Exhibition – Seaweed Future: Red Gold, Marrakech, Morocco, February 2020
Australian artists Lichen Kelp and Jessie French, founding members of Melbourne-based Seaweed Appreciation Society International (SASi), held an exhibition in Marrakech in late February 2020, under their shared practice which emerged from SASi, Biomutualism, as part of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair.
Seaweed future: Red gold was an exhibition of bioplastic sculptures made with agar extracted from locally grown and harvested red algae, and an installation based around site-specific research made by the artists in Morocco. Their research, done while on the La Pause residency in the Agafay Desert, focused on the largely unrecognised, yet environmentally and economical important species gellidium, a kind of algae known colloquially as ‘red gold’. Tracing the environmental, economic and cultural contexts that this seaweed exists in, the eco-experimental installation combines the scientific and poetic qualities of this natural resource.
The installation also served as a bioplastic laboratory, where a series of performances punctuated the exhibition, as sculptures and objects were made live in the space with glass and metal molds made by local artisans and agar extracted from Gellidium algae harvested and processed in Morocco.
