Not everything that counts can be counted: A Microbe Monopoly Game, 2016, Participatory performance and process, 48 x 36 x 38 inches. Photo: Natalie Fleming.

 

Exchange is paramount in Moira Williams’s Not everything that counts can be counted: A Microbe Monopoly Game. Using microbes, samples of soil and water, and cards to facilitate interactive play, Williams’s work seeks wellness through engagement with others and with space. Her work includes microbes collected from positive-living communities, thus bringing illness—in a different form—into the work. Whereas Monopoly might be seen to represent capitalism par excellence, Not everything that counts can be counted: A Microbe Monopoly Game works best through cooperation, partnership, collectivity, and reciprocity—thus, there can be no monopoly only sharing in Williams’s game.

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Moira Williams (b. 1962) is a conceptual artist co-creating and working in performance, public walks, events and sculpture. She has spoken at Elastic City Walks Festival, Open Engagement Conference for Art and Social Practice and interviewed by C Magazine. Her works have seen in iLAND, Flux Factory, ABC No Rio, The Kitchen, Fran Ilich’s Aridoamérica Winter Plan, No Longer Empty’s This Side of Paradise, MoMA PS1, The Center for Book Arts, The People’s Museum, Manchester, UK and Ghetto Biennial, Haiti. She is a Laundromat Project Fellow, recently awarded a Denniston Hill Artists Colony residency a Contemporary Arts Foundation Emergency Grant and Creative Capital selected Moira as an On Our Radar Artist. Moira holds a BFA from School of Visual Arts, NY, an MFA and Spatial Politics Graduate Certificate from Stony Brook University, NY.