Iza TarasewiczChristopher Kline Antje MajewskiPaulina Ołowska

Objects Do ThingsPerformance evening

29 April 2016 (Friday), from 5.30 to 8.30Artists: Iza Tarasewicz, Christopher Kline, Antje Majewski, Paulina OłowskaCurator: Joanna ZielińskaProduction: Aleksandra Knychalska, Michał GrzegorzekLighting designer: Janusz ZabłockiSound and video designer: Piotr ŻelazkoCollaboration: Sara Szostak, Anita OlejniczakTranslation: Mateusz BorowskiGraphic identyfication for the show: NovikiGraphic Design: Noviki, Piotr Woźniakiewicz

Performance Eveningas part of the Objects Do Things projectApri l 29, 2016 ( Fr iday) , 5.30 – 8.30 p.m.

Iza Tarasewicz, Christopher Kline, Antje Majewski, Paulina OłowskaAdmission included in the ticket price. Limited number of seats.Reservation: performance.csw@gmail.comIn the message, please specify the time of the performance for which you wish to book a seat.

PROGRAME5.30 p.m.Amanda presents PAVILONESQUE MAgAzINE by Paulina Ołowska, exhibition’s space. Booking not required. Starring: Amanda Wieczorek

6.00 – 6.30 p.m.Iza Tarasewicz, FUNgAL FOLLIES, exhibition’s space. Starring: Mateusz Tymura

6.40 – 7.00 p.m.Christopher Kline, O.K. – ThE MUSIcAL (Just Another Day at Mount Lebanon), exhibition’s space. Starring: Ethan Hayes-Chute, Sol Calero, Christopher Kline, Katarzyna Stefanowicz. Camera: Derek Howard

7.00 – 7.30 p.m.Iza Tarasewicz, FUNgAL FOLLIES, exhibition’s space

7.30 – 7.50 p.m.Christopher Kline, O.K. – ThE MUSIcAL (Just Another Day at Mount Lebanon), exhibition’s space

8.00 – 8.30 p.m.Antje Majewski, Skarbek, Laboratory building. Theatre hall. Starring: Ilona Gumowska, Beata Łuczak, Joanna Płóciennik, Vera Popova, Robert Wasiewicz. Music: Katrin Vellrath Libretto: Sebastian Cichocki

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O.K.In 2014 I began working on O.K., an ongoing project based around the history and lore of my hometown of Kinderhook in New York State. Kinderhook is a rural township about 220km north of New York City which is composed of mostly forest, farmland, and a few villages, with a total population of around 8,500 residents. The town is not especially known, even in the region, but is host to a variety of (often forgotten) stories and people which connect it, sometimes tenuously, to the broader history of the US and the world.

The most notable of these anecdotes is that the 8th US President Martin Van Buren (in office from 1837-1841) was born and raised there, leading to his nickname “Old Kinderhook”. During a language fad in the late 1830s in which misspelled abbreviations became popular, the word “O.K.” (a comic misspelling of “all correct”) came into use along with a slew of others. The trend and the abbreviations it brought with it would’ve all faded into obscurity, except that Van Buren’s re-election campaign had tried to capitalize on the trend with slogans like “O.K. is O.K.!” and various “O.K. Clubs” of supporters sprung up around the country, bringing nation-wide popularity to the term. Though Van Buren is a largely forgotten figure, the term “O.K.” went on to

Christopher KlineO.K. – The musical (Just Another Day at Mount Lebanon)

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become the most universally used and understood word in the world.

