Affective Materiality: A practice-based collaboration with fungi

Abstract

This research investigates experimental design approaches to making and unmaking textiles through working with mushroom mycelium. In doing so, this practice-based research explores the affective and ethical dimensions of care, revealing complex entanglements between human and non-human actors such as fungi. The absence of care for textile clothing (much of which is mass-produced) is a significant factor in the production of large-scale textile waste resulting in damaging effects on biodiverse ecologies. Ganoderma steyaertanum, a saprophytic species of fungi that occurs in Australia, is capable of breaking down cotton textile waste and, in the process, remakes a material of its own. Working with such materials may open up new possibilities for how we care for textiles and by extension human and nonhuman ecologies. In working with a non-human species of fungi – a practice that is experimental in nature – philosophical re-framing is required to consider the affective and material entanglements between human and non-human others, thereby challenging human exceptionalism. Theorists such as Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Donna Haraway and Elizabeth Grosz have been central in offering critical perspectives at the intersection of the biological sciences and posthuman ethics. Through this lens, this research critiques anthropocentric approaches to working with mushroom mycelium – as fungi are increasingly being employed to remediate waste matter resulting from advanced capitalist consumption. Posthuman theoretical enquiries stemming from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concepts of affect, engage affirmative and emergent visions of rethinking a care of the possible. Located in the material-focussed field of Growing Design, as defined by Serena Camere and Elvin Karana, my practice utilises hands-on ‘collaborative’ methodologies of working directly with textiles and fungi, evidenced through four interrelated project outcomes. However, through the notion of ‘dressing’, my project reconceptualises collaboration – as not simply limited to two contained entities working together in a shared project – but rather as symbiotic exchanges that are unmade and remade together through contamination. This idea explores design practices that are processual rather than teleological and open up other types of relations with non-human ecologies through an affectivity of materials. Show more