Fungal cosmology investigations in Patagonia: “art-science research is an invention of modernity”
Fungi Cosmology is a project that emphasize new forms of dialogues, translations and collaborations between art and science around the fungal kingdom. The program was created by CAB Patagonia, LabVerde Amazonia, and Swiss partners Artists-in-Labs and foodculture days with the support of Pro Helvetia and a greater consortia of funding bodies from Brazil, Chile and Switzerland. Over three years, the program brought together artists and scientists to study the reign of mushrooms as a societal metaphor in the three countries. Makery had already published Maya Minder’s account of the Amazon, and as the third and final chapter opens in Switzerland, the artist takes time to recount her impressions of their second chapter in Patagonia last winter. The Swiss leg kicks off this Thursday, August 29, with an open discussion at Zurich’s Theater Spektakel festival, and will continue with a trip to the Valais mountains of Switzerland.
According to philosopher Bruno Latour, the age of the Anthropocene is not mainly about the concern over human-made decline of biodiversity, the devastation of soil, the rapid rise of global temperatures, or the imminent end of fossil fuels, but the overwhelming comprehension of us all sitting on the same planet. We might not understand the vastness of this complex interplay between geographies, geophysics, and geopolitics, but like a drop of oil staining our ground, we might start to understand the term “Spaceship Earth” – we navigating our planet together through the universe.
Latour uses the word “parsing” as a keyword to be used as an antidote to the overwhelming and demotivating feeling of the dawning Anthropocene. Parsing is a term used to dissect and break down our imagination into smaller units of interest: a piece of land, a singular garden, the littoral zone, one square meter of soil, one acre of forest. Their findings offer a much more realistic picture of a political process in place than the bigger idea of “planetary terraforming” relate to the impossible task of taking stewardship of a whole planet.
In this text I would also like to address the heterogeneous agencies, talking about not only human agency, but also about the many actors that influence the different factors of change in our planetary world. For example, Latour uses the term “critical zone,” the layer of soil not deeper than 20cm, which is composed of so many various actors, like human agency of agriculture, petrochemical agency, rainfall, nematodes, microbes, plants and their root systems, and many more. “Critical” carries the notion of stress, crisis, conflicts, and history, the term “Zone” concepts as territory, land, heterotrophy, and transformation.
While Bruno Latour is helping me to lay the foundations for my research into fungal cosmology, I am supplementing this by also taking into account the domestic sphere and the theory of everyday practice as proposed by Michel de Certeau, Lucie Giard and Pierre Mayol in their book The Practice of Everyday Life. According to this book, domestic life is a place for the creation of knowledge, shared rituals and the embodiment of community building. Finally, the work of Silvia Federici adds to this in her use of the term domestic space as a place of both submission and resistance.
The complexity of the Fungi Cosmology project, as an international research program, lies in the manifold aspects of a transdisciplinary project and the heterogeneity of cultural identities and disciplines of Art/Science that created the context. Visiting three different areas in terms of geography, landscape and ecosystem enabled extreme comparisons to be made. The participants are artists, scientists, and curators, from Brazil, Chile, and Switzerland. As methodology can vary greatly between disciplines and territories, we agreed to start from a common ground with a site-specific approach, a processual approach and a Do-it-with-others approach, sharing our methodologies in group meetings and discussions. We also shared the same critical zone and habitat, common spaces for eating and sleeping, the same meals and the same daily rhythm of resting our feet and minds, eating the same harvest and sharing these common experiences.
Patagonia – a phantasmagoria at the end of the world
Werner Herzog’s documentary Encounters at the End of the World tells the stories of people who choose to live in the most hostile environment on our planet. It is the stories of scientists, logistic workers, and other deserters that live in the most unreachable place to devote themselves to solitude and the pure passion of their field of research.
With this film in mind, I traveled to Patagonia, the starting point of scientific and tourist expeditions to Antarctica, a city marked by colonization and immigration, and even a place of remote refuge for outlaws and fugitives from justice.
