Once you step outside, you don’t need to go far. You can find lichens on a sidewalk, in a suburban yard, in arid deserts, deep woods, the Arctic tundra, a live volcano, the Amazon rain forest, by ocean tide pools, and in graveyards. Lichens live in extreme and varied environments, and cover about 8% of the earth’s surface, which is a lot if you consider their tiny size. Lichens have been on earth for hundreds of millions of years, and their long life-spans and inventive, adaptive natures suggest that they, or their habit of being, will collectively outlive human occupation of this planet. (Some species might live 4,000 years, some people claim lichens can live 8,000 years, other versions of the lichen symbiosis might have been slowly metabolizing for 10,000 years [i] — depending on whether you believe they actually even die.) Once situated, lichens stay in their chosen place, intimately relating to micro-climactic conditions. When you see them, you may want to draw close, out of curiosity, and then, after a while, you may pull away because they are just, well, sitting there. But I am suggesting that you stay there, with them, with us, for a while longer, and allow yourself to slowly enter The Lichen Museum.

The aim of this museum as a conceptual art project … is to redirect attention to these mostly horizontally-oriented (though not exclusively so! [ii]) beings in order to disrupt our human-centered relations to space, time, and knowledge. The Lichen Museum aims to help change how we see; and to interrupt and question certain habits and structures of knowing, being, relating, and describing by engaging with life forms that appear to organize their lives — and “selves” — differently.

When I started digging deeper into my life-long, but until that point, un-examined interest in lichens, I recognized how their startling habits of living and becoming resonated with my own hopes and desires for another world and a different future. [iii] What I learned about lichens (admittedly from observations written down by humans) seemed to present a set of qualities and modes of relating from which to model alternative pathways and practices, as a counter to racial capitalism’s ruinous course. Some of lichens’ radical life ways include: collective identity (they are a symbiotic mix of fungus, algae, and various other organisms), mutual aid, decentralization, interdependence, humility, and resistance to being used, as well as slowness, porosity, adaptability, wild diversity of form, and intimate relations with their environment.

* * *

If you hang out with the lichens for a while, both present to them and irreconcilably other, you might become acutely aware of how you are exchanging air with photosynthesizing beings immediately around you, or how the wind causes goose bumps on your forearm or the sun pulls out sweat, how alone you feel or how awkwardly visible, how smells of gas or weed or lilac filter in, or maybe how you can’t filter out the sounds of traffic that rise and fall but never cease. Entering The Lichen Museum is allowing yourself to be reminded of your porous, sensing, vulnerable body, and your intimate relations with whatever place you find yourself in.

… Lichens are both adaptive and defiant — they figure out how to live where nothing else does, but they won’t grow anywhere you tell them to. Some can linger in semi-dormancy for 10,000 years, inside a rock in Antarctica. [iv] Others can’t survive a move twenty feet across the backyard. [v]

… In milder climates, some lichens extend themselves with hyperbolic curves and fractal-like iterative folds increasing available surface area to absorb optimum moisture, air and sun; in harsher climates, some hunker down between the crystal grains of a stone, becoming-mineral in yet another version of a collaborative embrace. If individualism is an impoverishing, and ultimately disempowering, system of beliefs, as it limits our capacities as interdependent parts of a collective, social body, and doesn’t hold up to the pressures of living, individuality — understood as contextual and temporal expression — amplifies the potentiality, mutability, and creative capacities of worlds emerging together through inter-, or intra-, dependent relations — in time.

“Living things do not precede the environment nor does the environment precede living things.”
— Kinji Imanishi [vi]

