2026 SPE Annual Conference: Catalyst for Exchange
Looking for a chapter event?
Past SPE Annual Conferences
exhibitions
2026 SPE Annual Conference Schedule
print this pageInterspecies Collaboration - A case for an ecological feminist future
Kanishka Puri
Saturday, March 21 - 9:00AM to 9:30AM
Atlanta 1
The internal impetus to mutate my personal archive led me to imagine a world that is yet to be. Here, all of us, the slime mold, the algae, the fungus that infiltrated our environment, my mother, her mother, and I, are as unruly as we can be.
With this work, I explore feminist futurist aesthetics, along with other organisms. This collaboration confronts the invisible nature of women's labor and performativity. I highlight my maternal grandmother's resilience by making an algae bio yarn and intertwining it with an acrylic yarn to weave a Paranda - an Indian traditional hair extension. She sold countless Parandas to carry out her revolutions. These one-of-a-kind silver gelatin prints on expired photographic paper transcend beyond spatiotemporal positions occupied by the paper's age, the young algae yarn that will decay within a year, the year my grandmother was photographed, and the now, that will be a part of the past when this encounters you.
The interaction between the photographic archive and the slime mold obscures some parts of my mother's image while creating windows through which underlying structures reveal themselves. I persist in connecting with the slime as I live with it now. When Joseph Beuys locked himself in a Room with a Live Coyote, he said, "You could say that a reckoning has to be made with the coyote, and only then can this trauma be lifted."
speaker
Kanishka Puri
About
- Board Reports, Letters, and Minutes
- History
- Staff
- Board Members
- Board Committees
- Board Elections
- SPE Code of Conduct
- Caucuses
Join
Members
Annual Conference
- About the Conference
- Overview
- Speakers
- Schedule
- Registration
- Calls for Proposal
- Volunteer
- Sponsors
- Exhibit
- Anti-Harassment Policy
- Hotel & Travel
- Location + Travel
- Hotel
- Schedule of Events
- Schedule
- special events
News & Events
Chapters
Exposure Journal
About this piece
Comments about this piece
Dialogue and critique are important to the SPE mission.
Please join the conversation.