During the last years and also as part of the Artificial Times master program at Sandberg I have been cultivating a sound practice. In my sound practice I use electronics (esp32 instead of arduino!) to interact with natural elements. I am interpreting mushroom-related in a broad sense here. For me the relationship between us and reality mediated by technology is a practice of slow and attentive retuning with a sensitive knowledge seeking. Cultivating affect with others and the surroundings and creating space for this process to be prioritised, expanded. I am mostly interested into the relational nature of fungi and how that will be resonating in the trip within the group.

I pick mushrooms all year round. I was brought up in a family where all of us picked mushrooms. I remember walks with my grandparents and leaning about different tips of mushrooms. Now I started making double extracts. I teach other people about mushroom - during walks, during workshop that are focused around queerness and I sprinkle some spors here and there in the program of plutonixcollective.org and my during my own spaces - caringfor.space

While I am relatively new to mycology, I have always felt a quiet pull toward fungi. Each year, as summer fades, I find myself waiting for the mushrooms to emerge. Their sudden appearance in the landscape feels like magic. I love walking through forested areas, especially where I grew up, and noticing the variety of forms, colours, and textures fungi bring to the ecosystem. This joy and curiosity led me to begin integrating fungi into my ecological thinking. I am currently studying for a Master’s in Ecology and I am increasingly interested in how fungi complicate and enrich ecological relationships. My “practice,” right now, is one of observation, wonder, and open-hearted learning.

Mushroom foraging, Amanita Muscara dreamwork, rhizomatic research, Dionysian ceremonies, community-building projects...

I’m at the beginning of my mushroom journey - I love to draw mushrooms, watch documentaries and spot and boop them on walks in the forest - I am too amateur to know which ones to collect yet but want to learn more!! I sit with mushrooms often and see that as a spiritual entanglement of entering into union with them for guidance.

This past year I created a multisensory forest/mushroom experince for elderly people in care homes, which invited participants to engage their bodies with an old birch root and the mycelial network around it through all the senses plus augmented reality. I am also researching a practice/ritual where I communicate/listen/dream with specific places and entities, including mushrooms through the medium of water.

I'm a self-taught amateur mycologist. The Flemish culture in which I grew up is not fungi-minded these days, as a kid I was even taught to fear mushrooms. So I learned stuff later in life through books, apps and long long walks.
By taking my queer friends on my mushroom spotting walks in the woods and Antwerp city parks, I share my knowledge and enthusiasm for fungi and try to disclose this hidden world to Belgian city queers. With this I try to reintroduce communal knowledge of fungi in my community.

Until now, I haven’t done practices in terms of cultivation or consumption. I am very fond of cooking and love to learn about the plants I am using by using them, mushrooms included. Otherwise the practices with mushrooms come down to only theoretical texts.

I've been growing Cordyceps Militaris for the last year, recently started experimenting with Lion's Mane. Have a little space in Tallinn where I grow and have done some fungal workshops in collaboration with others and otherwise try to keep this space open to anyone interested. It's called @Seenekoda. Haven't done advertisement or events regularly so it's quite unknown at the moment but it's something! So some cultivation experience, little bit of organizing (fungal) community events. Recently bought a microscope to dig deeper but haven't put it to proper use yet!

Until now, my practice has been slimy, mossy, experimental. I spend the majority of my time crouched among crunching leaves, analysing mushrooms, trying to learn who they are. Sometimes, rarely, I forage for culinary desires and make powders to use in earthy desserts or meals for friends. Mostly, I play around and try to make ink from the fruiting bodies I suspect could decompose into gooey pastes. I use the ink for lino prints, or to write about my different observations and learnings from encounters with fungi. I also like to print spores, and see what mushrooms want to reveal. In my collective practice, I go to the same spots with older people from my town who have known these soils since they were children, and we listen/smell/watch the changes that are rippling beneath/barely above ground. For a few years, I've been researching how cultural traditions related to mushrooms are (re)adapting as fungi themselves are (re)adapting to changes in the soils and trees they relation with.

