more than one, 2024

Video Installation with sound, TRT 7 min.

Participants: Paddy Batchelder, Liza Carolina Brown, Linda Eastman, Christina Gonzalez, Pamela Holmes, Linda Lipkin, Jill Nussinow, Mandie Quark, Monique Risch-Meade and Jill Silliphant

Cinematography: Bia Gayotto and Craig Tooley

Reader's Choir Director: Sara Roberts

Animation & VFX: Takashi Takeoka

Editorial Consultant: Susan Crutcher

Music Composition & Studio Production: Luiz Gayotto and Rovilson Pascoal

Soloist: Tuca Fernandes

Sound Consultant: Andy Wiskes

Made with the support of Investing in Artists Grant for the Center for Cultural Innovation.

This short experimental film is inspired by a group of women mushroom foragers living along the Sonoma Coast in Northern California, who embody the invisible mycelium network beneath our feet. Mycelium, meaning “more than one” in New Latin and Greek, refers to the vegetative part of a fungus—a vast, branching web of root-like filaments. Though hidden from sight, mycelium plays a vital role in decomposing plant material, resisting pathogens, and absorbing water and nutrients. It also helps forests capture carbon pollution, mitigating the effects of global warming and sustaining our planet. Just as the mycelium network support the health of ecosystems, women have long been the unseen nurturers and sustainers of communities—embodying strength, resilience, and interconnection. Through an open form that blends a readers’ choir, performance, montage, and visual effects, this work invites a sensory and contemplative experience. A meditation on interdependence, it weaves together relationships between women, mycelium, and forest; micro and macrocosm, the real and the imagined.