2023
Rooted Signals
Praz-Delavallade Projects Los Angeles is pleased to present Rooted Signals, an exhibition that pays homage to the resilience of the humble mushroom and its vast mycelial networks connecting individual plants at the root by the Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist Moral Turgeman.
Considered the most intelligent of simple multicellular organisms, this porous fungal structure ensures individual plants across vast areas receive the nutrients they need to survive, through a complex and still little understood communication system. Turgeman brings this vital and decentralized structure of collective intelligence to Rooted Signals, conceptualizing the mycelium process of sending chemical signals across its generative, skeletal, and binding branches of tubular threads—called hyphae—to the human experience.
The immersive exhibition of sound and sculpture evokes emotion and triggers memories through its own intricate ecology, where audioscape compositions synchronize with vibrations emitted from a single lounger surrounded by series of radiant mushroom sculptures. Attendees are invited to sit in the space, in the company of these symbolic representations of growth, transformation, and the profound relationship between humans and the natural world, while their effects are felt in the body, not by ingesting them, but by means of the frequencies and vibrations emitted from the central seat.
A conduit for the growth, adaptability, and symbiosis of this incredible mycorrhizal network, Turgeman’s tactile sound and sight experience brings willing participants into a meditative space for contemplation, where their thoughts, emotions, and physical responses foster self-awareness and introspection. Rooted Signals blurs the boundary between the natural and technological, the body and its environment. It explores the immense interconnectedness of all things, and calls for harmonious coexistence in a place where the sound emanating from living organisms forges a tangible connection between the organic and the artificial.