Mushrooms on the Ruins Salvatore Arancio, Olivier Castel, Petra Feriancová, Iza Tarasewicz – curated by Borbála Soós

27 May until 22 July 2017, Nogueras Blanchard, Madrid, Spain

NoguerasBlanchard is delighted to present Mushrooms on the Ruins, an exhibition curated by Borbála Soós who was selected for the sixth edition of the Curatorial Open Call organised by the gallery.

How do forests think? Do plants communicate? What are animals dreaming about? Humans live in the entangled connections of a complex system created by other beings. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that in children’s tales mushrooms are often called little men in hats. Anthropomorphising plants, or thinking about subjects that are interchangeable are symptoms of a search for familiar features and abilities, in our attempt to understand them.

The relationship between fungi and humans, including the stories that they unfold, can be used as metaphors for our future survival. As Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing put it, it is time to pay attention to mushroom picking, not that it can save us – but it might open our imagination when we are stuck with the problem of living despite economic and ecological ruination.

In the 1963 Japanese horror film ‘Matango’ (aka ‘Attack of the Mushroom People’) directed by Ishiro Honda, a group of people turns into mushrooms on a mysterious deserted island*. We meet a small company of friends of various professions and social status, who leave behind their modern city lives in Tokyo to go sailing. They become wrecked on a deserted island, with no other visible human

activity apart from a second abandoned and marooned ship, which the characters determine was a nuclear research vessel. This ship is overtaken by mushrooms – the only edible species growing in abundance on the island. In the film the fungi are dangerous: they cause hallucinations and drive people insane, but most importantly, consuming them means that people are slowly transformed into mushrooms or a new fungi-human-hybrid species. The characters are consuming and being consumed, and eventually become inseparable from the island and its landscape. Only a single person manages to return to Japan, where he tells his tale, albeit from a psychiatric ward. Summing up his experiences, he points out that the booming and cruel city of Tokyo is not that different from this other island.

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing in her book ‘The Mushroom at the End of the World, On the Possibilities of Life in Capitalist Ruins’ writes about entangled connections involving people and mushrooms. We find stories about forests where the curious autumn-smelling matsutake mushrooms thrive on land that suffered from human disturbances. After the destruction of the atom bomb on the city of Hiroshima, the first thing to grow in the charred and blasted landscape was matsutake. These fungi now present all over the world exchange for a high-price, which provides opportunities for displaced and disempowered people to find work and carve out a new living.

The exhibition maps relations between various species in a landscape both strange and familiar. It strives to open up a world of imagination where all other beings have the same agency as humans, and where, if you wish, species are capable or becoming, or transforming into one another.

What we share with mushrooms, or other living things – whether bacterial, floral, fungal or animal – is that how we represent the world around us, is in some way or another constitutive of our beings**. We are inseparable from our companion species, and dependent on them for our survival. It is an illusion that we can detach ourselves, and keep only within the borders of our bodies, or retreat within the walls of our cities. Instead, what we can do, is to redefine ourselves with adaptable and soft boundaries. We can start to understand our evolution as a story of an ongoing cross-contamination, and our bodies as a site of nature in the past, present and future. As social beings as well as economic and ecological factors, we are inseparable from the world around us, and as such, our fate is bound to other living creatures.

Thinking about a future landscape, on the ruins of capitalism, we can envision a new type of structure. Humans might soon disappear and leave behind a blasted and disturbed landscape – one, however, fertile for mushrooms like matsutake to dominate. These fungi will choose and enable other types of trees and forests to grow as their companions, and hence aid new landscapes to emerge. Human activity, or more precisely, the memory of human beings will be transformed into mushrooms, and then plants and other new species.

Borbála Soós

* Hybrid species are not new to the Ishiro Honda, he also directed the first Godzilla movies in 1954 and 1956.

** Eduardo Kohn: How Forests Think, Towards an Anthology beyond the Human, 2013. Kohn has a complex theory and explanation about what he means by representation here. Semiosis (the creation and interpretation of signs) permeates and constitutes the living world, and it is through our partially shared semiotic propensities that multi- species relations are possible, and also analytically comprehensive.

Bios

Salvatore Arancio (b. 1974 Catania IT), lives and works in London. He received his MA in Fine Art Photography from the Royal College of Art, London in 2005. His works range across various media such as ceramics, sculpture, collage, photography, animation and video. His constructed landscapes contain a sense of both the familiar and the unknown that enhances their symbolic readings and implications.

