Andrea Shin Ling presents a visceral art installation at the Rhubarb Arts Festival

Architect Andrea Shin Ling’s Calculus of an infinite rot, showcased at the recently held Annual Rhubarb Festival in Toronto, Canada, is a reflection on how decay and regeneration go hand in hand. The Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s Rhubarb festival was founded in 1979 to be the cradle for experimentation and exploration of new realms in art and the performing arts. Also touted as the world’s largest and longest running queer theatre, the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre presented Ling’s new works, which is an amalgamation of forms of decay on stumps of wood, merging the biological and the design process, exploring the shifting spaces between living and dying. With artists performing with the installation, festival director Clayton Lee says, “Andrea’s work addresses concerns about the present, while simultaneously using technology and research that propels us decades into the future. The installation created for Rhubarb is a response to this moment, and the festival artists, in turn, have created work that responds to it.”

Calculus of an infinite rot is an experimentation of the natural connection between the decay and regeneration processes. “Decay and regeneration are paired processes, where the entropy of one system is used for the organisation of another. Through decay, the differentiation occurs between humans, trees, insects, and microbes blurs, as parts of us become parts of them and vice versa, in a process that is leaky, smelly, and messy,” explains Ling. 34 stumps created from fallen Spruce and Maple trees have been used to experiment with to achieve different results and finishes. With different fungal and bacterial injections the wooden stumps were left to rot in the theatre space itself.

At the Rhubarb festival, under the direction of Clayton Lee, artists performed while interacting with the installation, performing with the themes of decay and regeneration in mind. Artists incorporated Ling’s artwork and philosophy into their own performances. Throughout the week, Ling’s work changed and transformed subtly, while interacting with the ecosystem within the theatre space, creating an extremely visceral experience and piece of art.