The capital of the most south region of Chile, the XXII Region Magallanes and Antartica Chilena, is a place is a place hybrid by its wild mix of urban architectural carpentry, with records of last century’s settlement movements and of an advent of touristic exploitation. Some curiosity cabinets remind us the era of the “conquest of the Wild West” or of the “New World”, and a few brick factories reminiscent of the old whaling industries stand alongside shopping centers and a hotel chain that stands out for its difference and poor relationship with the environment and the context of the small city in the end of Americas continent. The overwhelming beauty of the landscape, the impressions of the vast sky and the rapid changes in the weather have overtaken the faded taste of this surreal place of non-architecture and the fact that all consumable goods, all living is brought from more than 800 km in distance ether by ground transportation, ship or then plane. Patagonia is very remote and only reachable by a certain clientele of tourism. One could ask, what are people searching for in Patagonia and what kind of crowds end up in this remote region of the planet. – “What are we doing here and why are we here?”
Transdiciplinary encounters in art and science
“The tips of the hyphae, of the mycelia is like a single brain, it is ALL collaboration.” Peter McCoy during his presentation at Spora event, Paris, 2024
The richness of this heterotroph zone was imagined upon our arrival. Maria Luisa Murillo, the Chilean curator and organizer of the Patagonia edition of Fungi Cosmology, organized a three-day conference of “Encuentros en Arte y Ciencia” (Encounters in Art and Science). It was a conference, a meeting point, a starting point for networking between many local players and agencies in the field of art and science. The conference sought to give reflection on the importance of linking the sciences and the arts in the fields within the arts and science that research, conserve, and think about cultural heritage and knowledge in Chile. It also aimed to promote the construction of inter- and transdisciplinary collaborative networks, to think ecological crisis and post-colonial trauma in the sense of art/science, encouraging the exchange between the professionals interested in sharing experiences where art and science coexist and evolve. Amongst the presenters were curators, artists, scientists, residency hosts, and researchers: the Antarctic Institute of Chile, Magellan University, Catholic University of Maule, Prisma, Museo del Hongo, the science museum Museo Interactivo Mirador, LABVA, and many more. Enriched with the many impressions and new acquaintances to share networks, us participants of Fungi Cosmology went further to travel to the CAB residency in Tierra del Fuego the next days to start a week of summer camp in the outback of the wild lands.
Summer camps as a methodology is the subject of many current contemporary community movements that create shared spaces and time within a group of people to share knowledge and skills. The content is mainly generated by the constitution of the camp, its environment, and the people participating; to create a transdisciplinary experience for all the members is the common goal. This format is not new but has been practiced by the early environmentalist Patrick Geddes in his “Summer Meetings” in England in 19th century. First held in 1887 in Edinburgh, the motto for the meeting was “Vivendo Discimus” – ‘by living we learn’. Geddes, who was a transdisciplinary scientist as biologist, socialist, and town planner, also marked the terms “from hand, to head, to heart” or “think globally, act locally!”. His ideas of transdisciplinary exchange by bringing people together from different disciplines was pioneering bringing people from different disciplines to study the same subject by sharing time and habitation together.
My house is your house and the otherness
As Maria Luisa Murillo told us, each residency she hosted at the CAB was different. The space gets constellated by the guests present on-site. Formerly the main building of an old timber factory Puerto Yartou, it was also her great-grandfather’s house. A settler, olderst son of swiss immigrants whom arrived in 1877 to the beginning of “Sandy Point”, now a days Punta Arenas. Alberto Baeriswyl evaded his family heritage because he did not want to go to finishing his studies in the country of their parents and who decided to stay in the wild south hunting wild hourses and then went on to establish his own settlement in the Tierra del Fuego hinterland. The house was very vast, with many rooms with different functions. You could see that the architecture stems from a colonial heritage and is based on ideas of functionality and the use of space according to hierarchy and representation: the open entrance room greets you with an opulent furniture and tapestry on the wall, he library is the next room, then the kitchen, which is the central core but is hidden at the very back of the house with its own entrance from the backyard. On one side is the dining room, followed by the salon for reading and contemplation, connected by a long, hidden walkway that leads to the kitchen and a maid’s room. On the other side are the private rooms, bedrooms and bathrooms and, again, an opulent walkway with large windows overlooking the backyard.
It was an extensive stay at the residency in CAB. The landscape and its seemingly rough appearance and lack of vegetation opened a playground to apply the methods of parsing the micro zones, to get a deeper understanding of the “critical zone”. Fungi Cosmology members instantly transformed the space into a temporary science lab, a reading room and library, a kitchen lab and an intimate space of retreat for all.
When we arrived in this remote place, we were stunned by the landscape, which gave us the impression of being inside a dream. Devoid of human activity, it is impressive in its nature. The ocean, mountains, shores and forests touched the horizon and reflected each other.
