2017 – ongoing
Tessa Zettel
Artist book & events
Residencies at HIAP Suomenlinna, Helsinki (Australia Council for the Arts), 2017 / Saari Residence (Kone Foundation), Mynämäki (Finland), 2019 / & ÖRES, Örö (Finland), 2024.
Ongoing research working towards a slow-growth, speculative artist book sharing stories of mushroom-picking cultures. Against a backdrop of cascading climate crises, Mushroom Trading Post takes up Donna Haraway’s claim, ‘it matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories’, to ask: what worlds are made in the sticky multispecies tangle of humans knowing, gathering, pickling, drying, eating, thinking with & learning from mushrooms? What stories can those worlds make, and how might these stories transform us?
Over several years I have accompanied people across Finland picking edible mushrooms in their local forest or park—hairdressers, artists, designers, retirees, lawyers, students, accountants, forestry managers, ecologists, translators, healthcare workers, bankers and wild food educators—collecting accounts of diverse relationships with mushrooms, making watercolour & ink drawings, and drying specimens. These interactions have been expanded into public events such as In the dark Evenings #1: If You Give Them Food (HIAP, 2017), a reading group/meal/collaborative mapping around Anna Tsing’s book The Mushroom at the End of the World.
Exploring the possibilities of ‘book-as-performance’, a small number of handmade copies will eventually circulate between borrowers via an experimental distribution model.
Please get in touch if you would like to participate!
Read OuMoPo blog posts about Mushroom Trading Post here