Making Kin with/through Fungi. Sensing, Sharing and Caring in Entangled Environments
Lecture by Sarah Kolb within the Annual Conference of the Nordic Society for Aesthetics – Aesthetics, ethics and relational being
University of Iceland & Iceland University of the Arts, June 13–15, 2024
In view of the pressing problems of climate change, global migration movements and the entire range of other alarming consequences of capitalism, Anna L. Tsing’s 2015 book The Mushroom at the End of the World hits the nerve of our times. Given the many dystopian future scenarios of the present, Tsing offers a quite optimistic perspective on the possibilities of living within the “ruins of capitalism.” Against the “grand narratives” of Enlightenment, in which Nature was to provide nothing more than a passive and mechanical “backdrop and resource for the moral intentionality of Man,” Tsing sets out on the trail of the Matsutake mushroom to uncover ways of overcoming the traditional separation of Man and Nature in terms of an egalitarian coexistence of different species.
Drawing on Tsing's approach, this paper develops a proposal for a pedagogy of the future that, beyond the well-known concepts of Flora and Fauna, also uses the fundamentally different world of Funga as a model for the conception of alternative futures. Whereas the models of Flora and Fauna long taught us to think and act according to a logic of hierarchical family trees and competing individuals that follow one-dimensional lines of progress, the world of Funga with its widely ramified subterranean networks and strategies of symbiosis and interdependence might also be considered as a model for development and learning. Fungi are masters of collaboration and can easily adapt to new situations by developing highly flexible exchange strategies and forms of coexistence.
Along the theoretical approaches of Anna Tsing, Roger Caillois, Jacques Rancière, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez, the paper provides a multisensory approach to the relational sense-making of fungi the starting point for learning concepts that are based on forms of collaboration, sharing and caring.
Sarah Kolb is an art scientist, philosopher and curator based in Vienna and Linz. She is a founding member of Mycelial Space and of Viktoria – Space for Artistic Research and Social Design in Vienna. With her ongoing research project Topologies of Artistic Research. Relational Knowledge in Art and Theory, she is FWF Elise Richter Senior Fellow at the University of Art and Design in Linz. Before she was Visiting Professor of 20th century art history at the University of Salzburg, research associate at the University of Art and Design Linz and lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.