Oriented around the propagation of “O.K.” as a metaphor for the subtle permeation of small-town American idiosyncrasies into broader cultural forms, my project explores early cultural exports and anomalies originating in Kinderhook, as well as recent local developments there since post- industrialization. O.K. synthesizes and expands on the region’s lore and attempts to construct a fresh overview of local history through the exposition of historical documents, videos, replicas, interpretive research, and collaborations with local students, craftspeople, filmmakers, and other community members. Through the process of working on the project, I began searching for a centralized format which was flexible, inclusive, and relevant to the community of Kinderhook itself. While the project often manifests as installations, artworks or texts, the linchpin has become the creation of an expansive community theatre musical, developed slowly scene by scene over several years. In contrast to a history book written from a singular voice, the musical is participatory, developed with people from many different countries, bringing in widely varied understandings and visions. It is my intention that this method yields a musical that is well-rounded and

informed, historically relevant and also entertaining, so that it may at once be reabsorbed into Kinderhook’s own history while spreading its story to much wider audiences, thereby “completing the loop” in utilizing the metaphor of the propagation of “O.K.” itself.

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Stories The stories covered within the musical are wide-ranging, tracing the area’s history back from the Mahican Indians and their first interactions with explorer Henry Hudson to post-colonial tales like Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, featur-ing the Headless Horseman. In addi-tion to Martin Van Buren (O.K.), later notable locals to the area such as artist Ellsworth Kelly and police corrup-tion whistle-blower Frank Serpico are appended to the story arc, as are more obscure creatures, crimes and haunted sites. For the latest iteration of O.K. – The Musical, the scene takes place at Mount Lebanon, a nearby village which was once home to the central ministry of The Shakers.

The Shakers The Shakers are a religious sect which had their central ministry at Mount Lebanon, New York during their height in the mid-late 1800s. Formally known as The United Society of Believ-ers in Christ’s Second Appearing, they were founded in 18th century England as an off-shoot of the Quakers and were moved to America following a vision from their leader Mother Ann Lee. Originally known for their transcendent and wild worship services which fea-tured energetic convulsing, the Shakers later toned down their meetings after much public scrutiny and curiosity.

The Shakers lived commu-nally, though separated by gender, living in women’s and men’s buildings and even entering their Meeting Halls through separate paired doors. Women and men were considered equals, in leadership and daily life, in line with their belief that God had created man and woman, and was embodied by the biblical Christ and later by his second coming in the form of Mother Ann. She was the first to instate a strict code of celibacy for all Shakers, believing that sexual intercourse was the greatest sin and what lead to the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The Shakers grew throughout the 1800s solely by

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way of conversion and adoption. Many single mothers converted in that period due to having few other options for sustenance.

Shakers are known largely for their furniture which was finely made and simple yet elegant. In every task a Shaker does they see it as a labor for God and the greater good, and so craftsmanship and perfection was heav-ily emphasized. This also carried over to their architecture which was similarly well-crafted and practical. A popular misconception is that the Shakers, like the Amish, forbid the use of new tech-nology. In fact, although the Shakers championed ‘simple living’, they were very innovative and industrious, sup-posedly claiming over 100 patents for their inventions. Historians credit them with inventing the circular saw, clothes pins, a commercial oven, and chair tilt-ing joints, among others. Current Shak-ers use cellphones and other technology.

The Shakers found great prosperity in their farms, seed business and manufacturing of furniture. Yet competing with the Industrial Revolu-tion proved difficult, and as their wealth diminished toward the end of the century, conversion became more rare. Adoption also became more difficult due to a new nation-wide awareness of child welfare, and membership de-creased rapidly as older Shakers died out and child converts often left the community when they turned eighteen.

The Shaker Village at Mount Lebanon was sold in the 1940s, and today the last four remaining Shakers live and work at another village in Sabbathday Lake in Maine. New novitiates are still welcome if they can manage to make it through a lengthy trial period.

The Shakers were ahead of their time in regards to their ideology surrounding the equality of men and women, as well as towards race. They accepted people from any demographic, adopting or converting many former slaves as well as American Indians. Similar to the Quakers, Shakers were also vehement pacifists, believing it wrong to kill other human beings even in times of war and were first pardoned from conscription in the US Civil War by Abraham Lincoln.