Mike Simms, paleontologist at the Ulster Museum in Belfast, and passionate lichenologist by avocation, gave me a tour of the lichen herbarium where he works. We walked through rows and rows of tall, dark, library-like stacks, lined with drawers full of envelopes containing bits of desiccated fluff. Senseless, crispy, dusty, beige, or grey, each specimen is labelled with its Latin name, and the place and date of collection. Mike joked about the absurdity of how little these samples resembled living lichen: “Sometimes the paper they are wrapped in is more interesting than the sample itself” — as he pulled an undistinguished looking dry snarl that had been collected in the tumultuous year of 1968 from its sensational newspaper clipping … Most of what Mike described while examining specimens were anecdotes of discovery, his memory of “aha!” moments in the field, finding a particular lichen, the weather on that day, the kind of rock he was climbing over, and whom he was with — especially stories about his companions whose expertise, eagerness, humor, or eccentricities made a specific foray memorable. What is left in the drawers in the Belfast museum is barely a trace of each lichen assemblage’s former life; the herbarium more than anything is a catalog, harboring an invisible, insensible archive of DNA lodged in fragments and tufts of material, but lacking most of what makes lichens lichens, their relations with their place: sun, water, rock, tree, prevailing winds … What does come out of the drawers in voluminous richness, and might be lost without them, are stories of encounters with lichens (and other lichenologists) in a living place — when what is now a bit of beige fluff shouted orange in the sunlight of the moor.

* * *

Lichens are not technically plants, but like plants, they are not “free”, if freedom is defined in the Aristotelian sense as the ability to move from place to place. But lichens, like plants, do “move” in the sense that they grow, change shape, breathe (respire), generate and disseminate spores and propagules, and make food from the sun for their collective. All of these activities are relationally engaged with, and contingent on, their immediate surroundings. In Plant Thinking, [vii] philosopher Michael Marder examines how ancient western philosophers determined the status of plants’ souls based on degrees of freedom of movement and also on the capacity for interiority, or self-containment. For Aristotle, humans were most free and most ensouled based on their ability to move around; animals were a little less; and plants had only a vegetative soul, lowest on the hierarchy, and grudgingly granted based on their capacity for growth. For Nicolaus of Damascus, also sometimes known as Pseudo-Aristotle, plants were “incomplete” because they have no inside, no internal digestive system and no interior “space”, and so, in a sense, their (vegetative) souls are worn on their sleeves. A plant’s entire being is oriented outward, completely dependent on its environment for life and growth. Lichens, without roots or vascular systems, unable to regulate moisture entering or leaving their bodies, and already collaborative assemblages, are arguably even less endowed than plants with anything like an inside, central core, because relational interdependency more than anything else defines them. Lichens are by inference and constitution wholly oriented towards the other(s) that make up themselves. The idea of freedom as the ability to move independently is replaced by not needing to get away because one’s “being” is already distributed among many.

Caribbean scholar Édouard Glissant uses the term errantry to describe a movement towards “the Other” (his term) and a mode of relation created in and through this movement, that fundamentally shapes identity. Colonizers start from an imagined center, a “totalitarian root,” an “intolerant root,” a territorial root, and expand from that “predatory rootstock” to collect and acquire other lands, resources, specimens, and labor, attempting to incorporate, digest, assimilate, or exploit. But for Glissant:

“Relational identity:
— is linked not to a creation of the world but to the conscious and contradictory experience of contacts among cultures;
— is produced in the chaotic network of Relation and not in the hidden violence of filiation;
— does not devise any legitimacy as its guarantee of entitlement, but circulates, newly extended;
— does not think of a land as a territory from which to project toward other territories but as a place where one gives-on-and-with rather than grasps.” [viii]

The vision that Glissant nurtures with the term errantry is a yearning for and movement towards “the Other” that is not acquisitive, instead extending outwards in a desire to become different as part of the vitality of life and growth.

A small number of “vagrant lichens” [ix] roll around unattached, reminding me that making any generalizations about lichens is undone by the exception. But, for the most part, lichens develop intimate relationships with and through whatever substrate they attach to. They can grow on almost anything — concrete, glass, metal, plastics, dirt, rubber, leather, sand, the boot or roof of a car — but you will find them most often on wood or stone, surfaces unlikely to be disturbed because most lichens grow so slowly. Hanging lichens (fruticose forms) attach to trees by a stem-like “foot”; curly, leafy, spreading lichens (foliose) grow “rhizines” that act like crampons to grab and hold on to a surface. Crustose lichens have no bottom (lower cortex), and bond most intimately with their substrate, entangling (literally) their hyphae (fungal threads) with the grains of the rock or bark of the tree. Imagine the soles on the bottoms of our feet opening up, and our nerves and capillaries growing down into the concrete sidewalk … Lichenologists who want to bring crustose lichens back to the lab have to chisel off a piece of the stone.

