ISSUE 58 — SUMMER 2022
Twenty years ago, when the field of human-animal studies began to emerge, the mycological turn in the humanities was inconceivable. And yet, through a determinate will to challenge ourselves and fine-tune, not reject, the synergy of empathy and imagination, artists, researchers, and scholars have brought us so much closer to the non-human, making available to us more vivid, accessible, and world-enriching tools than ever before. Mycorrhizal networks are the perfect metaphorical incarnation of the webs of knowledge that the different strands of academic research are generating today—open-ended and poietic support networks that gather and convey information across multiple individuals, shared communities, stratified and often invisible underground agents.
This issue of Antennae features the work of many scholars, researchers, and artists who have accomplished just that by harnessing the world-forming power of empathy and imagination in order to make visible what has for too long been made invisible. Over time, they have devised new and much needed thinking-structures that reconnect us with the ecosystems and ecologies we share with other earthlings.
Dr. Giovanni Aloi
Editor in Chief
in this issue
Rachel Armstrong
Suzette Bousema
Eli Brown
Vitor/Yama Chiodi
John Dao-Tran
Darcie DeAngelo
doxiadis+
Madge Evers
Annike Flo
Michael J. Hathaway Allison Kotzig
Laurel V. McLaughlin
Elspeth Mitchell
Marion Neumann
Dao Nguyen
Regine Rapp
Marjolaine Ryley
Merlin Sheldrake
Galina Shevchenko
Remi Siciliano
Mendel Skulski
Kuai Shen
Fereshteh Toosi
Lenka Vráblíková
Helena Wee
How to live and die
text and images: Dao Nguyen
This portfolio consists of a
selection of images from a research-based practice that straddles science, art, and philosophy, and wonders how we live with others. These images exist somewhere between portraiture and documentation.
Toward
a radical mycology
main text: Peter McCoy
interviewer: Marion Neumann
Radical Mycology: A Treatise on Seeing & Working With Fungi by Peter McCoy explores the uniqueness of fungal biology, the critical ecological roles
of micro and macro fungi,
skills for accurately identifying mushrooms and mycorrhizal fungi, the importance of lichens as indicators of environmental health.
p 19
p 12
Cocreat:e:ures
Annike Flo investigated what happens when we, as artists, shift our perception of other beings towards collaboration partner, and oddkin instead of stranger, prop or material to manipulate.
text: Annike Flo
Your_wildlife communities, yeast worlds
text: Darcie DeAngelo
images: Darcie DeAngelo and John Dao-Tran
Darcie DeAngelo follows the lab and its community images of sourdough starters and their boules. Members compare human participants with their sourdough starter companions. Wild yeast cultures are shared among participants as well as photos of their new companions.
p 37
p 47
Mycorrhizae project
text and images : Allison Kotzig
Mycorrhizae Project, a large scale,
international collaboration is planned using a digital ritual space as a way to connect disparate emanations across a “forest” or mycorrhizal network of artists, each providing sustenance to the whole.
Entangled kingdoms
in conversation: Giovanni Aloi and doxiadis+
Entangled Kingdoms by Greek
Architectural and Landscape practice doxiadis+, highlights
the importance of the symbiosis between species as a sine qua non condition for the survival and future prosperity of our planet.
p 59
p 69
"Despite the most daring and sophisticated means of containment that architects and engineers put in place – the landscape is alive."
Nina Bassoli, p 58
"Most efforts to understand how moss interacts with building surfaces have come from the desire to remove it."
Alison Haynes, p 175
"A full century before the coining of the word ‘Anthropocene’, humans were recognised as geographical agents of the first order."
Irénée Scalbert, p 124
"There is a gap between the reality of working directly with plants, unknowable as they are, and that of working with drawings and other documentation required for the delivery of public space."
Dermot Foley, p 76
p 16
Metabolic rhythms of fungus-farming
text and images: Kuai Shen
The fungus farming of leaf-cutter
ants can be amplified by means of creative uses of technologies. These ants produce acoustic vibratory messages and enact fermentation processes by cutting, licking, and secreting chemical substances on leaves.
Museum of queer ecologies
text and images: Eli Brown
Eli Brown discusses aspects of
transgender life in relationship to mycelial life: asking if trans people are the first human-born multi- species organisms, and imagining a techno-sexual future where humans have learned to procreate with fungi.
p 77
p 88
Out of Office
text and images: Elspeth Mitchell and
Lenka Vráblíková
This contribution tests a premise
that encounters with mycorrhiza—a symbiotic association between a fungus and a plant understood as partial, situated, embodied and entangled practice-in-motion— enables critical re-considerations
of individual and collective relationships.
