Mushroom Out of Its Mycelium

Gayle Chong Kwan, Mushroom Out of Its Mycelium, San Salvario Mon Amour, Torino, 2005

A Mushroom out of its Mycelium linked up people in San Salvario (an area which witnessed race riots in the 1990s) who work with food. Referencing Freud’s idea of the closely meshed part of dreams that cannot be untangled, it created a temporary sensory communication by taking food from the working environment into nighttime intimacy. Sensory packs, created through dialogue between the artist and participants, contained foods important to each, such as bread baked according to baker’s grandfather’s recipe in the Second World War when the area was run by Fascists. These were shared through a sensory tasting session each night before sleeping, when they also kept a dream diary, took photographs with disposable cameras and wrote postcards to each other. The participants did not meet, but communicated only through the food shared and resulting work created.

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