Currently, I am developing a body of work inspired by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing`s essay “Domestication Gone Wild” This work in process evolves around mushrooms. Mushroom picking involves a lot of wandering outdoors. Here in my case I have constructed a narrative of domestication of this companion. It might have started as an endeavour of growing oneself food, but then evolved into sharing a world with them.

I started fantasizing of a protagonist that starts to build an amusement park for the living companions at home. The mushrooms then start to reproduce the faster the more fun they have and start taking over different parts of the home. Then the mushrooms finally start growing onto the suitcase for work, the protagonist starts to take them out with him.

Mushrooms are well known as companions. The concept of ‘symbiosis’—mutually beneficial interspecies living—was invented for the lichen, an association of a fungus and an alga or cyanobacteria.

I am interested in the symbiosis of the human and non-human world and the contradiction with the existing hierarchies of the human centric world.

This project is funded with the support of Niilo Helander Foundation.

I started with some tests with my collaborator choreographer Jyrki Karttunen where he is enjoying himself by playing chess in a public library and he has taken a chair and the mushrooms living on out with him.

To be continued…