Fem_Lab residence: Marzia Matarese

Fem_Lab residence with Marzia Matarese at Mz* Baltazar’s Lab in Vienna
Residence period: 2.12 – 8.12.2025
Opening hours to public: 3.12./ 4.12./ 5.12.2025 from 14h to 17h
Public Presentation Lecture/ Performance: 6.12.2025, 19h

ABOUT THE PROJECT
Dreaming about mushrooms dreaming about me sleeping between their gills is an embodied research project that evokes the desire to establish a shared perspective with mushrooms, from which to create language, memory, body, and meaning together. The project explores the intricate relationships that can be established with another companion species, appealing to the construction of an expanded kinship beyond the epistemic framework of human exceptionalism, situated within queer post-natural (and post-human) ecologies. As part of this process, speculative embodied technologies and strategies are being developed, intertwining exercises in fiction, biological experimentation, and artistic practice.

“Dreaming about mushrooms […]” is articulated through several tentacles that, like the hyphae of a mycelium, gather and connect different moments of research and creation. In Metabolic Affair. I eat you, you eat me (2022 – ongoing), the research focuses on exploring the possibilities of establishing a metabolic bond with mushrooms. Through experimentation with matter and tissues, it investigates metabolic processes as a means of connection between the organic and the affective, appealing to metabolism’s capacity to function as a system of memory and language. By using organic matter from one’s own body as food for the mushrooms, the project explores the circulation of something more than energy through the trophic processes of assimilation and transformation of matter. Throughout this process of bodily feedback, a proximity becomes evident that, through an exercise of material reciprocity, reveals new ways of building kinship.

ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE
Metabolic affair : re-rooted bodies is a speculative bio-fiction exploring the two-year-long metabolic affair between the mycelium and the artist. Through the use of an SF-powered technological device, the performance explores the desire to share bodies and grounds in an affective entanglement, questioning how we create bonds beyond power exchange, feeding, domestication, and deterritorialisation.

ABOUT Fem_Lab
Fem_Lab exchange Catalonia-Austria is a collaboration between Mz* Baltazar’s Lab and Hangar Barcelona promoted by the Delegation of the Government of Catalonia to Central Europe to support the artistic exchange between a Catalonia female* artist and Mz* Baltazar’s Lab collective.

The Fem_Lab residency is the result of an open call promoted by Hangar, opened to an artist or collective working in any creative discipline who are carrying out an art project which can relate to the term “hacking” and works on the intersection of Art, Science and Tech through a (trans)feminist lens. The residence has the form of one-week and ends with a public presentation Mz* Baltazar’s Lab.