Selected solo and group exhibitions are Viva Arte Viva, 57th Venice Biennale IT; Synthetic Landscape, Weston Park, Ludlow UK; And These Crystals Are Just like Globes of Light, Federica Schiavo Gallery, Milano IT; Tropical Hangover, Tenderpixel, London UK (all 2017); Evolutionary Travels, Foundación Arte, Buenos Aires AR; Travelling Circular Labyrinths, Museo Civico di Castelbuono, Castelbuono, Palermo IT; Oh Mexico! Kunsthalle Winterthur CH; Teleonomy, Cafe Oto, London UK (all 2016); Fashioned to a Device Behind a Tree, Camden Arts Centre, London UK; The London Open 2015, Whitechapel Gallery, London UK; Une Taxonomie des Sens et des Formes, Centre d’art contemporain La Halle des Bouchers, Vienne FR; Project 09: Salvatore Arancio, Contemporary Art Society, London UK; The First Humans, Pump House Gallery, London UK (all 2015); Birds, Cinéphémère, FIAC, Paris FR; Cathedral, AV Festival, Northern Gallery For Contemporary Art, Sunderland UK (all 2014); Curiosity: Art & the Pleasure of Knowing, Hayward Touring, various locations across the UK (2013-2014); Cyclorama, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City MX (2013); The Cosmos, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge UK (2012).

Selected residencies include CCA Andratx, Andratx SP (2016); Ceramics Fellowship, Camden Arts Centre, London UK (2014/2015); Résidences Internationales aux Recollets, Paris FR (2013); Art Omi, New York US (2011); EKWC: European Ceramic WorkCentre, SG‘s-Hertogenbosch NL (2012); Wysing Arts Center, Cambridge UK (2012); Museo Carlo Zauli, Faenza IT (2012), ISCP, New York US (2009).

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Olivier Castel (b. 1982, Paris FR) lives and works in London. He often presents work under heteronyms and has created over thirty different identities since 2001. Often using ephemeral or temporal forms he works primarily with projections, reflective surfaces, light, text and audio. His work functions as a set of propositions, employing the imaginary and exploring the process by which something is made visible.

Recent solo exhibitions were Communicating Vessels, Kunstraum, London UK; Soulstorm, Mumbai Art Room, Mumbai IN (both 2016); Des distances dans lâme, Artium, Vitoria-Gasteiz SP (2015); Once Across the Bridge, Phantoms Came to Meet Them, Andor, London; Fountain, Ibid, London (both 2014); The Back of an Image, Rowing, London; Imaginary Lives / Eight Hearts, Concrete Café, Hayward Gallery, London (both 2013); and Vive l’Amour, Schneeeule, Berlin DE (2012).

Group shows and projects include Both Sides of the Curtain – Meeting Points 8, La Loge, Brussels BE; Who Are You?, SALTS, Basel CH (both 2016); Tower, Ibid., London UK; The fifth artist, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge UK; Good Times & Nocturnal News, Lido, Venice IT (as Côme Ciment); Things That Tumble Twice, Tenderpixel, London UK; Covert Joy, La Conservera, Murcia SP (as Carl Laporte) (all 2015); Golden Age Problems, Auto Italia, London UK; Insomnia, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna AT (all 2014); Good News & Nocturnal Times #2, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (as Côme Ciment) (all 2013); Rock My Religion, Das Weisse Haus, Vienna AT; Memory Marathon, Serpentine Gallery, London; A Trusted Friend, Carlos/Ishikawa, London; Sweets in Jars, Ausstellungsraum Klingental, Basel CH (all 2012); In the Belly of the Whale (Act III), Montehermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz SP (2011); Surreal House: Fun House, Barbican Centre, London and No Soul for Sale, Auto Italia, Form Content and Tate Modern, London UK (both 2010).

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Petra Feriancová (b. 1977 Bratislava SK) lives and works in Bratislava SK. She studied advertising art at SSUV from 1991 to1995. Subsequently, she was accepted to the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava SK, which she left for the Accademia delle Belle Arti, Roma IT, graduating in 2003. In 2011 she was a resident at ISCP, New York US.

In her work she often uses already existing images, texts, objects and collections, which she interprets and methodically interchanges. Each new realisation leans towards an implied connection between the universe of unique personal experience, which is conditioned by civilisation, history and culture.