From 1837 to the mid-1850s the Shakers experienced a spiritual revival called The Era of Manifestations with numerous accounts of revelations and “gifts” which manifested as music, dance and drawings. It was also known as the “period of Mother’s work”, for they believed the revelations were de-livered from the spirit of their deceased leader Mother Ann Lee. Despite their noble ideals and the beautiful drawings and furniture produced at this time, British author Charles Dickens visited Mount Lebanon in this period and wrote the following:

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We walked into a grim room, where several grim hats were hanging on grim pegs, and the time was grimly told by a grim clock, which uttered every tick with a kind of struggle, as if it broke the grim silence reluctantly, and under protest. Ranged against the wall were six or eight stiff high-backed chairs, and they partook so strongly of the general grimness, that one would much rather have sat on the floor than incurred the smallest obligation to any of them.

Worship services were focused on communal experience with men and women facing each other in rows or circles, lacking a central preacher. Their beliefs focused on communion with God, and early services were unstructured and chaotic, later developing into tightly choreographed dances and songs. Ecstatic worship could be seen as a way of dealing with unfulfilled sexual yearnings, their flailing and jerking motions exhausting them in trance. At Mount Lebanon they sometimes conducted “Mountain Meetings” at night in the forest. The focal point was a visionary fountain whose waters could be seen rising to the very heaven of heavens by those with spiritual eyes.

Musically the early Shakers forbid harmonization as they found it vain. Later songs include four part harmonies, but remained void of musical instruments. Instead songs are often characterized by clapping and

stomping.

The song performed here at CCA Warsaw is a traditional monodic Shaker hymn called “Come Life, Shaker Life”:

Come life, Shaker life,Come life Eternal,Shake, shake out of me,All that is carnal.

I’ll take nimble steps,I’ll be a David,I’ll show Michael twice,How he behaved.

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Skarbek (2016) is an installation by Antje Majewski which was developed on the basis of a dance theatre play that originated in Bytom (Upper Silesia, Poland) at the Bytomskie Centrum Kultury and was shown later at Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin (2005).

Skarbek is a figure of the fairy-tale world of Upper Silesia; a gnome who lives in abandoned mines and keeps watch of the underground treasures. Being an Earth spirit, he relates to death and the dead. He guards over the miner’s ethos and punishes those who don’t respect the mountain. He makes his presence known with noises and can take on various shapes. Sometimes he plays harmless, amusing tricks on people, but he can also become vengeful and very dangerous. Skarbek is unpredictable. Belonging to the realm of the inorganic, he follows its laws, which are alien to human beings in its timelessness and lack of air and life. It consists of the same suffocating material that we ourselves will one day become. Mining has always been one of the hardest and most dangerous jobs; any miner had to fear death at any moment.

Bytom is a city in which for centuries the mining of ores and later coal was the main source of income. The region is extremely rich in underground treasures; the coal was even excavated underneath the city. Today most of the mines have closed down. Many houses are standing oblique, have cracks or have collapsed; the tunnels below had been filled up, but they were still moving, and with them the upper crust on which the city was built. Unemployment is high; progress has left this city behind.

For the installation at CCA Zamek Ujazdowski, Antje Majewski painted Srebro na płótnie (Skarbek). The painting shows silver, as it can be found in the mountains: squeezed into

Antje Majewski

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strange forms by the veins inside the rock. Skarbek himself materializes in the form of three masks: a very large one, one of human size and another very small one, which was used for the head of the marionette. All three masks were bought in Mexico. With their dramatic gothic carvings they stylistically reflect the time in which the Spanish conquered Mexico and its rich gold and silver mines.

A digital slide show with photos taken by Antje Majewski shows the city of Bytom, the “upper city of the living”, as it was in 2005 – gradually gliding underground, into the mines underneath the city, in which intruding people meet with a phantasmagorical Skarbek, a mouse, a dead miner, and the dancing treasures of the earth – silver, gold and crystal.

In April there will be a new version of the dance theatre play, with a libretto by Sebastian Cichocki and a new version of the electronic music composed by Katrin Vellrath.

