82 A radical act, a return to the roots, and roots are essential in holding the soil, to protect it and to protect ourselves. When Carsten Höller talks to me about Brutalisten, believe me, his eyes gleam. «In principle, you are only allowed to use water and salt for cooking an ingredient. You are not allowed to use even olive oil, nor any kind of grease, nor any kind of spice. And especially, you are not allowed to combine ingredients, like making a combinatory dish, which out there we are full of. That's also very nice, for goodness’ sake, but I am more interested in the idea of working on one ingredient and adding as little as possible, trying to get out of ingredients; out of the product, you can get the authentic taste of products. Take salad, for instance: nobody ever tastes the roots of the salad, or the oil that you can make from its seeds or its flowers. For us, salad usually means just the leaves. So it is interesting to think about getting a salad dressing under these constraints, because it is very difficult. You cannot use lemon juice, nor olive oil, to make a little vinaigrette. It doesn't work that way. So, what do you do? Maybe you have to ferment some leaves and make some salad water. Maybe you have to get the roots and try to use them. What we are interested in is a more complex approach to the product, that can incorporate the different parts of it. And then you can both cook it or serve it raw, very plain and straight, very Brutalist». «Our main care is to have great products and sometimes, at the best, we don't do anything with them. We just look at the temperature. We had some turnips, at the beginning of the season: they were so fantastic, these little white turnips, that the only thing we did was serving them on ice – and we put them on the ice just before, so they shouldn't have been too cold, just a little bit. Any kind of cooking, there, would have been wrong. I think it’s fantastic». In this Magnificat of the in-purity product of the soil lies the deep respect imbuing the rituals. The very soil becomes a hallowed sanctuary, to defend it, to protect it, to cherish its diversity. Another tenet in The Brutalist Kitchen Manifesto avows: « The use of overlooked, hard-to-get or rare ingredients, or ingredients that are generally discarded, is characteristic of Brutalist kitchen». There is another manifesto speaking of the recovery of marginality as salvation for diversity, authored by another erudite with a background in Agricultural Sciences. It is the Manifesto of the Third Landscape (2004) by Gilles Clément: «If we stop looking at the landscape as the object of a human activity, we immediately discover (will it be a forgetfulness of the cartographer, a negligence of the politician?) a multitude of undecided spaces, devoid of function, which it is difficult to lay a name on. This whole belongs neither to the territory of shadow nor to that of light. It is located on the margins. Where the woods fray, along roads and rivers, in the forgotten recesses of the crops, where cars do not pass. Among these fragments of landscape, there is no similarity of form. One point in common: they all constitute a land of refuge for diversity. Everywhere, elsewhere, this is driven out». The Third Landscape is neither the infinite nor the finite; it is the indefinite, the unfinished, the imperfect, the undetermined, the nonsensical, like that product of the earth neglected and then cured by Brutalisten, like any terrain vague where lack of definition means multiplication of potential. Stop making sense (Talking Heads, 1984) as an admonition, for one of humankind's afflictions is the compulsion to ascribe meaning and a name to all things at all costs, so as to be able to pigeonhole them and thus get rid of the discomfort stemming from dealing with diversity. Carsten Höller is not afraid of nonsense; quite the converse, as he elects it as a symbol of his art, in a very specific form: «The mushroom. I use a lot of mushrooms. They are a very good image for my art, in the sense that they stand for something incredibly powerful and beautiful, but also mainly nonsensical. And that is what I have always found so interesting about mushrooms: that they often make no sense. Why do they look like that – sometimes masterfully camouflaged, other times so colorful that you can see them even from a distance? It has to be said that what we call mushrooms are just the fruiting bodies from the mycelium, and you cannot see mycelium unless you look at it very closely. Usually the only function, if we can call it that, of these fruiting bodies is to bring their spores out of the soil, to come out of the darkness, to go into the light. Spores are produced by millions and transported by the wind or by any other agent beyond the control of the mushroom. It's not really like a flower, for instance, that wants to attract an insect in order to ensure pollination. Apart from truffles, for example, and stinkhorns, the majority of the mushrooms are therefore completely nonsensical, just splendid examples of something that has evolved; and this, I would say, is as close as it gets to being an artist, from my perspective». Indeed, mushroom, which is also a symbol of the very soil Carsten Höller delved into as a scientist, is truly astonishing. Although its behavior lacks a discernible purpose and function, beyond that of its self-preservation, the paradigm shift from anthropocentrism to ecocentrism in defense of the soil and, consequently, of our survival, can also be justified by its superiority in terms of adaptability. In The Mushroom at the End of the World. The Possibility of Living in the Ruins of Capitalism (2021), anthropologist and feminist Anna L. Tsing documented the trade in Matsutake mushrooms,
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