Amber Frid-Jimenez, Joe Dahmen: Mycelium Mock-up

Title:

Mycelium Mock-up

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Creation Year:

2015

Medium:

Mycelium blocks, LCD screens

Artist Statement:

Mycelium Mock-up is an architectural installation composed of a wall built of mushrooms with embedded screens that play looped videos and image sequences pertaining to urban aspirations and failures of the last two decades in Vancouver. The walls are constructed of environmentally sustainable blocks of agricultural waste and mycelium. Mycelium is the root structure of mushrooms, a thread-like fungus that plays an essential role in natural world, aiding in the decomposition of materials and converting them to biologically available elements. Vancouver utilizes global capital in an effort to reinvent itself as the world’s greenest city. This ambition, when combined with the mechanism of global speculative development, produces a paradox. Despite the presence of some of the most progressive and experimental urban planning policies in North America, how can global capital, with its attendant pressures to produce short term gains, construct a sustainable city? When space is a commodity exchanged on speculation, why not build as cheaply as possible? The installation engages with the cycles of demolition and speculative construction that embody these tensions through the use of video and next-generation sustainable construction materials.