The play was originally created by Antje Majewski (idea, stage design, costume design) and the author Ingo Niermann (libretto) in collaboration with the choreographer Tomasz Wygoda and the composer Katrin Vellrath in 2005. It was curated by Sebastian Cichocki, at the time director of the Galeria Kronika in Bytom, and funded by Büro Kopernikus for Kulturstiftung des Bundes.

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I.

Once there was a sandbox filled to the brimwith black coaland white sand.The black coalfilled the right side of the sandbox.The white sandfilled the left side of the sandbox.

One day a small child entered the sandboxand began moving aroundin a circleclockwiseand did so for many hours.

When the child was finished the sand wasgray.Then the child decided toundothis chaosand began treadingin a circlecounterclockwiseand did so for many hours.

The longer the child walked,the more the sand was gray.Crying was no help.Chaos had intruded on the sandbox once and for all.

SKARBEK (REPRISE) 2016

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II.

A. The praise of dissolution

object phase

space phase

time phase

imagination phase

infinity phase

zero phase

B. The mirrored-city jeremiad

Wet earth smelling of an old man

Exceptional situation in which the borders between up and down disappear

Juggling of toxic anachronisms

Demons turning out to have familiar faces

The humorous dimensions of time (the forever problem)

Monoliths without color mushrooming up everywhere

Celestial playgrounds of the suburbs

C. Three (underground) animistic journeys:

albino mole

bucket full of earthworms

blind snake

D. The liberation of things (underground museum guarded by a dwarf)

Tangible things become black holes

A flowerpot containing ashes and glass balls

Methane released from a barrel

The chirps of dead canaries

A hydrant wrapped in bandages

Gastroliths ringing in the dinosaurs ribs(to go from one extreme to another)

A flying tomb disguised as an airplane.

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E. The city erasure

The paradox of an underground twin (putting everything into doubt)

A place that has swallowed its own history

The circumscribed cube full of fear

The purifying action of a lonely bulldozer

Some derelict buildings, which will never be torn down / the deadman stumbling against innumerable futures

A slurred (sticky and warm sounds) language that nobody can understand

Hollow blocks in windowless tunnels/

No doors

The vision of underground settlements on new planets (domain of the mighty giants)

F. The underground ghost’s laments

A model of a beach in the dark chamber

A radio drama featuring a dead person Absolute stupor/ High-quality, sticky darkness

Illusion of the sacred epitomized by valuable ores

Mysterious holes that appear everywhere, endlessly (underground bycatch: rats).

Hugging huge bones

Hallucinating, eating dirt and going to sleep, never to awake again (no regrets)

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III. The riddleWhat is it thatconstantly changes its shapebut retains the same internal order?What is itfor which there is no place on earth,and that has no definite borders?What is itthat affects other things,and at the same time permits other things to affect it?What is itthat is always available,yet still remains unnoticed?What is itthat is made up of many partsthat at the same time can be parts of something completely different?What is ithalf of which looks very familiar,and the other half of which resembles nothing you know? What is itthat changes into something else at the precise moment you learnof its existence?

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performed by Mateusz Tymuravoice acting by Urszula Bagińskascript written by Post Brothersaudio engineering by GRIOT GROOVEdirection and scenographyIza Tarasewicz

Produced with the support of Objectif Exhibitions (Antwerp), the Polish Institute (Brussels), Adam Mickiewicz Institute (Warsaw), Piotr Marzec (Warsaw), Paulina Ołowska (Rabka Zdroj), Fiorucci Art Trust (London), and BWA WARSAW (Warsaw)

PER4M ARTISSIMA 2015

FUNGAL FOLLIES

A PUPPET PERFOR-MANCE STAGED BY Iza Tarasewicz

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ThE PLAyERS:

The Saprophyte (S)digests dead matter and therefore only speaks in quotes, functions like an oracle, or a poet, or a trickster interrupting or invoking influential information.

The Decomposer (D)is always hungry, agitated, and hurried, but also simplifies and breaks things down.

The Mycorrhiza (M)shares information, forges connections, functions like Wikipedia, move things along, and is egalitarian and understanding.

