Mush Rooms

To be contemporary might mean to re-learn how to dwell in instability, in uncertainty. Now that the notion of progress (or capitalist modernism) seems quite fragile and finally questionable, anything that once was solid, given, or true is currently in the process of evaporating. The viral pandemic affecting the global human population confirms the volatility of what we understood, until recently, as the stable world. This crisis calls for political aims to articulate newly perceived paradigms, using new tools and new understandings, thereby bringing the “political” to bear on aspects of everyday life that previously appeared natural or pragmatic.

Mush Rooms is a small contribution to this positioning, inhabiting a designed world—indirectly inspired by Donna Haraway’s String Figures (and other SFs) and Bruno Latour’s Gaia (after Lovelock and Margulis), but constituting a work of its own, with its own internal logic and character.

The production of this video was supported by Fundação EDP and MAAT—Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology.

Critical Cooking Show is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Istanbul Design Biennial within the context of its fifth edition, Empathy Revisited: Designs for more than one.

BUREAU is an architecture studio, furniture series, and editorial project by Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta and Galliane Zamarbide. They are based between Geneva and Lisbon.

Walter el Nagar is a chef known for dynamic and evolving menus, pop-up restaurant series, and his restaurant “le cinquième jour,” where experimental free meals are served on Saturdays to those in need. Active in gastronomy and social inclusion, he founded Fondazione Mater in 2020.

Filipe Felizardo is a Lisbon-based musician and visual artist; his work spans composing for solo electric guitar, writing and drawing, and installation and land-art works. He has previously released albums on Clean Feed and three:four.