Mycorrhizae es un libro en dos idiomas, inglés y castellano, creado por Genoveva Galarza. Una obra artística y literaria que expone una visión mítica y arquetípica de algunos hongos comunes de nuestro entorno desde la perspectiva personal de la autora. Recoge 31 especies de hongos con bellas ilustraciones, así como relatos y poesías inspirados en sus vivencias con estos seres míticos.
https://genocation.com/projects/mycorrhizae/
Mycorrhizae is an artistic and literary project about humans and mushrooms. The author?a human?goes on a profoundly personal journey through grief, disconnection and estrangement in a post-pandemic world. But art, mythology and ecology come to the rescue and become the author's most precious tool for healing. Like fungus, the author feeds off a dead imaginary world and learns to build a new one.In her "Carrier Bar Theory of Fiction", Ursula K. Le Guin [1] encourages us to tell stories that are recipients. Storytelling becomes a bag to hold things and bring them home: things that don't need closure, threads that don't need tying. Stories don't aspire to be linear, tales don't need to revolve around one conflict and, like an arrow, take us to the final resolution. Stories don't need a hero.
Mycorrhizae is a carrier bag; a net bag woven out of mycelium. This artistic and literary project holds a collection of essays, intimate tales, poems and quotes about diverse topics?which, like things thrown into our carrier bag, don't have a linear connection but a mycelial one. The author uses her relationship with mycology?transmitted down through generations?to talk about other things: love and grief, technology and colonialism, ecology and land exploitation, linguistics and philosophy, identity, isolation, community.
Through its pages the book builds the Fungal Archetypes, a speculative illustrated mythology where 31 different mushrooms take the shape of an archetype, all inspired by the fascinating and shadowed ecology of the Funga. By throwing these fictional myths into the carrier bag, the author invites us to reflect about other possible ways to live; futures that could maybe learn from natural systems.
The result of this exploratory and creative process is Mycorrhizae: A songbook of fungal myths, a mycelial collection of texts?prose, poetry and other authors' quotes?and mushroom illustrated mythologies.
The songbookPermalink to ?The songbook?
Mycorrhizae is a songbook with no songs. The title transforms this little zine into the kind of booklet one takes to mass or any other kind of spiritual ritual. The songbook of fungal myths becomes a liturgic tool, an accessory for a speculative worship.
Instead of psalms and prayers, this book collects a series of texts?narrative essays and poems?like quick sketches on a number of topics that frame the journey of the author through difficult times. These sketches travel through remembered past and fictional future and, instead of offering any clear answers, they attempt to link all questions together in the search for a systemic interpretation of The Trouble.
The development of this project was also illuminated by a constellation of books and essays by a variety of authors?environmentalists, feminists, philosophers and poets?that incorporated into their work a contemporary look on ecology, planetary grief and species loneliness. Their influence over this songbook is captured in a collection of exceptionally inspiring quotes and excerpts. All these works are listed in the Bibliography section below.
