What if we would connect already existing spaces of mushroom knowledge*?
What if we would create encounters for these knowledge practices in community contexts?
How would that take shape?
*knowledge that is often scientifically decypherable, commercially hidden and
generally stuck among solid disciplinary borders
It could be a
that creates open learning spaces
in place-based community contexts,
facilitating encounters with mushrooms
and the embodied knowledge of working with mushrooms
from different fields.
How to
or fairy rings are naturally occurring circular formations of some mushrooms, generated by the primarily spherical growth of fungal tissues.
They reappear for several years around the same centre point - the oldest one is said to be 700 years old.
They can be read as signifiers of nutritious areas that allow the invisibly spreading mushroom roots to pop-up fruit-bodies of spore dissemination when the climatic conditions require the connection
to distant places.
Their image has been described by tales of more-than-human creatures all around the world and various iterations of the transformative power of these circular spaces existed.
Fairy circles
is a growing,
research-based learning network
- inspired by mushrooms -
in quest of how thinking with
non-human creatures could transform
human sensitivity.
As mushrooms embody a growing web of resources in relation to their companion species, the nomadic laboratory accumulates knowledge and tracks an open-access network.
It connects already existing practices and agents of engaging with living systems with an openness for cross-fertilization and arranges their knowledge in horizontality.
This connection accommodates qualities of different understandings of mushroom mycelium. The knowledge of mushrooms coming from
natural science,
farming practices,
applied mycology,
ethnomycology and
place or activity-based oral histories.
The collaborating partners are working in different scopes: balancing practices of critical theory and pedagogy, cultural and community organization, ecofeminist and posthumanist artistic approaches.
The emerging network generates learning spaces that are the most relevant for each partner and their localities: for example in forms of civil mycologist learning groups, artist-led explorations of mycelium as material and metaphor, experimental mushroom growing space architecture, mycoremediation actions, encounters of mushroom thinking.
All finding a place in a live archive of contemporary ethnomycology.
Its main medium is mushroom mycelium and it happens primarily through the interventions of a nomadic mushroom laboratory in collaboration with local partners and their communities in Central and Eastern Europe.
While 1.) it performs as a free school of mushroom knowledge that supports local and circular forms of food and medicine making / agroecological practices / ecological design technologies 2.) it works with the sensitivity and imagination of communities
transforming their 'mushroom blindness' and unsustainable relationships to the 'natural'.
During 2021 parallel interventions will be performed by the partners, according to the needs of their local communities and in relation to their ongoing work and research orientations
- adding a mycological twist to them.
The collaboration will start-up with the collective creation of a cross-border peer learning structure, that would support the participants' learning experiences, the planned public events, dissemination and the project collaboration itself.
During the project period of 15 months,
a collective lab facility would be set up,
the common grounds of collaboration would be created and
a palette of learning modalities would be experimented and tested for further development and dissemination.
We invite the expanding understanding of mycelium into our space of collaboration and inform our imagination, ways of listening and sharing through it.
is intensely expanding at the moment in the fields of basic and applied sciences.
Parallel to this, self-taught practitioners form loose communities (locally and online internationally) where valuable knowledge is produced about applications of mushrooms and from where marketable solutions are capitalized to patented know-how.
A more complex approach is also present though for example in eco-critical art and theory that works for the renegotiation of what mushrooms can mean for humans and possibly imagine the liberation of these entities from being mere resources in service for human wellbeing.
Knowledge related to fungi and the access to it is a yet not fully colonized field, it seems, there's still a chance for struggles of diversity and ownership on practices, strains and technologies.
Fair-y Circles works for the self-organization of civil mycologists to invigorate the movements of food sovereignty, environmental restoration and community resilience development. Given its collective facility, it functions as a socio-economic experiment to enhance the imagination of systems (food, knowledge, natural resources) based on solidarity economy and practically offering a space for community-based art and agroecological actions. The organized interventions are aiming at offering practical knowledge of working with mushrooms (for local food and medicine production, habitat restoration or eco-architecture) and mentoring for community and project development. With the attempt to confuse urban and rural it incorporates qualities of the rural into the urban and tries to support the emancipation of the rural colonized by urban-centric value-production.
the process of learning and unlearning 'nature' with the capacities of artistic research and questions the production places and usages of 'knowledge'.
The project seeks hybrid forms of knowledge production: communicating scientific knowledge embedded in local practices, structured in a form of artistic research.
As a radical pedagogy project, it empowers communities to restructure their relations to places, nature and naturalized resources. The interventions ensure quality encounters of professionals and local communities challenging the tendencies of monopolization of resources, separation of theoretical and practical knowledge, the devaluation of embodied and experiential learning ways.
nomadic mushroom lab
think with
mushrooms?
Fair-y circles
Conditions for
connection
in general
Places
people
+
The plan
The human knowledge
on mushrooms
Fair-y circles approaches
In a greater perspective