Interview with Filipa Ramos, 2021
For the exhibition Boolagoorda, Centre d'art Madeleine Lambert, Vénissieux

Filipa Ramos: Let’s start from the beginning. In 1993, when you were still a child, you visited Shark Bay with your family. This event became the starting point for your investigation into the incredible cyanobacteria that the site hosts. This makes me curious about two different temporal aspects—one that concerns the past, and the other the future. So first I’d like to know what brought you back to this site, so many years after your visit? Did you continue thinking of it throughout your youth, or did you rediscover it in recent years? Then, additionally, I’d be interested in knowing something about the present-future: taking into account that you are now living in Europe and the impact that travelling and tourism has on the environment and on the daily lives of communities, did you ever consider revisiting Shark Bay, or would you rather keep a physical distance from it?

Sarah Sandler : I reconnected with the site recently, or rather it connected with me, coming to my immediate consciousness. During the pandemic, I was in my apartment in France and looking at the empty street and apartment-framed sky, I recalled Shark Bay¹ and Hamelin Pool.² The recollection was subtle and somatic—heat, light, expansive space, and colours. I have difficulty putting it into words. After that experience, I decided to research the site, and the project gradually developed.
I’m not opposed to visiting, but given the distance, I would only go if it made sense to my practice or if there was an invitation or concrete reason for doing so. Due to the timing of lockdowns in France and Australia, the project missed out on contact with selected researchers, research centres, and community groups. I would like to continue researching the natural and cultural heritage of Boolagoorda—if there’s a future opportunity to spend time on Country guided by the Malgana Aboriginal Corporation and the Malgana Rangers, it would be warmly welcomed.


I find artistic research fascinating for providing a fundamental mode of knowing the world, as relevant and urgent as those of science or the humanities. Being so, I would love to learn more about your research. Can you tell me what has been your goals, questions, and methods, but also your support and obstacles, while working on this project?

To make this project, I began a long learning journey, as I was no specialist in microbiology, nor Australian geology. I learned many things along the way. I was drawn to the converging and coalescing histories at Gutharraguda: techno-scientific, ancestral, and futurist. An obstacle was the early 2020 pandemic context in which research developed, as it was challenging to connect with sovereign custodians to build the conversations and relationships I would have hoped for, had I been able to leave France to visit the site.

Broadly, my practice questions the stability of long-standing scientific narratives within the present. In doing so, I try not to present a fixed point of view, but rather blur boundaries and problematise discourses to rethink certainties in science, and highlight a possible economy of knowledge that recognises the potentiality of uncertainty and ambiguity. The subjects I address are usually animals or non-humans that have been forgotten, cast aside, or don’t have cultural clout. Once I have a research subject, I gather as much literature and speak to as many people specialising in the subject as possible, followed by storytelling methodologies as the first steps toward visual work.

The stromatolites of Boolagoorda are known as ‘living fossils’; they’re the relatives of ancient bacteria found in fossil records from 3.43 billion years ago. Their rare status makes Boolagoorda a research hub for the study of Precambrian Earth and potential extraplanetary life; it’s a portal for traversing temporalities and diverse interests.
For example, from 2016 -2018, NASA’s astrobiology lab developed Fluid Lensing at Boolagoorda, which they’re using to this day. This machine-learning algorithm can identify if a 3D structure is a rock or of biological origin. They trained it using stromatolites, before searching for extraplanetary biosignatures during the Mars 2020 Rover mission.
Since Prehistory, Gutharraguda has been the traditional Country of the Malgana, Nhanda, and Yingkarta people. Boolagoorda is the Malgana word for the microbial bodies—the stromatolites—that populate the bay. In the Malgana Dreamtime cosmology, the stromatolites are their ‘old people’—ancestors—and both stromatolites and sovereign custodians have lived in proximity for millennia, evinced by the ancient campsite and midden traces at Gutharraguda.
Until recently, these stromatolites thrived, as they were protected from open marine waters and salinity level variations by the vast Faure Sill seagrass bed. Yet in the 2018 Climate-change Vulnerability Index (CVI)³ workshop, convened across all World Heritage properties, Gutharraguda was ranked in the highest vulnerability class for near future climate change. The landscape’s future fragility—from sea-level rise and extreme temperatures—will result in seagrass loss, directly impacting stromatolite health and other marine animals that find food, shelter, and nursery areas within its grasses.