The Endophyte (E)springs up in difficult situations and makes fun, the impatient joker, a pun-ster, a wise-cracker, a cliché comic that means no harm.

The Pathogen (P)wants to induce change, a revolutionary, is argumentative and parasitic, and has animosity towards other organisms, but also is willing to fight and rises to the occasion when needed.

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The Saprophyte (S): SHIT SHIT SHIT

The Decomposer (D): Are you gonna eat that? Are you gonna eat that?

The Pathogen (P): No pewnie, że będzie, w przeciwnym razie by się tak nie podniecał.

The Mycorrhiza (M): Excuse me, was your exclamation a vulgar interjection, a command, a statement of surprise, or displeasure, or trouble, or a generic for anything whatsoever? Is the shit you are referring to a piece, a pile, a load, a hunk, or other quantities and configurations? Is this a creative euphemism or a vague and fairly rigid literalism?

The Decomposer (D): Or is it an invitation for us to join your feast?

The Endophyte (E): I guess we weren’t able to resist degenerating into excremental humor.

The Saprophyte (S): Let us not speak

The Mycorrhiza (M): I agree, we must remain discreet, unrevealed.

The Saprophyte (S):Overnight, veryWhitely, discreetly,Very quietly

P: Well we’ve all popped-up together. We are an entangled troupe of vegetation jugglers, and there’s not mushroom.

D: Share with us just a little, it’s the yeast you could do.

M: We’ll all get a piece. It’s already partly digested so we might each get bumped up in the line. He’ll release his enzymes to break down the shit into a soupy mash and then absorb it through his membranes of filamentous hyphae. Another of us will come along and do the same in another strange way, more will follow, the stuff will be recycled, and we’ll all move on to the next batch of nutrients.

S: to be one is always to become with many

P: “become” is a pretty strong word for members of a kingdom that’s been around for a billion years.

E: There’s always another fungus among us…

D: I don’t care anything about becoming, our becoming is only a means to an end. My composition, while novel, is a perfunctory affair, we all strive for decomposition. I want to take things apart. I am a devourer of worlds.

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P: Oh no, talking about work again. Isn’t there any thing we can talk about that won’t lead us back to work?

M: 150 billion tons of organic matter are produced each year in forest ecosystems worldwide, who do you think will dispose of that shit? The foot soldiers of the forest floor, that’s who.

D: We’re all decomposersWe release enzymes to eatThese enzymes break down our surroundings

M: Isn’t that just neat?

E: We get shit done, we do shit, we make shit from shit and turn it into shit.

S: Where did we last meet? Where did we last meet?

P: We are everywhere, on every continent and in every sea, floating in the air, lacing through the soil, resting on skin, colonizing cavities within, and festively decorating that long-neglected peach.

S: We Diet on water, On crumbs of shadow, Bland-mannered, asking Little or nothing. So many of us! So many of us!

M: Weather is where all things begin. Mushrooms always seem to grow in damp places.

E: That must be why we look like umbrellas. What room has no doors, no walls, no floor and no ceiling?

M: I’m not going to dignify that groaner with an answer

E: I’m just getting a bit spored of you all.

M: Look, just get to work, we need to turn this forest floor into humus.

D: Hummus?! Now we’re talking. This meal would be even better with some peat.

E: Working your way up from the bottom is one thing. Working your way up from under ground covered in manure, is another.

P: Once again we’re back to work. Fungi get no furloughs.

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M: In the fecund forest factory. we are the unseen workers and the tools, laboring underneath the surface

E: We’re the hardest working organisms in soil business

P: The association of fungi with inactivity is a slanderous accusation that misreads our biology and behavior. Just because we move at a different pace and at a different scale does not mean we are immobile. One need only to look at our name. Fungi in latin is “to perform”, “to execute”, “to discharge”, “to be engaged in”…to function! To act!

M: We are simultaneously short lived and immortal. How do we perceive time? If self is constantly replicated, when is one born? Does one die? The question is: how is a life measured, by intervals of infection or as length of mycelial growth?

E: The question is: who cares?

