As a person enters the art space, they enter a fungal world. They stand among mycelial ghosts, listen to the songs of mushrooms, they breathe in the same air as the mycelium. And when they leave, they are changed, even if imperceptibly. They are participating in a dance. They leave with traces of mycelium imprinted in them. Through this somatic experiencing, can the audience know and feel a little more what it means to be in relationship with the fungal world?
This work explores ideas of community, caretaking, and mutual systems of support as modeled by the role of mycelium on the planet. Mycelium is the root-like structure of mushrooms. It is integral to life on earth; it is responsible for the health of all soil and is integral to the health of 90% of all plants. This project encourages participants to think with, care for, and learn from the fungi. Through attention and cultivation, it reinvents how we can have a relationship with the natural world and provides a model for how to co-exist and collaborate across species.
Signaling is a sprawling, networked project made in collaboration with oyster mushrooms, five dancers, many citizen scientists, a sound-artist, a chef, and the audience. The primary site is an immersive sculpture- and sound-installation built by and for the mycelium. The living mushrooms in the space are creating a sound piece—the electrical signaling from the mycelium is collected into data points then turned into sound. It is a meditation on more-than-human methods of communication and symbiotic relationships. It also functions as a space for lectures, cooking experiments, and dance performances. This project is in its first iteration and will take place in May 2022 in Trondheim, Norway at the Vitensenteret and Trondheim Kunsthall.
The future of this project is The Spore Lab, a traveling experiential lab that combines visual art, sound, science, dance, and cooking. Like a spore that travels through space to grow a new mushroom, this project will travel between several sites to build a sense of belonging and community through fungi. It will be a networked project that is rooted in the local and becomes inter-community as it invites new collaborators and participants from each new city. Through many cultural creative activities at The Spore Lab, the audience can connect with fungi and understand its role in the ecosystem, while also cultivating a sense of belonging within a larger community.
Please highlight how the concept/idea can be exemplary in this context
This work is made by and for the mycelium--the fungi and the work are in a mutually beneficial relationship, and this is the foundation for considering how we relate to the natural world. Collaborating with fungi teaches us about community as it provides a model for symbiotic relationships. Collaborating with fungi also teaches about us about sustainability by showing how we can turn waste into food, sculptures, sound art, and healthy soil.
To create the sculptures in Signaling, I reference new methodologies in bio-design fields. The sculptures are grown by Pleurotus ostreatus, a commonly cultivated, edible, and versatile fungi. They are known for their ability to consume a wide variety of substrates, ranging from coffee and sawdust to cigarette butts and crude oil. Due to their diverse appetites, they are a primary fungus used in “mycoremediation” — the study of the potential uses of fungi for mitigating the damage we have inflicted on our planet. Searching for renewables to mitigate the environmental cost of new buildings and objects, architects have developed techniques for using mycelium to create bricks & insulation, developing a new field called “mycotecture”. Fungi's ability to consume and transform waste into organic matter will be a cornerstone to how we consider sustaining life on our damaged planet.
This project directly references the bio-design field but reframes it within artistic research and democratizes the knowledge. While most mushrooms are grown under sterile conditions, The Spore Lab reframes this as something anyone can do at home with agricultural waste. This knowledge and skill-sharing of low-tech methods show us several layers of circularity: waste being turned into food and knowledge being circulated between several communities. The Spore Lab provides a platform to raise questions of sustainability, share skills and knowledge in new contexts, and connect with each other through nature.