With these diverse readings that span different temporal scales, I began to think of the stromatolites as trans-historical and trans-cultural signifiers, witnesses to a multitude of superimposed and ongoing histories and storylines. My first question was how these diverse ways of knowing and being come together at the vast conservation estate that is Gutharraguda, followed by a need to make visible the climate devastation already shaping the region.

As ethnographer Deborah Bird Rose wrote, “the world of life is a world of connectivity”,⁴ and it is the loss of this connectivity and mutuality that begins a dynamic vortex that is ever more difficult to reverse. In other words, functional extinction precedes actual extinction; lose the seagrass beds and there is just no way of knowing how far the unravelling of life systems will go. For two billion years, photosynthesising stromatolites transformed the Earth to such an extent that one could say they sowed the seeds of their destruction; it’s a process hard not to compare with what humans are doing now.


I am very interested about how you decided to spatialise this research in the form of an exhibition. How did the show come into being, spatially I mean, and how did you conceive the spatial relationships between the various elements that constituted it?

The spatial relationships evolved as I began to think of stromatolites in relation to ecological time. Ecological time contains embodied and embedded qualities (think of a tree’s concentric rings) and continuity between past and future necessary to understanding its processes: stromatolites grow in stratum, in stratified layers of ~0.05mm per year, with an average age of 2000 years; some grow at the precise location and from the same microbe family (Entaphysalis) as their billion-year-old ancestors. I wanted to use the notion of temporal continuity and the embedded qualities of ecological time to decide the placement of artworks, scenography, and to direct visitor movement through the space.

To conceptualise the spatial plan, I imagined the rectangular exhibition room divided by cross-sectional strata that one would traverse when viewing the show. This idea evolved into three exhibition settings, each with artworks and scenography elements that have material and formal relationships: the pewter of the suspended sculpture Metal & Grief reflects the yellow of the painted entry wall and this sculpture’s agglomerative barnacle-like forms echo the cavernous space depicted in the photograph Inner States. By putting artworks, scenography, and lighting in dialogue, I wanted to create settings that radiated micro-atmospheres of material and textural relationships, and echoed back to the evocative recollections of light, colour, and space I first had of Boolagoorda.


Bacteria are incredible life forms, and even if they are so much part of who we are, historically but also physiologically, we always have to imagine or represent them in order to get a sense of them, both because of scale (they are so small that they cannot be seen with the naked eye) and because of distribution. I am interested in knowing if, from an artistic point of view, if you ever felt the need or desire to represent them, to make them visible, and if so, where do they emerge in the exhibition and associated artworks?

I would say bacteria are omnipresent in their absence. I never needed to represent them explicitly, but traces of past and future microbial life informed the exhibition and most artworks. They’re present in the textured surfaces and laminar production of Sisters, the etched and metal cast cuttlebones for A system of Arranged Meaning, the accumulative and globular composition of Metal & Grief, and the micro-movements of the protagonist in Another is I.

I love that physiologically and ontologically our gut bacteria complicate the ‘us’ human question. They enable us to imagine new forms of self-understanding that take place beyond our perception. As James Bridle writes, we have much to learn about unknowing, about productive darkness5. I consider our microbiome and the ancient bacteria of stromatolites—from which, thanks to great oxygenation, we evolved—as shamanic, as indiscernible mystics that could help us renegotiate our physical and spiritual boundaries with other beings.


There are many contrasting elements in the show, which constantly pull viewers back and forward in haptic and intellectual gestures at once, for instance there are distances and correspondences, soft and hard materials, light and shade, organic and synthetic matters… How did this dialectic logic emerge?

It emerged instinctively as I worked on the narrative for Another is I. The video oscillates between the intimate and somatic testimony of the protagonist and the multiple histories of the road trip site—peri-colonial, techno-scientific, and ancestral. In working on it I saw there was a constant back and forth between the personal and ‘official’ history, between an embodied and scientific way of knowing, between corporal interiority and exteriority, and between the time scales of Boolagoorda. The artworks, scenography, and lighting are visual extensions of these scales, proximities, intimacies, and distances.
Some works developed more directly—like Sisters—informed by scanning stromatolite fossils from Boolagoorda at the CNRS Geology Laboratory in Lyon (in 1989 a research trip was made to the site) and other works more instinctively, like TimePiece.

