Gwyn La Em

Mixed media installation

Sit Back, Relax and Enjoy the Apocalypse - La Vallée, Brussels, 2022

Collaboration with Studio Misti - Kerolaina Linkeviča and Nicholas Delap - A generative inter-space where mythic English and Baltic histories entwine, spiralling into the ether of imaginative landscapes navigated through ‘journeying’, digital worlds and physical installations. Intermixing their wide array of skills and utilising them as immersive tools.

The audience were invited to interact with the fawn and the saprotrophic organisms housed in its silk grooves, residing at the centre of the incantation circle. Through haptic interaction, trans-species relations are encouraged, activating the soft celebrations of the ‘more than human.

For this exhibition, I was delighted to collaborate with Studio Misti to echo the songs of the blooming oyster mushrooms live into the La Vallée space (@lavallee_bxl ). With an accompanying collection of reishi mycelium sculptures coated in turkey tail mushroom paper, framing the salt processional route.

Collectively Misti x Katya created an environment which encourages and nurtures the multilayered otherworldly experience of being part of a living universe. Providing an intergenerational mystical encounter that facilitates a rekindling of expanded empathy, enlivening an innate, embodied understanding of the more than human world.