A mycelium is the dense network of mushroom roots that allows trees to communicate with each other. It is also the planet’s natural recycler, decomposing all organic elements (including human bodies). Its tiny threads spread endlessly in all directions forming a rhizome. As in Deleuze and Guattari’s theory on thought, communication and feeling, the mycelium points towards a non-hierarchical, open system of connections.
Yet here is our mycelium, stripped of its three dimensionality, hanging like an old skin. Maybe this is because it was sewn during the quarantine, a time imbued by another rhizome, that of the virus Covid-19 and the injustices it has amplified. Or maybe because it warns against a future in which mycelia and their weblike connections only exist as artefacts of the past. Rhizomes turn against us when they are pillaged without concern for their fundamental nature.
