With Living in Mycelium, Vinciane Despret, Christine Aventin and Juliette Salme launch us into a future in which man has finally reconnected with living materials.
The historic starting point for this new era, which the artists refer to as ‘mycélocène’, is ‘In Vivo’, the proposal by the architects from Bento (Florian Mahieu, Corentin Dalon and Charles Palliez) and their multidisciplinary team from Wallonia and Brussels for the Belgian Pavilion at the 18th Venice International Architecture Biennale.

‘In Vivo’ calls into question our voracious, extra-activist production system by giving us an opportunity to see, feel and experience an alternative constructive world made from living materials in a single moment in time (M). Mycelium, wood and soil are all sourced from the urban landscape in Brussels, as part of a sustainable approach to a super-short circuit.

The piece puts the concrete reality of this temporary installation into perspective, and extends it through the current century through an inspiring fictional account that takes the form of an investigation conducted in the 2050s.
Based on clues and fragments collected by Christine Aventin and Vinciane Despret, this investigation brings together diverse and varied records, including email correspondence, extracts from texts about mycology and philosophy, field records from an anthropologist, Juliette Salme, who supervised the work by Bento and reports by psychologists, historians and experts in therolinguistics (a discipline that studies non-human languages and literature).

Everything it attests to (because there is a lot of truth in these stories), and everything it imagines (because there were a lot of potential futures to consider to give them a chance to reflect reality) takes root, branches out and blooms from an architectural proposal, and new way of living, created by Bento.
This work amplifies this statement, with the aim of escaping ‘an inert world, which has no intentions or projects, an available world in which living beings, other than humans, sometimes formed a vague landscape, sometimes constituted a useless or irritating clutter or sometimes served as a resource to extract and consume.’ The fertile imagination that emerges immerses us entirely in this outlook, and traces pathways for the development of the possible realities of this new constructive era.

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