83 which grow on soils despoiled by environmental disruption, such as the devastated and razed city of Hiroshima in 1945, where this very species was the first form of life to re-emerge. The application of mycelium in fields far removed from pure botany aligns with the cause of earth's rights. In architecture, materials technologist Mae-ling Lokko has grafted mycelium onto organic waste, giving rise to an insulating adhesive that allows waste to solidify and then be used as biobased bricks. In design, shoes crafted by Kristel Peters are produced carbon-free using what has been called “mushroom skin”, a material derived from mycelium similar to calfskin. In music, one can just mention the name of John Cage with his groundbreaking revolution based on silence that has been the three-movement composition 4'33'' (1952), to discover that he was a great mycologist, a passion that he often intertwined with his sonic experimentation, as in the case of the performance Mushrooms et Variationes (1985), where he aimed to raise awareness about the need to give a voice back to the soil. In Carsten Höller's entire body of work, the mushroom has truly transcended the boundaries of art to become a pop icon on an international scale. (Ed.’s Note: Milan, Fondazione Prada, my daughter and I in the elevator. Two young girls entered brandishing their smartphones as some kind of scimitars. «Excuse me, do you know where the mushrooms are?» «At the ninth floor» I replied smiling, as that's where Carsten Höller's ultraInstagrammed permanent installation Upside Down Mushroom Room is located. But I must admit – even a bit ashamed of a vague regurgitation of chic radicalism, then quickly smothered – that the urge to answer «In the woods» has been almost overwhelming, to put it mildly) In particular, Upside Down Mushroom Room (2000) is the experience created by Höller in which, after traversing a narrow corridor in pitch blackness, with only the aid of a handrail as a guide, one finds itself dazzled in a room that serves as an artificial habitat for giant mushrooms hanging from the ceiling and turned upside down. The initial sense of estrangement is akin to Freud's Unheimliche, that sense of perturbation arising from the internal conflict between the familiar and the uncanny, because those mushrooms are exactly the ones we unknowingly, and with their stems firmly planted in the ground, used to draw as children – the Smurfs' houses, just to make it clear (or the nerdy fetish Toad from Super Mario Bros.). But that species is the Amanita muscaria, confidentially called Fly Agaric for its poisonous and hallucinogenic properties, whose use is attested as far back as some prehistoric rock engravings and is still used in collective shamanic rituals, mainly in Siberia. Amanita muscaria is the species most knowingly utilized and reproduced by Carsten Höller, who is doubly aware of the facts: as a soil scientist, he is aware of its properties and historical use, and as an artist, he knows the imaginative power a symbol can hold. In 2010, at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, Soma – the name of the extract of Amanita muscaria used by Vedic nomads since the 2nd millennium BC, believed to facilitate contact with the divine – was the tableau vivant in which twelve reindeers (which regularly consume Amanita muscaria), twelve canaries, four mice, and two flies moved freely inside the exhibition hall of that international contemporary art temple – some of them, in truth, more freely than others since half of them, without declaring which ones, were given Soma twice a day. Science and art, Bruno Latour Eugène Ionesco and David Lynch, laboratory experiment and psychedelic vision. Psychedelia, indeed. This is what, from an aesthetic standpoint, I have always found in Carsten Höller’s artworks, finding it in terms of ethics as well – also in relation to soil conservation – particularly in his constant attention, investigation, and exploration of the limits intrinsic to mind and perception. Speaking of limits of the mind, in Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge (1992), one of the fathers of the psychedelic counterculture, Terence McKenna (already mentioned here by Höller in the context of the relationship between overconsumption of resources and overpopulation of the earth), systematizes his thoughts by examining all psychoactive plant organisms, including Amanita muscaria, making them a viaticum for one’s own spiritual evolution, provided they do not assault the brain and are not alien to it – i.e. difficult to metabolize, such as synthetic drugs, alcohol, tobacco, tea, coffee, sugar, cocoa, all implemented to perform alienating jobs inherited from the Industrial Revolution, and television, which McKenna refers to as an “electronic drug”, functional to the dominion civilizations for mass control: «We have sold the spiritual dimension of nature for the plunder of its resources», McKenna wrote. From psychedelic literature (and from Aldous Huxley and his experiments with peyote; hands up if any of us, in our youth, hasn't at least once declaimed quotes from his essay The Doors of Perception, because I'm almost certain that each of us has had at least one hippie phase), directly descends a book like The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World (2001) by Michael Pollan, which describes the ability of cannabis to blur the filters between us and the world, allowing the return of a childlike sense of stupor. Furthermore, from his profound respect for plants as sentient beings, led to the excellence, the science of the father of Plant Neurobiology Stefano Mancuso also stems, former guest of Ossigeno 10 and Carsten Höller’s companion at Palazzo Strozzi for The Florence Experiment (2018), aimed at measuring the empathic relationship that can be established between humans and plants.
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