Thinking Together
Mycelial Work Group
With Daniela Bershan, Aubrey Birch, Nahla Koch, Red Vaughan Tremmel
Thinking Together, the festival’s discourse format, is dedicated to time-related issues and questions that lay at the heart of the festival.
Visual concept & design: Eps51, Berlin
- In English
Past Dates
How might we use an erotic epistomological approach – in Audre Lorde’s sense – to learn from and be with mycelial networks and their fruiting bodies? How might we relate to this world with the orientation of an amateur, organism, guest, gourmet, healer, or fearless lover? What happens when we collaborate with mycelial intelligence rather than “work on” it? What happens when we adjust our speed and pace of working, our projections and expectations? What kind of power dynamics are revealed by and reproduced through the creation of sterile or pasteurised environments? What would it mean to create nutritious living conditions at large?
During six afternoons the co-hosts of the Mycelial Work Group seek not only to be intimate with the subject of these networks but also to experiment with methodologies of approaching, touching and relating to our subject. In addition to sharing low-threshold practical hands-on knowledge for growing, cultivating and processing mushrooms, we will meander through our speculative intelligences and radical cross-practices. Hands on and hearts open, we will move easily between the lab and the kitchen table, text and taste, laughter and study, considering for example what the ubiquity and intelligence of mycelial networks might teach us about refiguring relations of power and togetherness.
Taking away the platform of authority this work group aims to create erotic possibilities to encounter knowledge together and bring it into complex, interdependent and experimental ways of learning together.
The Mycelial Work Group is oriented by the ongoing experiment (of eight years) of ELSEWHERE & OTHERWISE, a fluid grouping of artists and scholars who live together for 10 days each year, focusing on contemporary urgencies through feminist, queer and decolonial analytics and practices. We practice a radical openness to a diversity of sense-making methodologies and intelligences, always collectively remixing different ontologies and epistemologies through workshops, ritual, reading groups, invocation, map-making, artistic practices, cooking and cleaning, critical inquiry, reproductive care, sex, magic, and radical forms of togetherness.
The workshop will be supplemented by contributions by Dr. Patricia Kaishian and Lori Tipton.
“It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.” (Donna Haraway)
Thinking Together is the discourse format of MaerzMusik – Festival for Time Issues. Dedicated to the materiality of thought – the bodies, minds and senses that share this space –, the format provides time to connect to stories and through questions that lay at the heart of the festival.
Consisting of lectures, workshops, public talks, reading groups and experimental settings, Thinking Together invites artists, participants, guests and hosts to reflect present time related issues through the lenses of sound and vice versa.