Choir of Kin is an audio-visual performance by the collective Transformative Narratives combining topics of ecology, biology, queerness and music theory to queer notions of kinship and our relation with the environment. Based on scientific research on symbiosis and collective lifeforms, the project aims to question concepts of individualism and proposes strategies of mutualism, sympoietic world-building and radical care. Focusing on polyphony and tone clusters a speculative bio system is created, using sounds from a variety of life forms.

Choir of Kin is an ongoing multipart, cross-media project by the collective Transformative Narratives, exploring experimental music notation and sound production processes through multispecies encounter. The collective’s themes and methodologies are shaped by its inquiries into symbiosis and landscape
entanglement. In installations, the collective presents its music notation technique, Lichenography.
Lichenography is a custom music notation method that generates sounds based on the morphological data of lichen. The bodily shapes of lichens growing on trees and stones are manually traced and translated into MIDI notes using digital music editing software. Generating tone clusters, the lichens
become active participants in the composition process. The animated visualizer makes the audible visible: as a thin line traces the shapes of the lichen, notes are triggered, and sound is produced. This Choir of Kin acts as a dissonant, resilient defence system for dealing with generational and environmental trauma, and invites the audience to watch and listen as a symphony unfolds.

With Choir of Kin, they have produced new performative, plastic and sound narratives at the intersection of worlds that are usually considered to be distinct. They expand the notions of human identity by establishing a more-than-human relationship to life. During its residence at Antre Peaux, the collective focused on the development of an experimental musical notation technique and the creation of programs adapted to a scientific method which was applied to the observation of populations of lichens. Lichenography is the process of sequenced tracing of the body shapes of the lichens that proliferate on trees and stones. Thanks to this process, which is often used by lichenologists in order to follow the cycles of growth of individual specimens and the decline in biodiversity, the bodies of the lichens were manually transferred one by one by the collective into a MIDI editing program – a digital musical instrument interface – in order to compose the musical score. This was then run through a modeling and creation process in order to generate a new immersive visual landscape. Choir of Kin is conceived as a malleable and modular system that can be reconfigured to suit each specific context in which it is displayed. It can take the form of listening sessions, of an audio-visual performance or as an installation, as in its initial presentation at the Haïdouc. Drawing on queer reflections on kinship applied to the fields of biology and ecology, the installation inscribes itself in a vision of a new relationship to what we call Nature, with a particular focus on the diversity of intersections, inter-relations and shifting identities that [re]link human and non-human communities. Through this installation, a new symbiosis
is at work, between constituent common principles of groups and of those individuals usually considered as alien – foreign – and exogenous of our own corporality. The discourse, as much as the protocols employed by the collective for this artwork, functions symbiotically, interweaving landscapes and projecting themselves toward the creation of a sympoietic world. That is to say, a world made up of multi-species interdependencies. Choir of Kin acts as a “deviant” defense system, borrowing from the researcher Cy Lecerf Maulpoix’s thinking, taking forking paths which lead to new sources of fertile imaginary in the face of the collapsing environmental conditions which affect all life forms.