The Mycological Twist

The Mycological Twist is a project by Berlin’s Eloïse Bonneviot and Anne de Boer. They take mycology as a source of inspiration in engaging with ecological and social practices—from the mushroom fruiting body to rotting matter deep below ground. Recent projects include: ECLIPSE (the 7th Athens Biennale), Quadrat Sampling E-Ecologies (with HAU, Berlin), and L’Académie des Mutants, (Musee d’Art Contemporain Bordeaux).

There is a definite sense of immersion entering the workshop. There is a layered configuration of amorphous tables clustered inside a semi-circle of banners that hang from ceiling to floor, designating an intimate space for this Troll Swamp to unfold within. New age, quasi-mystical music plays in the background and imbues the room with a sense of fairytale and adventure. The spatial design of the workshop space uses platforms in a literal and physical way, setting up an environment for imagining new ways of constructing physical representations of something that we are used to inhabiting very immaterially.

Photography: Silke Briel

Choose your fighter: Troll Swamp character assignments include an 11-year-old dreamer, a half-organism half-fairy, a legal advisor, a cottagecore virtual avatar, a 1-day-old broccoli, a power user of pet advice forums, and a cactipus. The game characters, represented as 3D-printed rainbow clusters of castles, crystals, and creatures, all live on the foodie internet, each inhabiting their own websites and blogs.

Character strengths:

Making fiction reality

Creating glitches that open portals to new works

Comments everywhere on everything

Quick while being slow and not moving

Knows a little about many things

Goes in two directions at once, without moving much

Character weaknesses:

Can’t distinguish between fiction and reality

Unaware of own weaknesses

Hates cooking with olive oil

Overly occupied with aesthetics

Uncertain about their support

Paranoid due to fear of being eaten