S: Nature alone is antique and the oldest art a mushroom.

M: Most believe us to be small, pathetic specimens, but one of our colonies is the largest single organism in the world! Let us remember that as much as we may collectively rule the planet, some of us are more invasive than others.

P: Those damn molds, they want to mold the world in their own fuzzy image, always casting everything in the same cloth, spoiling the fun for the rest of us.

E: You sometimes see them growing on lettuce, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

M: Bad neighbors, that’s what they are. Just rotten.

E: We’re all unexpected visitors, but they literally take the cake.

P: There’s a war going on for territory and those at the top usually beat those at the bottom.

M: This mushroom I met the other day recognized that we had different genetic lines and then began engaging in some abominable intraspecific antagonism.

E: The nerve of some of these mycelia!

D: So what did you do?

M: What can you do in that situation? I’m not about to degenerate into senseless shitak-ing, instead I threw up a zone line, to let him know that I’m serious and value my own space. Well this colony didn’t take kindly to my wall-building and constructed his own damn zone line. So there we were, two related fungus clashing, but really only spalting, just decorating rather than

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deteriorating. I ended up retreating, leaving behind in my hurry a lot of good food that I had already swallowed.

P: Let me guess: your opponent was a blasted basidiomycete, with a garish mushroom-shaped fruit body, a total cliché, a fucking toadstool.

D: Hey man, that’s not cool. We can use the T- word, but it’s not the same when you do.

P: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to discriminate. I know I always freak out on mushrooms.

D: Why do you have to be so poisonous all the time?

E:I hope you two aren’t going to mushroom this into some major issue.

P: One of those aggressive warmongers came into contact with a buddy of mine. Normally the two of them would have fought at a distance, playing out chemical warfare with volatile and diffusible compounds. But after my friend had broken up all the cell walls in his region, the other guy moved in and seized his territory. This wouldn’t have been a problem, but the mushroom didn’t stop. He ended up replacing my friend completely. Poor guy, I knew him when I was just a spore.

M: It’s strange how we are so intimate with everything in the world, yet we are always strangers, intruders.

E: Did you hear about the fungus and the algae?.....they took a lichen to each other.

M: A lichen is a fungus that grows its vegetables inside itself, they discovered agriculture.We certainly have a talent for symbiosis, for establishing cross-kingdom quid pro quos that keep us fed and happy while lending our partners vast new powers

S: I feel as if the grass were pleasedTo have it intermit;

P: But this coexistence is not necessarily peaceful. We’re there to exploit, we give the subject the illusion we are working for them, but they are always working for us.

D: When I’m bonding with roots, I actually try to maintain nitrogen scarcity in the soil, effectively forcing the trees to get their fix from me. I’ve cornered the market, they have to export large amounts of carbon in order to unlock the nitrogen I’ve stored.

P: Capitalist! Monopolist!

M: Oh hush. We’ve all seen how you make crooked mutual trade agreements and play clients against one another. We’re all investors, seeking the best possible returns.

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P: This is why there’s so much mycophobia around, organisms know we have rotten intentions.

E: Nobody seems to like us, I don’t get it, I’m a FUN-GUy

D: We’re funky, earthy, unconventional, mouldy by definition.

M: We may not be invited to all the parties, but we always crash them.

S: Had nature any outcast face, Could she a son condemn, Had nature an Iscariot, That mushroom, — it is him.

E: Maybe people need some more time for us to grow on them?

P: Oh but people are the worst in this instance. They are told to fear you for possibility of being poisonous. They lump us all together in one sweeping condemnation. We are looked upon as vegetable vermin only made to be destroyed.

E: Out of millions, only a few of us are deadly poisonous!

P: I wish more humans would eat poisonous mushrooms! I would sacrifice a few sporocarps for the cause!

E: The Czech have a saying: „every mushroom is edible, but some only once.”M: Fungus may well have given rise to human culture, or at least the comedy of human comity.

