Photographs on this subsite are property of Mira Boczniowicz & Sonia Kujawa

My conflicted feelings about working with mycelium made me come up with an idea to bind up a living plant with electronics to make it artificially follow a light source that can be guided by a human. Though it does not contain any fungal matter, it serves a purpose of capturing a feeling of power over a living being by creating a codependent network between a human, a live organism and the work created in the intertim.

Even though the plant is loaded with wires that constrain it and force movement onto it, it is kept alive by watering and strengthened with fertilizer. On its branches hang little ink cartridges that follow the movement and „record” it by creating a drawing on the floor with a soaked up thread. Despite the brutalized character of forced movement, an eerily alluring mark is created in the process.

The idea for the creation of this work originated during my residency at FUNKEN Academy, where I conducted research on an organism that was previously unfamiliar to me — mycelium.

Forcing this entity to fit my molds, made me reassess my understanding of the way humans and nature affect each other. Is there any balance in this relationship, or are we just parasites thriving on its suffering? Ecological networks are self-regulatory systems dependent on both interactions between species and the changes inflicted by the species on themselves.

This does not necessarily mean that our relationship with nature is symbiotic, but it is not exactly parasitic either. The human body is home to about ten times more microorganisms than the amount of cells it consists of.

We are their whole world!

Symbionic Affairs