Being a mushroom. Underground encounters

Past event

With the arrival of autumn we take up the thread opened in spring and take it a step further. In collaboration with fungi, we will once again look at the home they share with so many other forms of life: the soil. This double session combines artistic and scientific practice to raise awareness of the complexity of underground ecosystems and their vulnerability.

In the first session, we will start from the substrates already sampled in the FCAYC environment and generate new analyses. Isolation and culture in Petri dishes of the organisms present, observation at different scales and photographic capture using non-conventional visual techniques will allow us to reveal growth patterns, textures and morphologies that are rarely seen with the naked eye. We will cross-reference these images with chromatographies carried out in spring to establish correspondences between matter, structure and living processes.

In the second session, we will open a space for collective interpretation: we will put new chromatographies and crops in dialogue with the recent fires in Spain, to think about how fire alters soil dynamics (its porosity, its biota, its capacity to retain water) and what implications this has for restoration measures. In addition, we will carry out a small restoration intervention in a nearby degraded area to exemplify soil improvement techniques: mulching, organic matter input, cover planting, water retention microbarriers and, of course, fungal inoculations. We will document the process (before/during/after) to relate these actions to the laboratory results and the aesthetic reading of the images.

The aim is twofold: to refine the aesthetic gaze on the invisible and, at the same time, to activate practical criteria to care for and recover the soils we inhabit. We invite the community to participate in this shared learning, where art, science and conscience meet to understand our common home.

This programme will be linked to the Third Master project.

Photo gallery