I selected the scenography materials of patinated deployed metal for partitions and synthetic open weave fabric for the projection screen for their moiré effect that filters and obscures vision. This subtle perception play—on what you think you see or comprehend—was a formal way to invite uncertainty into the exhibition.
As 3D printed ceramics, Sisters embody qualities of ecological time, a technique chosen as the method and duration is visible in and intrinsic to the final laminar form.
Another is I skirts the in-between state, visible in the imagery of varying distances and intimacies; from microscopic to satellite documentation of stromatolites and the protagonist’s journey from a strategy of resilience to one of relinquishment via scholarly modes of geological research and trance-like presence.


I’d be curious to know more about the protagonist of Another is I. The film’s title alludes to a sort of duplication of the self, which could also be you, while as viewers we assist to a subtle transformation of an individual through a journey of discovery. Could you tell me more about them?

The protagonist embodies an intentional plurality and fracturing of self that began in the narrative by thinking of where the self would start, and followed into the production by working closely with several friend collaborators to materialise the character.

I don’t experience being a self as static. I see selfhood as a composite of many influences and transitory states of becoming that in their multitudes create the body as an archive. There’s a diachronic aspect to selfhood that is composed across time—traversing lived experience—and, to think about the body across time, I believe, is also to think about it in ecological time.

The protagonist extends an invitation to think through a hermetic and siloed definition of selfhood or identity as fixed (as a mainstream cultural form). It’s an invitation—through watching an individual journey of discovery—to think about the body as being in a continuous state of becoming, and like bacteria, physically and metaphorically porous with the world around us.


Still thinking about the first-person narrative of Another is I, and how they narrate their encounter and process of discovery and learning of the stromatolites around which the whole project gravitates, I was particularly curious about the dancing figure: a young woman who moves in between the walls of a narrow corridor. Why?

Another is I is fiction, and Farah Maakel is the protagonist. I met Farah through a friend, it was a joyous working collaboration and the start of a friendship. Farah’s in the geology laboratory looking for answers to questions that aren’t expressed in words. The video is generally about the challenges of communicating with the non-human—a subject I’ve addressed in my practice over the last few years.

Farah’s movements developed in two phases; first by creating a series of repetitive micro-movements informed by microbial mat formation and microbe biosemiotics, including interactions like quorum sensing.⁶
Second, through performative ‘fieldwork’, Farah’s micro-movements adjust to the institution—with all the physicality and sensibility required to dialogue with the lab’s history and architecture of taxonomies—archival cabinets, glass vitrines, compactus.
You could say that the protagonist’s movements are conditioned or framed by the geology laboratory; at the same time, they breathe life and organic movement within it.

At moments Farah is in a quasi trance— receptive to the consciousness of another species, or their umwelt⁷. Her movements are far from language and how it tries to fix meaning. The ambient soundtrack echoes these sentiments; in the scene where Farah’s lying on the floor, the soundtrack samples theta pattern binaural beats— associated with extrasensory perception.

Throughout the video, blue flashes of light reveal limbs and extremities. They culminate in the final scene, where the protagonist scans her entire body, a gesture to pierce and break any vestige of separateness and embrace non-human relations.


Its title, Another is I, pays tribute to poet Arthur Rimbaud, who once declared je est une autre—such an outlandish, disturbing, and incredible declaration. Why did you choose to bring Rimbaud close to the stromatolites?

Before commencing Boolagoorda, I read several of Katerina Johnson’s⁸ articles on the microbiome-gut-brain axis. I was curious how the growing evidence of possible microbiome influence on the brain and behaviour fits with the assumption of the cranium as the centre of intelligence and consciousness.
Titling the video Another is I, I had in mind the entanglements between human and non-human life and modes of intelligence—on sensing outside of our cranium as a mode of intelligence. I was interested in the capacity we have to affect and be affected.

It was Xavier Jullien, exhibition curator, who evoked Rimbaud in his curatorial text, and though I knew the reference, I wouldn’t have necessarily made the connection. With all of my works—previously sculptures and this my first video—I aim to leave some ambiguity and abstraction in the final form, as within this uncertainty is a space for the viewer’s interpretations. I’m grateful Xavier brought a new reading to the video.