Selected solo exhibitions from recent years are Systems, Individuals and Measuring Tools, Bòlit. Centre d'Art Contemporani. Girona, SP; Survivals, Relics, Souvenirs, Apoteka, Dignano, Croatia HR; An Exhibition on Doubt, MAN_Museo d'Arte Provincia di Nuoro IT; Politics of Life, (from the Archive of Kveta Fulierová), amt _ project, Bratislava SK (all 2016); Petra Feriancová, ArtVerona, Verona, Italy, IT; Vulnerable, Yet Everlasting, Viltin Gallery, OFF-Biennale Budapest HU (2015); Things that Happen, and Things that are Done. On Beginnings and Matter, Fondazione Morra Greco, Naples IT (2014); Every Day has a Noon, AMT_project, Bratislava SK (2014); Birds, Myths and Tusks, Frieze Frame London UK (2013); Still the Same Place, (with Zbyněk Baladrán), Czech and Slovak Pavilion, Venice Biennale IT (2013); ARCO, Madrid SP (2013); A Study of the Seconday Plan, Dumb, The House Of Arts, Brno CZ (2012); A Report on the Time Spending, Jiri Svestka, Berlin DE (2012); Postsriptum to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimge, Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava SK (2011); Theory of a City or the Possibilities of an A4, ISCP, New York US (2011).

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Iza Tarasewicz (b. 1981, Kolonia Koplany, Poland), based in Munich, Germany. She graduated from the Faculty of Sculpture and Performing Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan, Poland in 2008.

Her sculptural installations take the form of modular, flexible, mobile, and reconfigurable display systems that combine a raw and modest functionalism with formal logics found in the natural world, scientific experimentation, and graphs and diagrams—figures of thought and charts of relation that systematise knowledge and data and abstractly describe the interaction of phenomena.

Recent solo exhibitions include ULTRA HIGH TURBA TURBO III (background noise), Kostka Gallery, Prague CZ; Turbulence Soon Appears, Trapéz Gallery, Budapest HU; Loop de Loop, Bikini, Lyon FR; Sorry for All The Ups and Downs, Syntax Project, Lisbon, PT; Reverse Logistics, BWA Warszawa, Warsaw PL (all 2015); By the apparent impossibility of arranging signs, Arsenal Gallery, Białystok PL; The Means, the Milieu, Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp BE; Collaborating Objects Radiating Environments, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin DE; Strange Attractors, Polnisches Institut Berlin DE (all 2014) and Clinamen, Krolikarnia X. Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture, National Museum, Warsaw PL (2013).

Recent group exhibitions among many others include Anu Põder. Be Fragile! Be Brave!, Kudu Art Museum, Tallinn, Estonia; Croy Nielsen, Vienna AT (both 2017); 32nd Bienal de Sao Paulo 2016 BR; the 11th Gwangju Biennale KR; HYPERCONNECTED, Moscow Biennial of Young Art, Moscow RU; A Thousand Horsepower, Can Trinxet Factory, L’Hospitalet, Barcelona SP; Contemporary Art from Poland, European Central Bank, Frankfurt DE; Unfolding Constellations, CCA Toruń PL (all 2016); Dust, CCA Zamek Ujazdowkski, Warsaw PL; Gardens, Zacheta National Museum, Warsaw PL; Procedures for the Head. Polish Art Today, Kunsthalle Bratislava SL (all 2015); As You Can See: Polish Art Today, Modern Art in Warsaw PL (2014).

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Borbála Soós (b. 1984, Budapest, Hungary) is a London-based curator. She is the director and curator of Tenderpixel, a contemporary art gallery in central London, a Visiting Lecturer at the Royal College of Art, and also works as an independent curator. In 2012 she obtained an MA in Curating Contemporary Art course at the Royal College of Art, London, and in 2009 a MA in Film Studies and a MA in Art History from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest.Her recent research focuses on the development of structures found in plants and fungi, and explores these as metaphors for social organisation. She regularly curates projects that circulate biopolitics, the commons, as well as system dynamics. Selected projects include curatorial residency at Rupert, Vilnius in April 2017; ‘Fungal Futures’, lecture at Vilnius Academy of Art, April 2017; the event ‘A realm where cause-and-effect no longer applies’, at the artist run space, Autarkia, Vilnius LT; ‘Tropical Hangover' a group exhibition at Tenderpixel, in February 2017; ‘Biopolitics and the Urban Commons’, a lecture as part of the project 'Techniques to Make you Doubt' at Fluent, Santander, Spain in September 2016; ‘Spatial Practices and the Urban Commons’, an 8 week long event series and exhibition at Tenderpixel, during spring 2016; ‘The Infinite Lawn’, ‘Figure Finger’ and 'Things That Tumble Twice', three interconnected shows at Tenderpixel, in 2015; ‘Collaboration Beyond Consensus – Rehearsing Collectivity’, an exhibition, reading room and seminar organised at tranzit.hu as part of the OFF-Biennale, Budapest in 2015; ‘Social Choreography’, a screening programme at Tenderpixel, during spring 2015; and ‘Acting Truthfully Under the Circumstances’, a group exhibition and event series also at Tenderpixel in 2014. She is working towards a large group exhibition as part of the OFF-Biennale, Budapest in October 2017.