Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez

Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez works as curator and researcher on art and ecology, and is based in Mexico-City. She founded and directed many international initiatives at the intersection of art and ecology, including the Green Art Lab Alliance (Asia, Latin America and Europe) and the Nature Research Department, the Van Eyck Food Lab, and the Future Materials Bank at the Jan van Eyck Academie (Netherlands).00There is a growing interest in fungi and mycelium as a material, the ever-branching connecting threads of the fungal world. The entanglements and how this rhizomatic network functions is not just a fascinating ecological system and material, but carries a profound usefulness as a metaphor for our potential new systems, ways of thinking and behaviors.00Let?s Become Fungal! takes its inspiration from the world of art and mycology and shares innovative practices from Latin America and the Caribbean that are rooted in multispecies collaboration, symbiosis, alliances, non-monetary resource exchange, decentralization, bottom-up methods and mutual dependencyƯ?all in line with the behavior of the mycelium.00Every chapter is phrased as a question. They do not lead to answers, but to twelve teachings addressing for instance collaboration, decoloniality, non-linearity, toxicity, mobilization, biomimicry, death, and being non-binary. Simultaneously it ventures deeper into the world of fungi. The teachings from the fungus may inspire artists, collectives, organizations, educators, policy-makers, designers, scientists, anthropologists, change-makers, curators, urbanists, activists, gardeners, community-leaders, farmers, and many others, to become more fungal in their ways of working and being.

Mycelium Teachings and the Arts: Based on Conversations with Indigenous Wisdom Keepers, Artists, Curators, Feminists and Mycologists

Let's Become Fungal!

Giovanni Silva

I found hope with fungi, which approach environmental collapse in a low-tech, collaborative, holistic, and interconnected, adaptive yet pro-active way. Fungi don't let a good crisis go to waste; they are veterans when it comes to luring extinction; they have survived meteors and ice-ages, nuclear disasters, and the loss of their habitat. Crises equal opportunities for fungi, as they present a situation in which to expand on their collaborations and, therefore, increase symbiosis.

I use the word 'women' in its broadest sense, so it includes all those who, sometimes partially or occasionally, identify as women.

It was first told to me by Brazilian mycologist Juli Simon, that fungi can produce both sexually and asexually, are non-binary and have endless possibilities for sexual compatibilities, in which gender does not play a role. They demonstrate the amount of space and possibility we can enjoy when we break out of the limited boxes of categorizations we live by.

In my conversations with Patricia Kaishian she proposed mycology as a queer discipline. Fungi made it clear they aren't plants or animals and are free from sexual categorizations, opening up a beautiful, ambiguous space in-between. And in that in-betweenness there is space for many collaborations outside of our boxes, to use a contemporary term; multispecies collaborations.

Quote from 'Field Guide to Getting Lost' by Rebecca Solnit

Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognitia in-between lies a life of discovery.

Perhaps what we call 'getting lost' is just the mycelial walking, or the mycelial thinking. We don't get there in a straight line; we take unlikely and unexpected turns, only to discover what we actually have been looking for without us knowing.

In Potawatomi cosmology (and many others), the harvest, but also fresh fair and clean water, are considered gifts of the earth, and gifts need to be reciprocated. Kemmerer gives us many examples in her book of how to reciprocate the gifts of the earth: In gratitude, in ceremony, through acts of practical reverence and land stewardship, in fierce defence of the places we love, in art, in science, in song, in gardens, in children, in ballots, in stories, in renewal, in creative resistance, in how we spend out money and our precious lives, by refusing to be complicit with the forces of ecological destruction. Whatever our gift, we are called to give it and dance for the renewal of the world.

Lina herself comes from a dance background and told me in hee charming mixture of English and Spanish that: 'Our bodies aren't meant to just carry a big cerebro (brain) around, as intelligence and memory are really present throughout the body.' That's why, at Platohedro, her art organization, they do therapeutical work or offer psychosocial support through body-work. Lina: Body movements for sanación, for healing, recovery. In this sense we shut up the word, la palabra, and the mind. Usually with victims and situations of trauma, there is still hurt encapsulated in the body that needs to be let go of. And so the body transforms.

The configuration of the team with everyone's roles and responsibilities entangled is crucial. Something that is only possible with a lot of trust and respect between everyone. She continues: The well-being of the team is so important and the well-being of the person feeds the well-being of the organization. Everyone had a different rhythm and we have to go through our own processes. You can't take away someone's pain. But that doesn't mean we should bury that shit. It means that we have to compost it. And then one nurtured organism starts to open up, and then all the other ones start to spread out as well to become the way they want to be, and start using the space and co-living in a nurturing manner. It's not the way humans have worked in the sense of the patriarchy: 'You are because I give you.' It's more like 'I exist because you exist and how do we exist together?' That's a completely different way of working. We have a way of thinking based on Buen Vivir.

When I ask her how they got to this deep level of trust within the team, she gives me a knowing and slightly mysterious smile like she is about to share the big secret of life with me. Lina: We only got to that by working on silence: of deep listening to ourselves initially, but then also to our participants. When we learned to be silent it helped us to be more engaged.

Let's Become Fungal! quotes

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