artist statement

During this class, I was guided my the material. As I entered the class, I had a vague idea of what I wanted to do: working deeper on a project I started before concerning plant passports. Maybe, I could make a humorous plant passport using the mycelium and kombucha. However, I ended up doing something entirely different. The mycelium and kombucha mother had different plans for my journey in biodesign.

I learned, or re-learned, that if I was to take up the task to work with others, I had to keep an open mind. The open mind included following my and microbial intuition. From the beginning, they evoked certain emotions in me. The microcosmos we've worked with during the class were sending signals of healing - although they were getting infected at times. With mycelium, as my lab journal shows in detail, I started thinking about how they break down material. This includes the substrates we provide, but also larger things such as death. Fungi, among other members of the decomposers family like bacteria and insects, are essential in breaking down dead bodies, giving them another life. Their ability to do this made me think of healing trauma - especially generational traumas caused by not only familial issues but also societal ones. What if we could break down our traumas, and cleanse ourselves with a mycelial ritual? The way to get there wouldn't be without issues, as my mycelium molds got infected several times. However, they created a beautiful landscape that became part of my final project: A healing landscape of death. A healing landscape of life.

The material also led me to a place of play. What kombucha mother was doing was to provide a space for me to have fun. What a nurturer! By creating the sugary, acidic drink, kombucha was telling me stay in the moment. While the attention during the class was given to the leather-like layers scoby created with us, I do believe the drink was important to frame the healing journey mycelium started: we were to share this drink, let is go through us, let it go to its bacterial siblings living in our guts.

Thus I came to my final work, combining all the experiments of kombucha and mycelium. The physical resemblance of mycelium mesh to a dessert from my heritage led me into a funny research: the history of pismaniye, a cotton candy like, stringy dessert from Turkey, but also from other places around the world. The way the mycelium acts was similar to this dessert: it moved around China, Iran, Bosnia. It appears in side-road stop points mostly, as if to say, "You can only have this if you are on a journey!" And in a journey I was. Thinking through the nomad and rhizome concepts by critical thinkers Deleuze and Guattari, I was imagining a ever-changing dessert that was created by mycelium and kombucha. Through my ancestry, they were communicating. Through symbols, like the symbolism of representing another thing, like representing your country with a dessert or your trauma with a final art project, they were showing me their nomadic and rhizomic relationships. That's how I started the work "The World's First Pismaniye", nodding to the fact that microcosmos have been around millions of years before humans.

Listening to the other is essential for biodesign - if we are to work with others, we need to actually work with them. Let them speak their minds. My collaborators just wanted some sweets.