Holobiotic Dance Floor (2018)
glazed ceramic, plasticine, 5 channel video installation, fog machine, audio track
Installation views of Gossamer, Lee Pivnik and Lesley Jackson at Hotel Art Pavilion
Holobiotic Dance Floor is a 600 lb ceramic sculpture resembling a termite mound, with ventilation towers that let viewers peer into a five-channel video installation. Built from earthen material, like the mounds of communal insects, it draws connections between their social structures and underground queer communities.
The rapid-cut videos splice together Hollywood films from the Red Scare era—The Mole People (1956), The Blob (1958), Them! (1954), and later, The Swarm (1978)—which framed collective life as monstrous. These are interwoven with exterminator commercials and footage from recent Pride parades that were tear-gassed, tracing how the stories we tell ourselves can shape a world of fear and violence.
Taking the form of emergent animal architecture that evolved alongside termites as they farm fungi, the work elevates non-human intelligence and collectivized ways of life, to tell a new kind of story. One that might be as old as termite mounds themselves, which evolved 200 million years ago.
Read more about this work in my essay for Silica Magazine Holobiotic Dance Floor: Looking underground for planetary mutualism.