BIOSYSTEMS: DARK MYCOLOGY

mUSHRoOoMs
Hosted by: Glasgow Zine Library, Glasgow
Special guests: Rebecca Gill, Mark Hanlon, Mike Saunders 
︎: SpotifySoundcloud
Year: 2018








we are compost, not post-human; we inhabit the humusities, not the human- ities. [...] Critters, human and not,—become with each other, compose and decompose each other in every scale and register of time and stuff in sym- poietic tangling, in ecological evolutionary developmental earthly worlding and unworlding


Donna Haraway







Mushrooms are weird critters. The ‘flowers of fungus’, they share much of their DNA with humans. Many form webs underground in collaborative, symbiotic structures as complex as the internet. Theorists have connected them to dark matter, rhizomatic philosophies and the information exchange of social networks. In this discussion, poet Mike Saunders led us through a key mycological text: Anna Tsing’s 'Mushroom at the End of the World' alongside artist Rebecca Gill and Green Hollows forager Mark Hanlon. With reference to art, poetry and theory, we explored how mushrooms provide literal and metaphoric examples for assembling communities out of capitalist ruins, and how mycology offers a transdisciplinary nexus for linking ethical, scientific and aesthetic approaches to speculative environmental thought.