Mushrooms are senselessly beautiful.
They have peculiar structures, overly curated details, charming textures and appear from night to day, as gifts brought in the silence of the night.Their shapes have captured the attention of the species that surround them for millions of years. What we are fascinated by is nothing but the fruit, the dress, the wig. But the true magic is on the floor beneath. Their body, the mycelium, develops underground. It is a real web, used by the all vegetal ecosystem that is part of that to exchange information through electrical impulses: an invisible neural network that connects/links, feeds, corrects, saves and helps. These creatures try to teach us the profound secretes of symbiosis since milon of years, without arrogance; through beauty, magic and transformation.
‘’In 1957 Gordon Wasson and his wife Valentina elaborated a binary system to classify human cultures: some are Mycofilic (love mushrooms) and some other are ‘’Mycofobic’’(they are afraid of mushrooms)-[...] mycophilic cultures descended from those that had venerated mushrooms; the mycophobic cultures the one that had considered devilish theirs power’’*
In our project it is the clay that decides what to show or not, the white glaze and the black oxide establish their own chromatic priorities during the burning process. Our mushrooms are funky: happy and relax they face without arrogance the duty of showing us how collaboration is always a winning surviving strategy and how the distinction within good and bad, useful and superfluous, friend and enemy, me and the other, is in the end ephemeral, transient and of little importance. The result is a delegation of simple but wise creatures that show us the charm of imperfection and the power of vulnerability. To study the mushroom’s kingdom leads us to sense the primordial energy that goes through everythings and that links all the species with endless bonds.
Our mycelium network extends from Milan to Stockholm and we are Mycophilia.
AM:PM
* Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures (2020)Edit.
Mycophilia project has been done in collaboration with Alessandra Modarelli for Milan design week 2023.
Read more here
They have peculiar structures, overly curated details, charming textures and appear from night to day, as gifts brought in the silence of the night.Their shapes have captured the attention of the species that surround them for millions of years. What we are fascinated by is nothing but the fruit, the dress, the wig. But the true magic is on the floor beneath. Their body, the mycelium, develops underground. It is a real web, used by the all vegetal ecosystem that is part of that to exchange information through electrical impulses: an invisible neural network that connects/links, feeds, corrects, saves and helps. These creatures try to teach us the profound secretes of symbiosis since milon of years, without arrogance; through beauty, magic and transformation.
‘’In 1957 Gordon Wasson and his wife Valentina elaborated a binary system to classify human cultures: some are Mycofilic (love mushrooms) and some other are ‘’Mycofobic’’(they are afraid of mushrooms)-[...] mycophilic cultures descended from those that had venerated mushrooms; the mycophobic cultures the one that had considered devilish theirs power’’*
In our project it is the clay that decides what to show or not, the white glaze and the black oxide establish their own chromatic priorities during the burning process. Our mushrooms are funky: happy and relax they face without arrogance the duty of showing us how collaboration is always a winning surviving strategy and how the distinction within good and bad, useful and superfluous, friend and enemy, me and the other, is in the end ephemeral, transient and of little importance. The result is a delegation of simple but wise creatures that show us the charm of imperfection and the power of vulnerability. To study the mushroom’s kingdom leads us to sense the primordial energy that goes through everythings and that links all the species with endless bonds.
Our mycelium network extends from Milan to Stockholm and we are Mycophilia.
AM:PM
* Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures (2020)Edit.
Mycophilia project has been done in collaboration with Alessandra Modarelli for Milan design week 2023.
Read more here