* * *

I carried a second-hand, hard copy version of V.I. Vernadsky’s Biosphere (1926) with me when I joined an expedition to the High Arctic … I had at least started to think that lichens, the primary vegetation north of the 80th parallel, would be the focus of my study — lichens as indicators of time frames beyond the human, but temporalities shorter than geologic time and so potentially within our ability to imaginatively if not perceptually grasp. I had also read enough to know that I might find cryptoendolithic lichens in the Arctic and that Vernadsky’s prescient descriptions of the formation of the early earth (as a collaboration between geologic and biologic processes) might be relevant to the binding together of earthly matter and life that a rock/lichen assemblage could embody.

* * *

Some lichenologists have estimated growth rates for Arctic map lichen (Rhizocarpon geographicum) at 6–8 millimeters a year (about a quarter of an inch). I wanted to watch, with a video camera, the lichens growing. Rather than looking up, and documenting at macro scale and in human (techno) time the spectacular visuals of calving glaciers and astounding, changing, landscapes that I would never see again, I looked down and focused myopically on the surfaces of the rocks, and on movements that were, practically speaking, invisible … If the cryptoendoliths slowed their metabolisms to the speed of 10,000 years, it seemed possible that I might slow down a little too — being so out of synch with the daily cycle of light that my body was used to, and in such cold. Maybe this would allow my sensory apparatuses to access a different kind of crepuscular time, and maybe even allow me to slide into lichen time, “cryptoendolithically”.

Actually, human metabolism speeds up in the cold, unless you go into hypothermic shock … Stopping to watch lichens grow I was always behind, straggling polar bear bait, and slowing the party down. I “watched” in short interrupted bouts of a few minutes or seconds, recordings that more than anything reflected the disjuncture of my presence there, rather than any possibility of being — or becoming — with. The most memorable pictures that anyone took, from my perspective, are those of our whole crew climbing around on the ice armed with multiple cameras and tripods looking like absurd re-enactments of nineteenth century explorers. What was I doing there? I recognize the privilege of having been given that unforgettable opportunity, but it was largely possible because of the melting ice which we were all there to witness and report home about. Artists are often the first to be invited to colonize places that others don’t want to go to (yet) for whatever reason; we usually accept, and we don’t always recognize or acknowledge how what we think of as our autonomy — our “freedom” — is fused with, and directed by, larger forces. The stone, according to Spinoza, thinks that it is rolling because it wants and intends to, and not because it was pushed. [x]

* * *

Freedom and independence are associated with movement — the ability to get away, to leave and return, to explore and exploit. If you are attached, if you stay in place, you risk becoming an object, and possibly an object to be used. The rocks and earth and oceans, the plants and forests, seemingly unmoving, become a backdrop for human activity, “the environment”, like a painted scene within a diorama. Inside this scene, obvious movement at the scale of human perception is equated with agency and will, and all that appears static becomes a resource. But thinking in a longer time-frame shifts how we understand what’s moving and what’s still. What led me to want to watch lichens in the Arctic was how their radically different scale and relations to time contrasted with what is readily available to human perception, including the spectacular effects of global warming now “visible” in human time because of the extremity of the climate crisis. In mineral time, rocks transition between liquid to solid to liquid-like; plants turn to hydrocarbons; continents glide over and under each other; ecosystems collapse and start again differently. Some lichens gradually erode rock; others stay dormant for ages, considering.

[excerpts from The Lichen Museum, University of Minnesota Press, 2023]

A. Laurie Palmer is an artist, a writer, a teacher, and an activist. Her place-based, research-oriented art practice takes form as sculpture, public projects, and publications, and she collaborates on strategic actions in the contexts of social and environmental justice. Her first book, In the Aura of a Hole (Black Dog, 2014), investigated elemental materiality and how matter from large-scale material extraction sites moves between the earth and our bodies. Her current book, The Lichen Museum (University of Minnesota, 2023), examines lichen's role as an anti-capitalist companion and climate change survivor. Palmer collaborated with the four-person art collective Haha for twenty years on site- and community-based projects. She has shown her artwork internationally, including at Haus der Kunst, Munich; Grimaldi Forum, Monaco; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Artists Space, NY; Aperto XLV Venice Biennale; Magasin, Centre d'Art Contemporain, Grenoble; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Randolph Street Gallery, Chicago; MASS MoCA, North Adams. She is currently a Professor in the Art Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she helped to bring the Environmental Art and Social Practice MFA Program into operation, and was the first Director of the new program (2020–23).

