Cryptogamic Dramaturgy – Understorey Agencies of Landscape Dramaturgy is a research project that extends my long-term work on landscape dramaturgy by asking what performance, film, and collective action can learn from mosses, lichens, fungi, and other cryptogams. Developed through fieldwork in West Cork, Ireland, in spring 2025, the project grew out of collaboration and exchange within Marta Popivoda, close observation of understorey ecologies, and conversations with plant scientist Marcel Jansen and ecologist Chris MacMahon.
The research proposes cryptogamic dramaturgy as an ecological and eco-feminist model of composition based on three principles: latent activation, porous assemblage, and distributed protagonism. Instead of hero, climax, and linear progression, it looks to the slow, interdependent, and non-hierarchical life processes of cryptogams as a way of rethinking dramaturgy. Through examples from contemporary art and recent protests in Serbia, the project contributes to a broader feminist, ecological, and decolonial reimagining of how performances, films, and social processes are composed.
I will continue to pursue this line of research through further articles and presentations and through new video work with Marta Popivoda.