Financial crisis mycoremediation
in conversation: Giovanni Aloi and
Fereshteh Toosi
images: Fereshteh Toosi
In Financial Crisis Mycoremediation, oyster mushrooms, known to excel in bioremediation, are decomposing some canonic works representing the rise of neoliberalism and the global financial crisis.
p 96
p 108
From “Lenin is a Mushroom” to “On the Edge
of Tenderness”
text and images: Galina Shevchenko
Chthonic and sacred, meaty
and delicate, forbidden and desirable, seductive and liberating, ambiguous and omnipresent, mushrooms are powerful signifiers that embody the mythological convergence of nature and culture.
Caucases of inhalation
text and images: Laurel V. McLaughlin
Anicka Yi’s exhibition “You Can Call
Me F” (2015) and the installation Immigration Caucus (2017) are ac- cumulations of bodily and more- than-human biological cultures, that, when exposed to the air, immerse audience-actors within mycological “caucuses” for their metabolic, immersive, political, and ethical consumption.
p 121
p 129
More-than-human ethics for biodesign
text: Rachel Armstrong
Recently, the ability of mycelia to
act like a living glue has provided inspiration for cutting-edge biodesign practices through the production of lightweight, organic mycocomposites. While these new materials are environmentally beneficial, biofabrication introduces ecoabuses into an otherwise regenerative process.
On mycohuman performances
text: Regine Rapp
The work of Saša Spačal, Tarsh Bates and Theresa Schubert
is not representational in the manner of traditional fine
art, but works rather through performative, multidisciplinary and research-based strategies to produce artwork through fungal material as such.
p 144
p 157
Growing fungus
text and images: Remi Siciliano
Growing Fungus: celebrating multispecies collaboration through image-making navigates an unexpected encounter between artist and fungus. The discovery of fungus growing through old and expired 35mm film transforms into an opportunity for creative collaboration between species.
The mushroom who saw the future
text and images: Marjolaine Ryley
Delving into the story of the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s Marjolaine Ryley explores the meanings of psychedelia, considering how mushrooms have become a symbol for this explosive era.
p 170
p 179
Entangled life
in conversation: Giovanni Aloi and
Merlin Sheldrake
By examining fungi on their own terms, Merlin Sheldrake, author of the best seller book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures reveals how these extraordinary organisms - and our relationships with them - are changing our understanding of how life works.
What a mushroom lives for
in conversation: Michael J. Hathaway and Mendel Skulski
What a Mushroom Lives For, Michael J. Hathaway’s new book, pushes today’s mushroom renaissance
in compelling new directions. For centuries, Western science has promoted a human- and animal- centric framework of what counts as action, agency, movement, and behavior.
p 190
p 203
Mycelia fabulations: stories on fungal tentacularity
text and images: Vitor/Yama Chiodi
Vitor/Yama Chiodi’s essay is an experiment in writing and thinking with fungal mycelia. Inspired by their radial world-making, the challenge is storytelling while putting aside linear thinking and conclusions.
Elemental mushroom remedies
text and images: Helena Wee
At the beginning of everything was the cosmic egg of chaos. From it emerged Pangu. For a long time he balanced darkness (yin) and light (yang). After death he became land, sea and sky, and ShanShui came into being. The interactions of yin and yang became the Chinese five elements; wood, fire, earth, metal and water.
Super organism
text and images: Suzette Bousema
In Super organism, artist Suzette
Bousema makes mycorrhiza super organisms tangible, visible, hearable, and smellable. This project aims to connect us to this hidden netwrok and stimulate emphasis by exploring networks using all our senses and empathy.
The new herbarium
text and images: Madge Evers
Informed by mycology and influenced by the inherent transformation of growing cycles, images in The new herbarium
series interpret the process of herbaria creation. The spore print, a mushroom identification tool, is adopted in form and medium to create works on paper that explore mycorrhiza and photosynthesis.
p 239
p 206
p 215
p 223
"The Roman Empire began its fall not only because of the so-called barbarian invasions, but also because of environmental problems for which the Romans were ultimately co-responsible."
Giacomo Pala, p 150
"For a landscape, often consumed by the monotony of industrial agriculture, fire is charismatic."
Kevin Lair, p 117
"And dandelions are particularly good, because they are one of those flowers that you find growing through concrete."
Monica Gagliano, p 99
"Space cannot be traced back to the creative authorship of the architect, but rather to the marginal, peripheral and molecular multiplicities that are already there."
C. Solstreif-Pirker, p 108
p 16
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