Her book The Lichen Museum, is published by the University of Minnesota Press. Serving as both a guide and companion publication to the conceptual art project of the same name, The Lichen Museum explores how the physiological characteristics of lichens provide a valuable template for reimagining human relations in an age of ecological and social precarity. Channeling between the personal, the scientific, the philosophical, and the poetic, A. Laurie Palmer employs a cross-disciplinary framework that artfully mirrors the collective relations of lichens, imploring us to envision alternative ways of living based on interdependence rather than individualism and competition. Lichens are composite organisms made of a fungus and an alga or cyanobacteria thriving in a mutually beneficial relationship. The Lichen Museum looks to these complex organisms, remarkable for their symbiosis, diversity, longevity, and adaptability, as models for relations rooted in collaboration and nonhierarchical structures. In their resistance to fast-paced growth and commodification, lichens also offer possibilities for humans to reconfigure their relationship to time and attention outside the accelerated pace of capitalist accumulation. Bringing together a diverse set of voices, including personal encounters with lichenologists and lichens themselves, Palmer both imagines and embodies a radical new approach to human interconnection. Using this tiny organism as an emblem through which to navigate environmental and social concerns, this book narrows the gap between the human and natural worlds, emphasizing mutual dependence as a necessary means of survival and prosperity.


[i] “Cold temperatures limit microbial activity and stabilize endolithic habitats as shown by the age of cryptoendolithic microorganisms in the Dry Valleys being on the order of 1,000–10,000 years old.” Christopher R. Omelon, “Endolithic Microbial Communities in Polar Desert Habitats,” Geomicrobiology Journal, 25:404–414, 2008.
[ii] Some lichens grow in the upper canopy of rain forests, or hang down from oak trees in the Pacific Northwest — there are so many exceptions!
[iii] John Berger’s famous essay “Why Look at Animals?” in his collection of essays About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1977), is an important reference for this project.
[iv] “Arctic lichens may be 3,700 to 9,000 years old while Antarctic cryptoendoliths and microbes trapped in glacial ice have carbon turn-over times of 10,000 and 100,000 years.” Rosa Margesin, Franz Schinner, Jean-Claude Marx, Charles Gerday, eds, Psychrophiles: from Biodiversity to Biotechnology (Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2008).
[v] In conversation with Paul Whelan, computer scientist, art historian, lichenologist and author of Lichens of Ireland. “Their ability to migrate is the thing that is very slow, having to do with particular appetites for microclimates … Old woodland cases are very fussy about habitat. Whatever is moving them about is moving them quite slowly or perhaps they don’t produce as many little bits as freely spreading lichens. We don’t know exactly why. Attempts to transplant sometimes have worked and sometimes not. I did that at home, I found a piece, a big leafy thing, stuck it on a hawthorne tree in my garden — it survived for a year or more — just survived — but didn’t thrive — and then it blew off.”
[vi] Kinji Imanishi, The World of Living Things, tr. Pamela J. Asquith (Hoboken : Taylor and Francis), 2013, p. 25 (originally published in Japan in 1941).
[vii] “ … something that is even less than a thing, something that awaits completion in its being productively destroyed, utilized for higher human ends of nourishment, energy generation, and sheltering.” Michael Marder, Plant Thinking (New York: Columbia University Press), 2013, p. 23.
[viii] Édouard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation, tr. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan), 1997.
[ix] “An ecologically interesting group of foliose lichens are the vagrant lichens, such as Xanthomaculina convoluta and Chondropsis semivirdis in deserts and semideserts … In the dry state the thalli are rolled up, thus exposing their lower cortices. When they take up liquid water, the thalli unroll and expose the upper surface to the sunlight ... When dry and inrolled, the lichens can easily be blown by the wind and as soon as dewfall occurs, they unroll and expose the upper surface again.” B. Büdel and C. Scheidegger, “Thallus morphology and anatomy,” in Lichen Biology, second edition, ed. T.H. Nash (Cambridge University Press), 2008, p. 46.
[x] Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, 1677.