On view in DIFFERENCE MACHINES (Oct 16th 2021 - January 16th 2022 at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery of Buffalo NY) and Future Ecologies (Fall 2021 at Vox Populi of Philadelphia PA) Root Picker is a queer nature documentary focused on a family of wild yams found throughout the Americas. Footage of yams thriving in swampy wetland ecologies is viewed through screen interfaces mapping the steroid hormonal molecular transformations that occur between yam, fungal, and human bodies. The work celebrates the queerness of these molecules that are produced in our bodies as well as in people across species divisions: plants, bacteria, birds, fish, mammals etc. Narration from Gabriella Cordoba Vivas flirts with the third person omniscient voice of the nature documentarian: speaking to the geopolitiical and industrial ecologies the yams have been absorbed into, weaving through trans feelings, and unwinding some of the colonial formations that have coalesced around their hormonal molecular gifts. In it's manifestation for DIFFERENCE MACHINES at Albright-Knox gallery of Buffalo NY, rootpicker accompanies a bioreactor that incubates fungal microbes fermenting phytosteroids extracted from wild yams, and transforming them into progesterone and other steroid hormones.