MUSH ROOMS
A BUREAU project with Filipe Felizardo and Walter El Nagar
A coproduction by maat and Istanbul Biennial

Mush Rooms is a performance that reflects about the true substance of our body. An attempt to acknowledge that we are multi-specifically connected, that what our body is less solid than we think, that the air that we breath is less unsubstantial than what we believe. And that we really exist by dwelling within these multiple states.

Accompanied by a live musical experimentation by the guitarist Filipe Felizardo, the chef Walter El Nagar will perform cooking to work in and around decomposition and fermentation. The main ingredients and general framework for the performance will be directly derived from the book by Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at The End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015).

During 30 to 40 minutes, Filipe Felizardo will develop his series “A Conference of Stones” in the company of a mineral public.

A large cooking table will be the stage of the performance and will be specifically designed to constitute a landscape of living and inert materia of all kinds. The end of the performance will be punctuated by a real meal where parts of the landscape will be able to be eaten. The table, and thus the landscape will oscillate between living, growing, decomposition and composition and our relation, as human spectators, to this otherness that we observe, contemplate and integrate into our body as a symbiotic act.