Please highlight how the concept/idea can be exemplary in this context
The primary site of The Spore Lab is an immersive somatic and sensorial experience for the audience. This helps them really feel what it means to be in relation with the fungal world, and to realize they are not merely visitors, but participants. As one enters the installation space, they enter a world of sensorial experience—a place where sight, touch, smell, sound, and movement are at play. The immersion of the installation gives them no option but to be a part of the work rather than merely looking from a distance. Mycelial sculptures hang from the ceiling with a sense of precarity. The ground is covered with woodchips that are home to living mycelium and now lay under their feet, mimicking an organic forest floor and marking a stark contrast from the manmade floor in the rest of the space. Walking on the uneven mycelial floor is a form of touching, and it sends different signals to the brain than that of a uniform floor. The room carries a smell with it— the dark, peppery, hidden smell of mushrooms. Smell offers a direct route to the limbic system— the part of the brain most closely associated with memory and emotion. Meanwhile, the sound and the light change based on the electrical signaling from mushrooms— a kind of durational performance made by the mushrooms. It reveals the typically silent-to-us communication happening within. The human participants can eavesdrop on the mycelial communication. The multi-faceted and sensorial nature of the installation offers a visitor many routes by which to feel their own body and presence palpably in the space.
In addition to having a sensory and intuitive experience, this project also asks the audience to question their notions of aesthetics. How does this fungal body align or misalign with our cultural ideas of beauty? Challenging the engrained patterns standards of beauty is necessary to go through the social transformations needed to build sustainable worlds. This project guides the audience through that process.
Please highlight how the concept/idea can be exemplary in this context
This project has several routes of inclusion as it can be accessed and appreciated by different audiences. Due to the sensory and experiential element of the project, a participant has an immediate route into understanding and engaging with the work. The audience also plays a participatory role—the living mushrooms in the space need to be kept alive through consistent misting, so the audience is invited to care for the mushrooms. The site is universally designed to be accessible to all. This project can be experienced by school groups of all ages, from small children to the university level. The wide range of themes that this project covers—visual art, design, science, sustainability, food justice, and experimental music—appeal to people with diverse interests and from different backgrounds.
This project also involves many people in direct conversation and collaboration. This includes local farmers who may want to expand their practices to include mushroom production, cooking groups who use the site to experiment with mushroom-based recipes, local performers who will be involved in the dance element of the work, or musicians and sound artists who could collaborate with the existing sound art piece. These collaborations are crucial to the work as conversations, caregiving, skill-sharing, and a sense of belonging are the backbone of the project. As this is a process-based work, these relationships have months to develop and time for each person to find a sense of self and agency within a larger collaboration. This work is co-created with each participant, and while it is my directing, the sense of ownership of the work is shared. These relationships create a sense of locality and community, while the traveling nature of the project speaks to inter-community connection. This project will move into new communities with knowledge and network formed in the previous community, the project will continue to grow and transform because of the individuals that form it.
Please highlight how this approach can be exemplary
Fungi infuse this planet in ways that challenge our notions of classification and identity, the nature of intelligence, and our understanding of how life is sustained. The Spore Lab asks very similar questions of cultural practices that fungi make us ask of the world. This work defies some of the categorizations we typically apply—disciplines, species, nature vs. culture. By collaborating across species, it challenges the sense of separateness we create between ourselves and otherselves. This project is about making kin with the more-than-human world and within the human world. By being widely interdisciplinary and participatory, it challenges how we typically consider the environment, sustainability, aesthetics, and art practices. It is at once directly educational—fungi and its role in environmental sustainability—and it explores ideas of encounter, contamination, and symbiotic relationships expressed through somatic experiencing, sound art, and movement-based performance.
As this work goes into new communities, the constellation of collaborators will change. Due to its process-based nature, new relationships and dynamics will emerge, making space for new encounters and directions. Each participant—active collaborator or audience member—will walk away with a unique experience, new questions, and a deeper sense of belonging to the human world and the more-than-human world.
The Spore Lab is a process of creating an ecosystem in which diverse perspectives, backgrounds, and species come together to form something new. By creating an entangled network that the work lives and breathes in, all participants develop interwoven relationships that unfold, emerge, and grow over time. Traces of this ecosystem will travel into the future: a spore moving through air, a changed perspective, another interwoven relationship made visible. It will move into new contexts, be changed by new relationships, and the ecosystem will become more diverse and healthier.
