Pilze retten die Welt. Zum Topos des kollektiven Überlebens
For a long time, mushrooms, mycelia, and spores seemed to be of little interest for art and theorizing – rarely visible, quickly perishable, and potentially poisonous. However, current crisis discourses and end-time narratives are virtually under the sign of a transdisciplinary mushroom cult, even allowing them to rise to become rescue figures between art, activism, and political ecology. With their »nurturing invisibility« (Eva von Redecker), subterranean mycelia become protagonists for an »enmeshed world« (Merlin Sheldrake) as well as for emancipatory and sustainable futures. The ability to contribute to the decontamination of soils and the regeneration of forests through symbiosis and decomposition makes fungi appear as co-actors for »collaborative survival« (Anna Tsing) – decomposers and borderline beings between life and death that can be used to design alternatives to the apocalyptic death drive. The artistic appropriation of such considerations encompasses aesthetic, speculative, didactic as well as activist dimensions of engagement. The effort to situate mushrooms as »survival artists« in the art context is based on different motives: the hope for agency, ecotopian thinking, sci-fi, ecological grief, or even mycoaesthetic counter-contamination in the white cube. The lecture explores the question of which phantasms, constructions of history, and notions of finitude underlie these theoretical and artistic approaches.