I am curious to listen to the mushrooms.
This trip would be for me a sonic journey.
I have been working on learning and improving my practice of listening to the surroundings.
Field recoding means for me tuning in.
Listen to expand the perception of something that otherwise I would overlook.
I have been recording trams, volcanoes, trash bins, but never muchrooms.
I am equipped with a geo phone to listen to low frequency sounds.
I would love to record the sounds of the surrounding and perhaps some other sounds coming from our daily experience during the trip.
I can.
Maybe some ritual around mushrooms and queerness or even m + q + sexual spaces.
Like a group masturbation space with mushroom fruiting bodies... that's just what to came to my mind.
I will need to feel into it before the gathering and see how much creative juices I have and capacities.
At this stage, what I have to offer is a deep curiosity and a desire to be in community with others who are exploring fungi as both scientific and symbolic beings.
I am interested in how my ecological training can be applied in more intuitive and creative contexts.
For instance, thinking about how post-conflict landscapes (a theme I recently explored in a summer school at the Irish Museum of Modern Art) might be read through fungal processes of decomposition, healing, and regeneration.
I would love to collaborate on building bridges between ecological research and queer, artistic, and spiritual approaches to fungi.
"In my practice I look to mushrooms for inspiration of how to weave ideas together in a rhizomatic fashion.
I enjoy interweaving different modalities, responding to a research inquiry first through movement, then reading that through sound, then letting that inspire text, and so on.
In this way each output bears the imprint of another, spores of one idea travelling freely across mediums and sprouting in different ways.
As mentioned before I am inspired by Dionysus as a fruiting body which travels and transposes freely, adapting to different terrains and climates.
Currently I am creating ritual theatre which allows space for mischief and madness - setting the environment and creating the behaviour codes to allow Dionysian magic to ensue.
This in order for all to remember the power of community, the power of themselves as magical creators and the possibilities in reality. "
I have a collaborative improvised movement workshop called ‘a dance between the ripe and the rot’ and this could be delivered to further explore and expand my research for the upcoming piece I’m developing ‘Compost the cabaret’ a queer ecology drag extravaganza!
I would be happy to share a version of the above mentioned ritual about dreaming with/communing with specific mushrooms or places in the forest!
It requires coming back to the same spot 3 times over the span of at least 3 days, and a glass jar for each person.
"As an illustrator/drawing maker that works a lot with language, I'm intrigued by the Dutch naming of mushrooms.
The naming is often figurative and rooted in folklore.
This resonates a lot with my visual language and how I link image with words in my drawings, sculptures and installations.
I'm looking for similarities and differences in the naming, treating of and believes (superstition) around mushrooms over different languages and cultures.
For example; Some mushrooms are labeled as poisonous in Dutch books, but seen as edible in French culture.
The 'dead man's fingers' is called 'houtknotszwam' in Dutch, which would translate as 'wood club fungus'.
The day I found my first dead man's fingers, I ended up cutting my finger and having to go to the hospital. Talking about superstition..."
Some cooking, learning about which can be eaten and which not, learning about herbs and what they can be used for.
I can perhaps give an overview or introduction to growing Cordyceps Militaris at home if that's what might be interesting to people, i dunno!
Also I have a bunch of fungi related books I can bring to share and for people to read.
I’m not sure if this is a format that would be appealing to everyone at the gathering but I could propose a collective lino printing activity with mushroom ink.
We could collectively create a lino print for the zine, and try to use mushroom ink to stamp it.
I can bring a few materials (a rubber block, a carving handle, etc.) and during the week each person at the gathering can add a tiny illustration on the block to compose the whole.

Other ways to engage with mushrooms.(Audio, smell, spiritual)
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Exchanging knowledge around naming with mycologists with different mother tongue.
(Multidisciplinary and multilinguistic surroundings)

I want to include my interest for fungi/mushrooms//mycelium more into my artistic practise.

I would love to connect to the people there as well as the nature, and lastly also my body. To experience multispecies connection, having a calm and clear mind and being creative in my way of living.
Definitely interested in biodata sonification and in genereal just meeting other myco-curious people! I imagine i'll be inspired during and after this gathering.

I’ve been yearning to learn and experiment with making tools (contact mics or small diy instruments) to listen to mycelium so I’m eager and curious to hear about biodata sonification. Mostly, I imagine learning new (to me) ways of being in relation with and becoming queer fruiting bodies. I would be most excited to co-create, to meld practices, and see what emerges from these collective bonds. It feels invigorating to imagine learning from the particular alchemy that would form during the week among people with different practices on a land that is unfamiliar, on which I would move humbly among the creatures who inhabit there. Within the giddiness of transforming, learning, and researching, I also suspect I will experience the challenge of sitting with that which is cryptic, and/or fugitive. I imagine leaving with redrawn, blurred, evolving notions of my human form, and of fungi forms.

I want to learn how other queers live with mushrooms - the rituals, mischief, dreams, and quiet noticing that shape their fungal kinships. I'm drawn to the chance to be in context with others who relate to fungi as teachers, lovers, tricksters. I think something can shift when we’re in a mycelial space together, sensing through queerness, slowness, and entanglement. Mostly I just want to be in a mycelial mess with other queers who see mushrooms as kin, not just things to study or eat.

I welcome space for the unexpected to flourish, as I can only hope it would in such a gathering! I hope to connect with the land of Massia, and experience how together with the other artists present we can create our own mycological network. I hope to take away some practices which I can implement in my daily work, or maybe practices which inspire a longer and deeper tangent of research. I look forward to sharing and deepening my knowledge in decolonial, ecosocial and queer-feminist knowledge practices, through learning from human and nonhuman kin. And I very much look forward to cultivating my relationship with Amanita Muscaria and sharing this with others!

In my practice I look for cues and to drive my intuition. The journey has a profound meaning for me in this sense as discovery and transformation. I am curious to learn about the other participants and the soil, the techniques used for sonification, I am interested in the research aspect. Especially around sound. Deepening my landscape of attentive tuning. Enlarging a landscape of meaningful connection. Learn about beings I want to know more of and get inspired from. Visit the land.

Meeting other fungi freaks and maybe falling in love! Learn how to use agar agar and grom micelium and then make some mulch/wood chips/wood to plant it in. All from scratch :3
Maybe I will experiment with that already before I come...

Learing new species, participating in some spiritual/ritualistic space to explore more my connection to fungie... making cute mushrooms out of clay and painting them, idk, I'm ready for everything!"
I hope to learn new ways of thinking and feeling with fungi. I’m excited about biodata sonification, dreamwork, and somatic rituals as portals into non-linear, embodied knowledge. I’d love to experience community care, softness, and shared vulnerability. As someone questioning queerness and identity, I imagine this gathering might offer insight not just into mushrooms but into myself, by creating space for transformation, ambiguity, and multiplicity, the same qualities that make fungi so fascinating.

Deepening my decolonial practises. More hands on tools for foraging. How to hold the space for research retreats such as this! I’m really looking sporeward to the gathering!!