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Repairing Repair: patchworking with fungi

Myco-remediators are species of fungi that are adept at restoring damaged ecologies and breaking down toxic accumulations. Summoned as a vital salve to heal the destruction caused by anthropogenic discards and climate change, myco-remediators are digesting pollutants and being used to grow novel biomaterial composites. The reparative labours of fungi are increasingly co-opted into the urgent work of global ecological restoration, what Amber Huff and Andrea Brock term ‘repair mode’. Here, repair is operationalised at a global scale and enacted in ways that are atomised, abstracted and economised. However, when repair is conceived this way and as an activity performed by others for humans, its true transformative potential is enfeebled. Rethinking repair as shaped by human and more-than-human co-creative agencies that are inventive, contextual and indeterminate, gives rise to alternative paradigms of how we may collectively enact repair. 

In Anna Tsing’s proposition of the Patchy Anthropocene, she suggests that the effects of the climate crisis are ‘patchy’, that is, occurring in ways that are not homogenous but rather uneven and specific. Taking up her argument, as both concept and method, this talk explores the affirmative possibilities that arise through experimental bio-textile modes of working in patches and patchworking across species difference. This work reveals repair to be both relational and creative, knotting beings and matter together in ways that are situated and specific.

Alia Parker is a transdisciplinary designer and researcher. Her creative practice and scholarship is concerned with the intersection of contemporary design and science investigating the ethical, relational and material possibilities that arise when working with more-than-human organisms in design contexts. Alia’s critical biodesign practice employs experimental methodologies in textiles, fashion, biology, installation and moving image, underpinned by posthuman ethics, philosophies of care and biosemiotics. She draws on design histories and speculative futures to generate affirmative ways of working in times of ecological precarity. Alia lectures in Design at the Australian National University and has exhibited and presented her work widely, most recently in TEXTURE at Canberra Contemporary Art Space (2023); she won first prize in the wearable category for the Northern Beaches Environmental Art and Design Prize at Manly Art Gallery and Museum (2022); Biomateriality at the Delmar Gallery, Sydney (2022); Bankstown Biennale: Symbiosis at Bankstown Art Centre (2020); and has shown her work at significant national design institutions and events. For over ten years, Alia worked as a designer, maker and researcher in the ethical fashion and textile industry in New York, Melbourne and Sydney.

This event will be held both on-campus and online via Zoom (a link to the online stream will be sent to registered attendees).

The School of Art & Design Seminar series will continue weekly on Tuesdays from 1-2pm, between 17 February and 21 October 2025, co-convened by Dr Alex Burchmore and Alia Parker.