In order to approach the mycelium and fungi as a kitted bond in-between an ecosystem, our group slowly became fungal in this remote isolation in Tierra del Fuego. This place, a non-place, was inhabited by indigenous peoples for centuries before being extinguished by white settlers. Tierra del Fuego is called the isle of fire, not because of a volcano or other geographical feature, but as the historic narrative says because of the many fires lit by the natives at night, when Magellan discovered the island and named the Magellan’s straight. Far out on the land the many fires became visible as small dots in an intrinsically connected web of evidence of life existing in this remote place.
What is the history of the edible today?
“Through my experience at home – through my relations to my parents – I also discovered what I now call the ‘double character’ of reproductive work as a work that reproduces us and ‘valorizes’ us not only in view of our integration in the labour market but also against it.”
Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, Oakland Press 2012
“Historically, the home has been a place where life is reproduced and where the people involved in the reproduction of life are connected through intimate relationships, by kinship, trust, affection; it is a place of social encounters. What we argued in the International Wages for Housework campaign is that in the history of capitalism, the home has been subjected to all kinds of state interventions and legislations that have turned it into a centre for the production of labour-power. The Campaign read the home as a workplace, a workplace for women, the designated subject of reproductive work. This means that the home, like reproductive work itself, has had two contradictory components that have produced a constant tension. On the one side the home and reproductive work have had to produce exploitable workers for the labour market, and on the other hand they have (re)produced our lives, and our struggles. Thus, the home has been both a place of subjugation and a place of resistance.”
Silvia Federici, in: (Home Works) A Cooking Book: Recipes for Organizing with Art and Domestic Work, Ed.: Jenny Richards and Jens Strandberg, Onomatopee, 2020
The bow I am taking here is that in the two disseminations of Fungi Cosmology, there has been an encounter and a critical approach to how fungi, as a food source, have raised many questions in the history of the acquisition of human food cultures, non-human entanglements and indigenous knowledge. As an artist I work with the non-human world and am mainly interested in human interaction, the entanglement and the history of non-human agency with the human world.
Having grown up in the 90s, I am a child of the dawn of hyper-globalized capitalism and the process of a sheer commodified world. I witnessed how the Swiss government took part in the co-founding the European Union by bilateral consent, only to be rejected by the mass movement of right wing populism in the early 90s, allowing free trade in goods while people rested within their borders. Sensing the hybridity of my origins early on, I never felt that I belonged or was attributed to a system, but I understood that non-belonging could also function as a tool of deregulation parallel to the neoliberal freedom of deregulated market politics. Capitalism was an ambiguous role-play of deregulation and individual self-regulation within its intrusive cages of late capitalist society.
I only started asking questions through the lenses I received through my mother’s eyes, when she was searching for her home culture in a foreign Western country, belonging to the otherness and was constantly reduced to her exoticism, as a female Asian women, in the role of a mother and housewife, staying at home in a foreign culture, wrapped in domestic work to raise her children in Switzerland in the 80s and 90s.
Her cooking was an investigation in her own culture. She arrived in Switzerland as a young woman with no knowledge of culinary practices. She has shown great creativity in adapting her skills and in replacing missing ingredients that were not available. Korean cuisine is rich in indigenous knowledge. Fermentation is actively practised in a wide variety of dishes and beverages that are produced in the domestic spheres and have not yet been outsourced to processed food industry. Many wild foods are integrated into recipes and cooking practices, and the production of foods such as tofu or miso are integral part of many recipes. I gradually became aware of why these ancient cooking practices have become so important and are still actively practiced and lived on into the 21st Century.
One of the reasons why cooking and recipes have been preserved in Korean culture is that food is strongly linked to its cultural identity. Cooking practices are an expression of cultural belonging. Recipes are intrinsic and are passed down from one generation to the next within the private domestic sphere. From the Asian Colonial history in the early 20th CE Korean identity has been heavily oppressed during the Japanese occupation from 1910 to 1945, to the extent that Koreans were forbidden to speak their language in public spaces and at school. Oppression of the Occupier became as rigid, that the silent and privat domestic space was the only space where cultural identity could be proclaimed. By way of comparison, capoeira was a form of resistance, practiced secretly as a dance by African slaves in Brazil. The music and dance concealed the secret practice of martial arts and defence techniques. A subverted way of practising culture, similar to the need to practice food culture among the Korean population at the time. Korean cooking was a private domestic practice that strongly expressed once belonging. Our eating food cultures are sensual body knowledges, that functions on a neurological sphere of memory and culture inscription – Food feeds the soul. The food is internalized and becomes culture from the inside, and as Silvia Frederici puts it, the domestic is a place of resistance. The incorporation of wild, foraged foods also testifies to the scarcity witnessed by the Korean population during this period of occupation, where most of the material resources produced in Korea were used to support Japanese soldiers in the wars and battles taking place on the Western mainland.
