Deepening / Part 1: I know it's a bit strange but it's the truth. This whole project grew out of a discussion between Warren and I about design and fungi. 

My fascination with the great world of fungi stems from multiple sources, which I try to summarize below. At an early stage in life my curiosity about this world focused above all on their mystery, their magic. My aunt Gina lives in a hilly village in the Venetian foothills of the Alps and she often spoke of mushrooms, they were almost always at the table and from an early age I would hear stories of people going into a forest and coming back with baskets full of mushrooms. They talked about secret places they couldn't reveal, they talked about very rich expeditions and unsuccessful expeditions, a bit like deep sea fishing I guess, or maybe like hunting, what fascinated me was the mixture of knowledge, study and luck, this gave these expeditions an archaic, pre-industrial charm.

My second source of inspiration is John Cage, whom I studied obsessively during my university studies, following step by step his parabolas and pirouettes that combined poetry and experimentation, amidst a piano modified with screws and various paraphernalia, silences and New York traffic noises, mushrooms appear played through a series of microphones and other devices unknown to me. This exploration and his tales of mushrooms brought me even closer to this magical world and the world of electronic music. 

The third source was a fantastic surprise, a book entitled “Entangled Life” by the British researcher Merlin Sheldrake, a mine of information and insights for those fascinated by fungi. There I learnt many things about their form, their method of diffusion and proliferation. I learnt that fungi are perhaps the most sustainable materials in the world because under certain conditions they double their volume every day. I discovered about their multicentric structure and their fantastic and infallible root system, the thing that fascinated me most then is their being in a world in between, not animal, not plant but in symbiosis with both, a very complex and articulated world made up of many forms and structures that are sometimes difficult to define and classify.

Deepening / Part 2: After our chat full of other stories we thought: why not learn from the fungi? And maybe try to apply this symbiotic, pacifist and magical strategy of theirs? Does it make sense to try to seriously explore the world in between? Perhaps in design today, opportunities, satisfactions, possible escape routes are to be sought outside the structure or in a middle world between industry and academia, in the gray areas that are difficult to decipher and classify (hence free territory), in the interstices between rules, in the third landscapes of the project, in the occasions when we are asked at some point, "but what exactly do you do?". Perhaps this is a possible survival strategy that will allow us to trace new paths in the wild woods on the borders of a hyper-structured hyper-rigid and hyper-boring world. In search of neo-tribal, fun solutions that do not oppose the existing system, but which with the magic, lightness and intelligence of mushrooms trigger a symbiotic exchange in the days and territories where there are many fruits, distributing thousands of spores!.

All bioluminescent fungi share the same enzymatic mechanism, suggesting that there is a bioluminescent pathway that arose early in the evolution of the mushroom-forming Agaricales. The physiological and ecological function of fungal bioluminescence has not been established with certainty.

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Warren Taylor so much for giving me the opportunity to return to this special island and for this dialogue that produced such a beautiful and crazy project. We met in 2018 and almost every year, during a series of summer workshops in Milan lasting about 3 days, 3 days x 5 episodes =15 days in total, these were enough to create a bond that seems to last for two generations.

I would also like to thank Careof, a fantastic contemporary art association in Milan that has been working with Monash University for years.

In order to make this project a starting point, a possible platform for future events, we have come up with a phantasmagorical website containing all the basic information for future events.

u-p-s-t-a-r-t.com