Speculating with Mycelium #

Open CUBE Presentation, 19.01.2026, 18:00

A. Isa Araújo, Ina Thomann, David Pirrò and Leonie Strecker

“Mycelium is a living, growing, opportunistic investigation - speculation in bodily form."

(Merlin Sheldrake, 2021)

A dark room. Cables hang from the ceiling, stretch across the space. Four performers. An audience that is part of the system. Speculating with mycelium is a lecture performance and sound installation built around a single organizing logic: the behavior of mycelium networks. Not as a metaphor, but as method. The instrument is a meshwork of four performers, four instruments, sound, video, light and electric magnetic field, a feedback organism. The output of one becomes the input of another, creating a web of interdependencies that mirrors the way mycelium distributes nutrients, signals, and memory across a network. The system listens to the environment and changes its behavior accordingly, just as mycelium explores, detects and reacts to what it finds. The audience is neither passive nor collective nor individual. Upon entering, they are already influencing the system – altering the electric magnetic fields and leaving traces behind. Every movement leaves a trace in the darkness. These traces accumulate across the duration of the performance, building aluminous record of all paths taken – influenced by the instruments, moving bodies and light. Speculating with mycelium is a processual work. This performance is a dot on the timeline, marking a point between the past – included in today’s presentation – and future iterations of this process.

“Mycelium describes the most common of fungal habits, better thought of not as a thing but as a process: an exploratory, irregular tendency."

(Merlin Sheldrake, 2021)