Becoming MushRoom

Creative Studio, Fitzwilliam Museum CAMBRIDGE

APRIL 2nd 2025

3pm-4pm drop in

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Is it possible for humans to step beyond the limits of their species-bound perception to embody the subjectivity of a non-human? Can we ever know or feel what a non-human entity experiences, or are we inevitably bound by our anthropocentric gaze? What are the limits of interspecies empathy? 

This experimental workshop invites participants to move beyond thinking about mycelial networks to being and doing as mushrooms. Through an immersive, embodied experience, we will explore the ways fungi connect, transform, and entangle with the world.

In this space, with bare feet and muddy hands on the floor, participants will be welcomed to an indoor ‘forest underground’ environment constructed from natural materials (expect some mud, soil, grass, decay log with moss, lichen, and real fungi), and engage all kinds of bodily senses (touch, smell, movements, sounds, sights and more) to simulate a mycelial network by the embodied act of ‘connecting’ wires, which will lead to the display of reactive sounds and visuals enabled by digital technologies such as Playtronica, Arduino, making visible the unseen rhythms of fungal connectivity.

We are curious: What new ways of knowing might emerge from lingering in the dampness, darkness, stickiness, and liveliness of this constructed fungal underworld? What happens when we embrace the visceral discomforts of be(com)ing mushrooms?

Through this process, we hope to provoke embodied reflections on:

• The (im)possibility of transcending the boundaries of the human body

• The vulnerability and potential intimacy between humans and non-humans

• The uncertainty and multiplicity of relationality

• The many unknown territories that emerge when we embrace the non-human world

This workshop is an invitation to dwell in the in-between, to entangle with the unfamiliar, and to imagine new ways of being and doing—within and beyond the human.