Mycelia as knowledge

This ongoing project aims to delve on the future and the transcendence of life in the midpoint of a climate crisis questioning Western logic, based on humanism and the hegemony of scientific knowledge. Which provokes discrimination, drawbacks and strong blockage when trying to envision a possible future. The project is a steady exercise that analyzes new alternatives and tools to relate us to the environment and the beings that inhabit it, in different ways. Proposing to imagine a new discursive order that breaks with the hierarchies, welcomes the diversity of knowledge, and multispecies relationships.

 

In this exploration to generate a modification of perspective, I decided to learn more about the fungi kingdom. Beings that are imperceptible, but that can provide relevant knowledge about multispecies collective work, the capacity of constant transformation, and diverse adaptations to extreme contexts.  For this reason, I have been investigating and experimenting with these beings for the last two years. Cultivating, caring, harvesting, and eating different types of mushrooms. During this time, photography has been a tool key to create and build together with them. The results have been extremely diverse: from photo collages to photographs altered by fungi themselves. Moreover, I started to experiment with spore stamps on paper and cloth. Scientific technique, which shares much with photograms. Well, the object is also in direct contact with the paper, but in this case, it is the tiny spores (reproductive part of fungus) that generate the footprint thereof.

Considering the teachings from fungi around the collective work and Multispecies, I reflect on the need for art to transform and unite with other disciplines to generate a collective and hybrid reasoning that allows to propose ideas from a combined perspectives. This is why I would like to continue experimenting with photography to expand this technique, which will allow me to emphasize the idea of going through life from new places and wisdoms. I also consider it pertinent to work hand in hand with historians, mycologists, and people from the Andean communities of Peru to incorporate ancestral knowledge from Pre-Hispanic cultures such as the Mochica, who considered these beings as sacred, being mediators towards other dimensions of knowledge and inspiration. Perhaps, access to this forgotten knowledge will push us to imagine new worlds and ways in which life transcends from speculation and the unpredictable.