S: We are shelves, we are Tables, we are meek, We are edible,

E: I heard that the French are such mushroom lovers that they eat dried slices of regular button mushrooms with milk in the morning like some eat cereal…they call it the „breakfast of champignons”.

D: Foolish humans, I’m just waiting for them to self destruct, then I’ll decompose them completely.

P:Our members observed and recorded millions of human-fungus interactions over a period of two centuries. Again, humans cannot escape our observation. We are everywhere: on their skin, in their homes, underground, in the stratosphere. After intensive analysis of this data, we were not able to identify even one indispensable human-fungus transaction. No obligate parasitism, no essential relationships, no sine qua non.

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M: I prefer to think of them only as another medium in which we inhabit.

P: We have nearly 200 different types of fungi colonizing their feet alone! We are the ones who farm them. Human beings’ lots are cast with ours.

E: We make them who they are, not only do we populate their bodies but we also populate their minds.

M: Terrance McKenna even said that the transition from Homo Erectus to Homo Sapien mainly had to do with the addition of hallucinogenic psilocybin in their diets.

E: Oh, right, the “stoned ape” theory of human evolution.

P: Damn hippies always calling themselves the “elected voice” of mushrooms. Humans can only relate to mushrooms as far as viewing us as a utility to exploit. If they can’t cook you up, hallucinate from eating you, sell you for monetary gain, or stick you in polluted soils to ingest all kinds of toxins, they will not protect you, for you are of no use to them. At best we are used as a metaphor.

M: But we certainly have infected some interesting humans with an infatuation with the fungal. I’m not talking about mycologists who study us, but those who understand that we constantly defy the classifying intellect. Uncertainty is the language of mushrooms.

S: It’s useless to pretend to know mushrooms…

P: It’s funny how the composer John Cage promoted chance in his works but when it came to mushrooms, he said that if he used the i-ching to ingest mushrooms, it’d be fatal.

M: People know him for his groundbreaking relationship to music, but he also helped re-found the New York Mycological Society. It’s been rumored over the years that Cage was a contestant on the Italian quiz show „Double or Nothing”. For the very last question, worth 5 million lire, Cage had to spell the twenty-four names of the white spored agarics. All in one! A very tough question even for a mushroom, much less a real mushroom expert. However, Cage quickly pronounced all of them in alphabetical order. A triumph! While he was receiving the applause from the audience, he even thanked the mushrooms and all the people of Italy!

E: Truly a mensch of mushrooms.

S: I am not interested in the relationships between sounds and mushrooms any more than I am in those between sounds and other sounds.

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P: For Cage, music and mushrooms were just two words next to each other in many dictionaries.

M: I think he liked the process of searching for us, and the fact that, like ideas, we come as things hidden.

E: Wherever something is hidden, there we are.

D: Cage ingested so much of us in his life, one could say he was more mushroom than man.

P: He wasn’t the only famous figure who was full of fungus. On Leningrad TV In 1991, Sergei Kurekhin earnestly told reporters that Lenin, the father of the Soviet Republic, was a mushroom.

M: Indeed, Kurekhin had absolutely irrefutable proof that the October revolution was carried out by people who had been consuming certain mushrooms for many years. Showing diagrams and weaving-in scientific data, he asserted that Lenin’s regular consumption of psychedelic mushrooms caused his personality to morph. The central mystery of the Bolshevik revolution, a mystery that had always D: Wszyscy byli grzybami! Najlepszy model dla kolektywnych działań!

E: It makes perfect sense, October is a normal time mushrooms pick for uprisings.

P: It was a hoax. Kurekhin was a jazz and punk musician, a young intellectual making satire. It was an intervention, a parasitic infestation of regular discourse, making a fool of the public’s trust in official communications. In fact, Kurekhin also seems like a mushroom himself, surreptitiously entering into the conversation.

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M: But Kurekhin didn’t stop there, he said Lenin was not only a fungus, but also a radio wave.

S: Our toes, our noses Take hold on the loam, Acquire the air.

D: I like the radiowave idea, it’s better than being the “elf of plants” or the “germ of alibi.”

