breath and the amber water of the River Dart. Over hundreds of years the bogs of Dartmoor have been drained for peat extraction and animal grazing. At the same time the woodlands have diminished. The area has environmental and archaeological importance internationally. It functions with its own unique set of Dartmoor Commons Rights, allowing access to the unenclosed moorland. In the context of the current struggle over land rights and the diminishing ecosystems in Dartmoor - How might sensitivity to these ecologies be strengthened? What might be revealed from engaging with more-than human witnesses, collaborating with indicators and burying them into the earth?
v)
Understand Queerness and Complexity as Vital for Survival
Understand Queerness and Complexity as Vital for Survival
Embrace the categorically slippery
Recognise those deemed undetermined, unclassified, not neat enough, not binary enough, not quite knowable.
Operate within lichenly relationships of decentralisation, interdependence and mutual aid.
Attune to the relational.
Lichens are symbiotic assemblages. As mutualistic relationships between algae, fungi and bacteria, they slip between distinctions of species and category. Having no centralised system that has so far been recognised, they form themselves as collaborative communities of interdependent organisms. This multiplicity has enabled their resilience and ubiquity; growing in a vast array of environments and extremes.
‘Lichens are more appropriately characterised as ecological microcosms, rather than as discrete and easily classifiable entities. Bioindicating lichens tune our attention to the relational qualities of organisms...’ (Gabrys 2018:352).
Lichens trouble the notion of the neatly sealed individual. As composite beings of collaborators, they remind us the importance of ‘viewing all bodies as multispecies assemblages—rather than seeing bodies as necessarily being either clean, healthy and pure, or infected, unhealthy and impure’(Griffiths, 2015: 38). This has consequences for how infected bodies are conceived of, treated and cared for.
Lichens remind us we have never been singular.
Queer love reminds us we can always love more.
Pay attention to the queer commingling between organisms.
These hazy edges where delineations between bodies and worlds become permeable, are a generative site for starting to imagine ecologies otherwise.
Attune to Other Beings Temporalities
‘For fleeting creatures such as ourselves, lichens are more-than-ghosts of the past and the yet-to-come’(Tsing et al. 2017:9).
Lichens offer us a glimpse into other temporalities. They operate in slowness, have existed since before humans and will most likely survive us. As prehistoric entities that have been present for millennia, they become environmental records of trace histories. Time can be read in their form; air-qulity indicated by their presence.
Sit with them in ‘thick time’, as described by Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker as 'a transcorporeal stretching between present, future, and past—in order to reimagine our bodies as archives of climate and as making future climates possible’(2023:558).
Histories and rhythms are embedded into a being’s tissue. This marking of time into the physiology of matter is another kind of temporality to attune to in moving away from anthropocentric clocks. It draws attention to the importance of the multi-species coordination and synchronisation that knits everything into relation with each other.
‘When we notice their tempo, rather than impose ours, they open us to the possibility of a different kind of livability’ (Tsing et al 2017: 9).
Learn to read wild clocks.
a)
Engage in Slow Exchanges of Absorbing & Offering
Engage in Slow Exchanges of Absorbing & Offering
Matter becoming witness requires slowness. Like lichen, soil needs time to become an archive, time to absorb, time to leave messages. Peat bogs are slippery thin places where time folds in and around itself. The bogs call for gentleness and patience in encountering their archives of preservation and long transformation. They engage in slow exchanges of absorbing and offering up. You must also engage in slow exchanges of absorbing and offering.
Where the ancient temperate rainforest once stretched is now almost entirely wetland and grass scrub. The bog holds ghost traces of ancient ecologies and remembers the trees.
This is where lichen infused garments were left to become carriers of these traces.
This is the point of submersion into peat breath.
Listen to Material Witnesses
Lichens have survived and flourished throughout deep time ecological shifts. As such ancient entities, they become environmental archives holding ghost presences of past events.
Environmental changes are written into the bodies of the human and more-than-human. The scarring of histories and relations into the very physiology of organic matter creates sign-givers and indicators that might be interpreted. Lichens act as bioindicators, recording tangled relations of pollutants, politics and ecological shifts. ‘These vegetal sensors demonstrate changes in environments that can span centuries’ (Gabrys 2024), positioning them as witness and warning to climate breakdown. Learn to read these warnings and understand that our haunted landscapes tell stories.
Susan Schuppli (2016) proposes the concept of the material witness, ‘to express the ways in which
matter carries trace evidence of external events’. She explores the evidential role of matter; examining ‘nonhuman entities and machinic ecologies that archive their complex interactions with the world’ (2020: 3). Lichens and other bioindicators draw attention to the slow, less immediately visible histories and forms of violence that are enacted on the land, atmosphere, human and more-than-human bodies. These sensing structures become registers of what Rob Nixon calls ‘slow violence’ (2011). Whether patterns of lichen, the rings in trees, or salt structure remnants from an ancient lake, these entities hold ghostly traces of past events.
Ayesha Hameed describes such entities as condensations that make slices through time. They bring us into relation with past events and environmental shifts. She describes them as ‘Objects that through their own charge and materiality make transversal cuts through time and destabilise the chronotopes to which they belong. Such objects can acts as portals to collapse two temporal moments together’ (2017: 3).
Let lichens be a guide towards thinking ecology otherwise.
These growing protocols are not easy to embody, but their importance lies precisely in this difficulty.
The otherwise is a challenge to hegemonic notions of liveability. It requires sitting with the unknowable, imagining new realities, and embracing complexities. It is to believe that ‘imaginative thinking is fuel’(Olufemi 2021:15) and that this fuel can stoke the flames for change. The otherwise unsettles the way ecology has been used for colonial extractive purposes and offers opportunities for new relations to be nurtured. Thinking with other organisms and engaging with the otherwise is a crucial tool for shaping the ecology of our futures.
Find the more-than-human entities to guide us there.
Let us be Lichenly
These growing protocols are not easy to embody, but their importance lies precisely in this difficulty.
The otherwise is a challenge to hegemonic notions of liveability. It requires sitting with the unknowable, imagining new realities, and embracing complexities. It is to believe that ‘imaginative thinking is fuel’(Olufemi 2021:15) and that this fuel can stoke the flames for change. The otherwise unsettles the way ecology has been used for colonial extractive purposes and offers opportunities for new relations to be nurtured. Thinking with other organisms and engaging with the otherwise is a crucial tool for shaping the ecology of our futures.
Find the more-than-human entities to guide us there.
Let us be Lichenly
Bibliography -
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