Living art just beginning to enter the mainstream. This reflects a consciousness around our damaged planet and is a very important development in the larger art field. The Spore Lab is being developed in conversation with these practices but is doing something different. It is innovative in how it intersects social practice with living art, food, and science. It is far-reaching in its collaborative nature and its references to theoretical, anthropological, and ecological texts. The breadth and dynamism of this work are widened through its entanglement with visual art, science, architecture, sound art, social practice, and contemporary choreography. It applies a system-thinking found in ecology into a context of artistic research, which is not present in mainstream practices.
Like other projects in the field, The Spore Lab shows the artifacts of the encounter between humans and Oyster mushrooms, but the collaboration is still alive. The aliveness is key to the project because it requires care and attention. The aliveness of the work is what creates the sound and light performance and is the method for considering communication within the fungal world. It attunes us to non-verbal language that amplifies our response-ability toward each other. The aliveness is what extends the participants’ senses towards new forms of embodied cognition, and this is an innovative component of this work.
The aliveness also forms the basis for the ecosystem of the work, including all human and non-human collaborators. Creating a project that is itself an ecosystem shows us the radical interconnectedness of all things. It is how co-creation, mutual support, and symbiotic relationships emerge. It addresses the global challenges with the local solutions: wide-reaching problems of sustainability and humans’ relationship with the natural world addressed by locally engaged actors who come together to share knowledge, change perspectives, and cultivate a sense of belonging.
In the first phase, The Spore Lab will go to three places: Nida Art Colony in the Curonian Spit, Lithuania; Swimming Pool Project in Sofia, Bulgaria; ARAC in Bucharest, Romania.
In each place, the project will be housed within an existing institution that is dedicated to asking questions at the intersection of visual art, interdisciplinary collaboration, and the environment. For two months in each space, the sculpture and sound installation will serve as a space for local artists, farmers, chefs, dancers, and other participants to become involved in mushroom growing experiments, cooking events, and a dance performance. In addition to their many other cultural heritages, these countries in Eastern Europe have unique histories of mushroom foraging and rich food culture. As food is one of the most effective ways of bringing people together, The Spore Lab will also collaborate with a food festival that is already established in each city.
With each iteration, the project will strengthen a network across Eastern Europe. As the life of this project is dependent on relationships, the cultivation of lasting interdisciplinary and cross-national relationships is key. Like the mycelium that can stretch for hundreds of kilometers underground and gives trees nutrients, so too will this project connect people, places, and institutions through creative cultural events, skill-sharing, and knowledge production.
In promoting this project, The Spore Lab will connect to the larger network of the New European Bauhaus including the other initiatives that are in effect under the European Green Deal. The Healthy Soils Initiative from the European Commission is in line with the educational, sustainable, and practical goals of The Spore Lab. An alliance with this initiative could strengthen both The Spore Lab and the efforts of Healthy Soil.
If The Spore Lab is awarded the New European Bauhaus Prize the following concrete steps would be taken:
June- August 2022-
- Begin planning in collaboration with each site
- continue research on mycelium and low-tech growing methods—develop connections with Gro Cycle in UK
- develop modular molds for creating the sculptures on site
- develop a connection with Healthy Soils
September 2022-
- Site Visit to Nida Art Colony in Lithuania
- conversations with potential collaborators in Lithuania
- strategic planning for implementation and promotion with cultural specificity to Lithuania
October 2022
- Planning, grant writing and funding research for the project in Lithuania
- Taking courses from Radical Mycology
November- December 2022
- Site Visit to Swimming Pool Project in Sofia
- conversations with collaborators in Sofia
- strategic planning for implementation and promotion with cultural specificity to Sofia
January 2022
- Site Visit to ARAC in Bucharest
- conversations with collaborators in Bucharest
- strategic planning for implementation and promotion with cultural specificity to Bucharest
February- March 2023
- Full Planning and Development mode for 1st site: Lithuania
- Full Promotion Efforts in conjunction with NEB events and Healthy Soils
April- June 2023
- Implementation of The Spore Lab at its first site at Niba Art colony
June 2023
- Reporting and reflecting on successes of the first implementation
- Planning for 2nd and 3rd projects in Sofia and Bucharest
@Wiatr Lewis, 2022
Content licensed to the European Union.