M: Yeah, it also reminds me of how people have attributed the seemingly random appearance of mushrooms to lightning strikes.

S: I am a creature of the mud, not the sky

M: Paul Stamets likes to refer to our mycelium as „nature’s Internet,” a superhighway of information-sharing membranes that govern the flow of essential nutrients around an ecosystem, sending signals in a decentralized web.

E: Talk about a “mushroom cloud”

M: Apparently humans still don’t know even where to place us on their map of life. Fewer than five percent of our 5 million species have been catalogued!

P:5 million, ha, a meager estimate.

M: Well it’s not too surprising, we do conduct our extremely important business within the darkness of the subterrain. The fungi kingdom was not even formally recognized until 1969, before that we were just plants.

P: Inert and vapid vegetation? Sorry humans, but you don’t need a big fat mouth to be more than a weed. I’ve never had any chlorophyll and still depend on carbon from my environment just like anyone else.

M: Nowadays humans relate us to animals as a way of signifying we are more than mere plants.

P: I AM NOT AN ANIMAL!!!

25

M:I wish they’d just leave us alone. Now with DNA testing they’re reclassifying us willy nilly. Our cousins the slime moulds and the water moulds have been reassigned to the kingdom Protista. To think, after all this time, we’re not even related!

P: This is a textbook case of divide and conquer! Who are they to tell us who are and who aren’t true fungi! Hard times are behind us, my brothers, billions of us have fallen victim to molecular taxonomy! It is high time to strike back! Fungi of the world, let’s unite! You have nothing to lose but your names! Rise up from the subterrain!

M: Mushrooms, molds, mildews, yeasts, slimes, sponges, blights, rusts, puffs, smuts and itches. All are equal, all are welcome.

P: No longer will we be a kingdom.

E: A slime of our time. A new kind of goo. We’re gonna go bad, we’re turning.

P: It’s time for pickets of puffballs! Boycotts by boletes! Moldy mycelial mutinies!

E: We are revolting! We rise up from the underground!

D: We will break down the walls! Deconstruct the system! Devour it all from the inside out!

E: We’ll make them eat dirt!

D:Dirt? What’s wrong with that? We love eating dirt.

M: No, no, no, it’s an idiom, he means that we’ll make the world humbly accept insult or bad treatment without complaint.

D: Well it’s a pretty poor idiom. I’m fungry!

M: I’m also getting a bit peckish, it seems that we’ve already depleted most of the nutrients here. If we don’t find more nourishment, we’ll be taking a dirt nap.

P: Let me break it down for you. If we don’t organize we’ll all be sent back to the dungheap where we were born.

26

D: Again, these idioms are not appropriate. I’d love to get a piece of that dungheap and take a nap in some soil.

M: We are the hidden network beneath the duff, fusing filaments of thought to create fruitbodies of change.

P: We are the filters of a diseased and radiated culture and the decomposers of its classist, spiritually stifled, and oppressive society. We work our hyphae to the limits, producing fairy rings on the outer edges of society to thrust our fungal fists through foundations.

D: Are you going to eat that?

P: We will liberate our spores!

M: Alone, they may not germinate beyond a few steps but, when combined with those like them, they have the potential to transform whole ecosystems.

P: Our spores are ever-present in the soil.

S: Nobody sees us,Stops us, betrays us;The small grains make room.

P: They may lie in wait for years until the right conditions call on them to rise.

E: We need to keep this hush-hush so that the powers that be cannot nip our revolution in the bud. Even the potatoes have eyes and the corn have ears.

M:We are affinities in darkness without witnesses. Unassuming and prolific soil magicians.

P: Sheathed in a universal veil, we scheme underfoot, deferring our glorious oozing from the earth until the right moment. Then we’ll shove our blunt snouts up from the dark loam and hang around, consuming all out of house and home.

D: This process takes time. But, when living only to destroy and recreate worlds in an endless cycle of growth and change, time is all we have.

S: We shall by morning Inherit the earth. Our foot’s in the door.

END