Shelter Island, New York, US; Voice 1
The Mycelium Project
A Work of Communal Mourning (Pilot Phase 2025)
Ann Burke Daly + Marion Belanger
In Collaboration
The Mycelium Project is a Lament. Through the project, we ask an expansive network of artists to foreground the gathering and transmission of their voices along with field recordings in sound and video, to activate a process of communal mourning for both personal and collective loss around environmental toxins and climate disruption in meditative works created at sites of personal significance.
Note to our visitors:
February 2025
This page documents our work in progress. We are in a testing/maquette phase. Recently the project progressed to the Semi-Finals of the Creative Capital 2025 Awards Competition. Several work sample prototypes are posted here. Please consider these proof of concept sketches. They are 1-3 minutes long and include audio and video field-recordings, and recorded spoken word descriptions of location details and notes. Our materials and approach are experimental. We are beginning to work with our pilot cohort of artists. This winter we plan to workshop a first iteration of the project. Contact: annburkedaly (at) gmail (dot com)
Branford, Connecticut, US; Voice 2
Zaragoza, Aragon, Spain; Voice 3
Guilford, Connecticut, US; Voice 4
Katsuta, Yachiyo-shi, Chiba, Japan, Voice 5
Japanese vocals 00:00-02:10— English translation vocals 02:12-04:09
About the Collaboration
By considering the regenerative actions of mycelium in the transformation of ruin and decay into living matter, we create a conceptually based collective organism that is public-facing. An interactive website and book will archive the contributions of all 365 individual artists and ground the work within contemporary art practice via critical essays and project notes. For our prototypes,, we have created composite work samples to convey a participant's "location lament," comprised of a field recording in sound and video, and a spoken word recording with time and location details including moon phase, and geo-coordinates. Our hope is that our interactive website archive of 365 voices will become a resource tool for the future.
Artists will each play a curatorial role by choosing two artists they know to join the project.
Artists are given the option to perform spoken word in English and/or their preferred language. All audio and video contributions to the project will become part of the archive including multiple language versions of spoken word performed by an artist.
Image right is "A Mycological Foray," in Daly's studio. Images left and center sourced from internet
Project Beginnings
Mycelium, Fungi, Compost and Cage
The Mycelium Project arose from conversations between us about the book “John Cage: A Mycological Foray, Variations on Mushrooms,” and our ongoing dialogues around our warming climate. Discussions of fungi as regenerators led to mycelium as a conceptual construct for collaboration. We began with the idea of behaving like and identifying with another life form, one that regenerates life from decay. Our dialog is with Conceptual Art projects and Filmmakers’ works including Cage’s Water Works; Yvonne Rainer's Trio A; Chantal Ackerman’s News From Home; Janet Cardiff’s The Forty Part Motet, and her series of “walking” artworks. Belanger has long portrayed the intersection of geology and the built environment; the warming planet has intensified her creative attention to climate crisis. Daly’s work deals with shifting subjectivity, loss and mourning, temporal dislocations, and the making and unmaking of meaning. Her recent work is a meditation on the shifting contours of self, through the prism of time; chronic illness; family history; environmental toxins; and domestic spaces.
Daly + Belanger
Collaborative Biography
We investigate issues of place, memory, and shifting subjectivities through sound, photography, video, and archive research.
Daly and Belanger have been in dialogue for decades. They have been part of a six woman collective that began after they earned their MFA’s in 1990, meeting in person or virtually for studio visits. In 2022 the collective participated in the NYPL pandemic diaries oral history project, and in 2018 they produced a limited edition portfolio, acquired by MoCP, Chicago; MASSart Rare Book Collection; and Yale University Art Gallery. They have explored archives in their creative work, and have each collaborated with other artists on interdisciplinary projects. Their focus on sound to mark places of loss grew organically through personal experiences. Daly has made voice recordings for sound-sculpture installations since the mid-1990s. For current work, she is sound-mapping her live-work spaces since becoming chronically ill. Belanger initially embraced sound to create an alternative to visual production for her young granddaughter who lost her vision soon after birth. With the Mycelium Project, they will work with a global network of artists using sound as a vehicle for embodied reflection and collective creative acts.
First sketch for performance space with speakers and monitors, March 2024.