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Complex Individuality (2025)
‘Complex Individuality’ is a collaborative multimedia project by visual artist Suzette Bousema and scientist Ingeborg Klarenberg, created on the occasion of the VU Connected World Societal Impact Award 2024. The project emerged through an ongoing exchange between artistic practice, ecological research and ecoacoustic listening methods.
‘Complex Individuality’ includes photographs, video, a soundscape and a workshop.
How can we relate to an organism that exists on a timescale so different from our own, growing only millimeters per year? What if this organism is not an organism, but more like an ecosystem?
Lichens challenge the way we understand individuality. What appears to be a single organism is actually a collaboration: a fungus living in symbiosis with an alga. The fungus creates the structure for the alga, and the alga produces carbon for the fungus through photosynthesis. Sometimes there is a third partner, a cyanobacterium that provides nitrogen. Next to that, lichens are home to other organisms, like mites, springtails, nematodes, tardigrades, protozoa, archaea, viruses and rotifers. Spiders, ants, flies, thicks and lice also like to spend time around them.
Lichens are pioneers and are, together with mosses, the first to arrive somewhere. For example, when a glacier retreats and a piece of land just became free of ice. They can survive in almost any habitat on Earth, such as Antarctica, only because of being a collaboration. However, that does not make them immune to pollution or climate change. Nitrogen deposition in the Netherlands leads to the disappearance of nitrogen-sensitive lichens, while nitrogen-loving lichens increase in abundance.
Hiding in plain sight, they are often overlooked, but once you learn about them, you will start to see them everywhere. They grow on tree bark, stones, soil and even sand. You can find them in your street, on the pavement, on buildings, on statues and on trash bins. Lichens are often used as a metaphor for interconnectedness and collaboration within human society and the rest of nature. This project is an attempt to connect to lichens, by closely looking at and listening to them.
Can we learn from them?
And potentially reflect on our own complex individuality?
On the occasion of the project we organize ‘Listening Lichen’ walks, where we invite the public to join us to look and listen closely to lichens.
The first workshop was organised in February 2025, and more will follow. If you are interested to join next time, please send an email to suzette@bousema.eu.
New Listening Lichen working coming up!
When: 30 August 2026, 13:00
Where: Het Natuurhistorisch Museum Rotterdam
Costs: Tickets sale (not online yet) through Het Natuurhistorisch Museum Rotterdam
See more of the workshop here.
Growing list of associations, by people listening to lichens
Absorbing
Adaptation
Always present but disconnected
Anthropocentric perception of sound
ASMR
Bugs up and down the tree
Bubbles
Calming
Collaboration
Connectors
Crackling fire
Crispy
Damp
Deep listening
Different
Digesting
Digestive system
Eating snail
Encountering something you pass by everyday
Every organism has a role in the ecosystem
Everything is connected
Expanding itself
Existence
Fire cracks
Fluid
Footsteps through crackly forest floor
Fundamental
Fungus
Getting inside their world
Groupwork
Growing
Growing in a delicate way
How minuscule we are in relation to the entire ecosystem
How they spend their life
How to translate it to people
Humbling
In order to understand something, you have to dissect it
Intelligence
Interdependence
It’s going to take over the world
KORSTMOS
Liquid
Listening gives a full bodily experience
Looking categorizes it
Metabolic temporalities through lichens
Moist
Mouth chewing
Multiple shapes
Mutual belonging
Neighbors
No rhythm
Noticing other sounds
Patterns
Perspective
Popcorn
Repetitive, but never exactly the same
Resilience
Rippling sea
Roommates
Soothing with occasional accents
Scale
Seeing a static object, hearing a living organism
Sensing slowness
Sharing economy
Sharing networks
Slimy
Slow eating
Slow is fast
Slowness
Society
Someone eating
Something eating itself, a feast
Something going up
Soothing
Spirited
Stomach
Symbiosis
Temporality
The sea
Time
Underestimation of natural life
Underwater
Water around stones
We can’t understand what is happening, but we are a part of it
We feed ourselves
We nibble and emerge
In the lab at VU Amsterdam
with Ingeborg Klarenberg
with Ingeborg Klarenberg