Molluscular Modes is a lecture performance that suggests a political history of the snail through an associative research on slowness, spirals, slime, snails and slugs.
There are different types of terrestrial locomotion (legged, limbless and rolling) and the big distinction between legged as opposed to limbless and rolling locomotion is that the latter is never loosing touch of the ground. Terrestrial gastropods, aka. land snails and slugs (not marine ones) are sliding on a carpet of slime. Their body is called foot. And this foot has a lot of muscles that contract in waves and produces a mucus. These waves are called pedal waves. The mucus serves for reducing friction and as a layer of protection from pointy or sharp objects. This kind of limbless crawling is not only happening in other organisms such as earthworms but also in the healing of wounds and in inflammation. This phenomenon is called „cell crawling“.
In „Poetics of Space“ Gaston Bachelard describes snails as dialectical beings, „half dead, half alive“, embodying the contrast of the inanimate hard shell and the soft living body. And even more integral seems the contrast between the soft, moldable body and the hard, geometrically perfect shell.
Snail’s shells grow in a logarithmic spiral. This means that the line that defines the spiral, is in each round around the center growing for about the distance to the centre. A straight line through the center will cut the spiral always in the same angle. The logrithmic spiral is self similar, in can grow but fundamentally will never change. This logarithmic spiral can be found in many other natural phenomena such as the growth of sunflower seeds, low- pressure areas such as cyclones or spiral galaxies...
Images taken at Oyoun by Anna Wyszomierska. © Anna Wyszomierska, 2023, Berlin.
Video © Lea Wittich.