When I grow up I want to be a recycling container
Preparing a workshop at
Popps Packing Artist Residency, Hamtramck, Detroit - 5 and 7 of August 2016 (5 pm - 8 pm)
think like mycelium and act like a spore…
(Radical Mycology)
The figure of the mushroom – the fungus - is a living metaphor, an ideal species. It has the powerful strength to adapt and the intelligence of the symbiosis. Fungi are in some way sustainability experts for their transformation of fossil fuels without creating waste. Fungi is the origin of life on our planet and its immune system. As a creature of magic and the divine it is the organism between life and death.
The visible part of the fungus, the fruit is the smallest part. The real body, the mycelium consists of a fine mesh that crosses the entire earth as a fabric, a mesh similar to the nervous system of the human body. It is everywhere, underground or in the wood of a branch, in sand dunes, underwater, in a nuclear reactor and in our lungs. Mushrooms pierce the world of their network.
The characteristics of mushrooms can be understood like a metaphore of life that teaches us how to live and act in harmonie with our environment. “think like mycelium and act like a spore” refers also to the sience of “myco-remediation” that was explored by the inspiring mycologue Paul Stamets during the last 30 years. Stamets found out that certain mushrooms decompose toxic material completely. In order to survive, Fungi is the “culture of solutions” and plays an important role of treating contemporary problems about food recources and pollution. How could the kingdom of fungi inspire the way we live?
The mycelium is the remedy:
Join us for a two days sporestorm as we will create a platform to share spores & knowledge. The importance of cultivating mushrooms and using mycelium to heal the Earth of the everyday pollution we as a species generate is the center of our reflexion. We will ally with the mycelium of several healing mushrooms, like Oyster and Reishi, to work on depolluting our daily life from some of our everyday waste like cardbord, spent coffee ground or cigarette butts, while learning to cultivate them. We explain and demonstrate how the mushroom is capable to transform toxic materials into organic life and how each one can recycle some of ones own house hold waste by cultivating fungi.
By sowing some household waste with the mycelium substrate and spreading the mixture as digesting system, the fungi will start to eat the given waste and quickly become eager to digest more, as a virtuous circle will open and grow, transforming trashes into gems (food, compost and inoculum for other waste digesting fungis) Time will do its job and some months later it will be possible to harvest the delicious fruits that have recycled the waste but are free from any contamination.
You are invited to participate !
Marion Neumann & Geoffroy Grignon