It is notable that, in a post-industrial society, most of the local, ancient or indigenous recipes of food culture, such as preserving, pickling, fermenting or processing food, got lost in the advent of postmodern society. With the invention of fridges and supermarkets, it became evident that those hardship requiring practices were no longer necessary and were outsourced to local food producers. Foraging and fermenting were regarded as retro and poorman’s survival needs in a post-war world. Cultivation, education and technological progress are still the main pillars of modern society. The remarkable thing is that these skills and knowledge got lost within few generations only, whereas previously they were passed down from generation to generation for centuries. In such a short space of time, a profound body of knowledge has been lost.
Domestic work is devaluated within capitalist society, it is undervalued because it does not generate wages. It has not been validated for storage in libraries or other domes of knowledge protection, since it is not regarded as high culture. It is only with the loss of the ancient practices of these recipes, similar to the knowledge of soil embodied by farmers, and only with the advent of ecological awareness and the climate crisis, that we are beginning to understand their invaluable capacity to go beyond the transfer of knowledge in deep time. It has enabled humanity to survive for centuries, even millennia. Can we say that pre-industrial societies lived in greater harmony with ecology? The substantial division of dual and non-dual wisdom underwent paradigm shifts with the advent of modern form of capitalism, which divided the body from capital, material from nature, nature from culture. Practices such as fermenting, preserving, pickling, working the land, cultivating the soil and the knowledge of foraging for wild foods are hyperlocal and fluid practices. By adapting from generation to generation, these recipes made it possible to cope with climatic or geographical changes and interruptions such as war, floods, droughts or other natural and human-made disasters.
Learning from fungi
The loss of knowledge of edible fungi is a clear sign of the loss of this deep temporal connectivity that our contemporary society is witnessing. Modern societies lack the capability of surviving in a wilder context. I theorize here that this is not the result of a break and a division that occurred with the entry into the Holocene, when humans became sedentary whereas they had been previously hunters and gatherers. I think it was rather at a later stage that most of the knowledge was lost, through displacement, wars and above all the advent of capitalism and the disembodiment of body and mind, the commodification of all the material entanglements we humans maintain, so to speak, with the non-human world.
Silvia Federici inside her seminal book of Caliban and the Witch, has conducted in-depth research into the history of the body in relation to the expansion of capitalism, arguing that perceived division was an essential condition for the development of labour power and the gendered categorization of work. Witches hunts in sixteenth-century Europe were expressed as the struggle for the monopoly of curative knowledge of plants and fungi by the reign of monasteries (religion) and monarchs (government). In a similar way, we came across similar interesting views on the knowledge of the indigenous Yanomami people in the Amazonian forest, how this knowledge is still alive and how fungi can be used for food, medicine and crafts.
The difficulties our contemporary society has in distinguishing between fungi and plants, the fear they arouse, the fear of poisoning and the fear of the unknown are for me indicative of this oppressed knowledge that has been lost, and the struggle to recover it as popular knowledge is not only on the eve of today, but is imperial to the struggle to fight against a capitalist society. Learning what is edible and what is not in a survival situation must have been a centuries-old struggle for humans in times gone by. We have given up this knowledge to capitalize on it and to be regulated by the state or the free market. Sciences and arts seem to be free disciplines, but as scientists understand the gap that separate them from society, impassable gorges are being dug. It is with the help of the arts and more community-oriented movements that this kind of knowledges will be opened up for people to use in a bottom-up approach.
Learning and knowing one’s own local territory is the power that has been given to indigenous peoples. It is undoubtedly this uncanny and awkward feeling that Magellan and the conquerors of the “New World” felt, which led them to the genocide of millions of people. The capitalist world, with its focus on extraction to generate exponential profits, was and still is one of the deadliest viruses our planet possesses.
Read Maya Minder’s account of Chapter 1 of Fungi Cosmology in Amazonia.
The website of the Fungi Cosmology project.
Meet the participants of the program at the Stammtisch of Theater Spektakel festival in Zurich, August 29, 6-8pm.