82 83 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, 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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