Lichenia is a nation-state as fictional as any other. Founded by MarksMara in 2024, Lichenia functions on a politics of lichenization - in which fungal and algal partners transcend their individuality to accomplish what they couldn’t on their own. Taking place at Parcul Carol beneath the imposing Monument to the Heroes of the Struggle for Freedom and Socialism, two soldier-performers worship Lichenia’s flag (an image of Graphis scripta, or secret writing lichen) through familiar nationalist rituals - anthems, marches, spectacles. In being performed towards a symbiotic organism rather than a hierarchical system of bureaucracy, these rituals question commonplace propaganda of the body. Playful artistic approaches invoke the Situationists’ idea of a revolution which turns the world into ‘an immense game’. Can we speculate on the multi-species entanglement known as lichen to overcome divisive binaries? One lichen, one state. Two sides, but really not-two.



MarksMara is an Athens-based emergent organism consisting of two symbionts: one Jared Marks (1991, Los Angeles) and one Mara Ploscaru (1987, Baia Mare). Merging their respective backgrounds in performing and visual arts, they work equally instinctually and conceptually with language, moving image, objects and performance, using content from a wide variety of sources: pop culture, sci-fi, science theory, poetry and beyond. Searching this material for spaces where accumulation does not add but subverts meanings, it is exactly in these overlaps - these grey areas - that a vision of our entangledness in and with the world emerges.

Join us - 28.09, 16h30-18h30 (continuous live action, visitors may come and go within the timeframe)
Parcul Carol, stairs beneath the monument
Meeting point

Concept, choreography: MarksMara
Performers: Ada Mușat (ADAM) & Eliza Trefaș
Looks: Resi Bender
Metal work: Ion Predescu

AFCN

This event takes place in the frame of the project Chak-chak-chak! Re-Reading Rituals, co-financed by AFCN. The project does not necessarily represent the position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN is not to be held responsible for the content of the project, nor for the ways in which the results of the project might be used. Those are entirely the responsibility of the beneficiary of the grant.