This year at Kiemkracht festival, the curatorial team of Back2SoilBasics — Fairouz Gazdallah, Philsan Omar Osman, and Sadaf Malyar — are coming together to explore the worlds of mushrooms, mycelium, and entangled practices.
As a team, they are weaving a collective process: sharing literature, discoveries from social media, passages from books and documentaries, and projects we have come across online. Together, we are mapping connections, ideas, and inspirations — a living archive of our thinking and curiosity.
During the festival, they will create a physical space where you can encounter this process: a glimpse into how our minds, networks, and conversations grow, branch, and interconnect. It is our way of being transparent about the many ideas, artists, and projects that inspire us, even if we cannot feature them all on stage.(UNDER THE MOTHER MUSHROOM,)
They invite you to step into this space with us, to explore, linger, and witness how a curatorial journey unfolds — a collaborative experiment in curiosity, care, and collective thinking.
INTERACTIVE INSTALLATION | Maÿtu collective
Join curator Sadaf Malyar as she guides us into the living, entangled worlds of the Maÿtu collective.
The Maytu collective
Maÿtu is a collective formed by Pedro Riofrio, Corentin Van Mullender, Ugo Danhier, and Anouk Lewkowicz. Their practice blends art, design, and biology, while being strongly influenced by readings in anthropology. Through various projects, they study the growth processes of mycelium and the microscopic mechanisms that drive it phenomena that remain relatively unknown.
Since the meeting of Ugo and Anouk, Maÿtu has been exploring, since 2019, the diverse potentials offered by fungal species collected in Brussels parks and nearby forests. They created their own microbiology laboratory, the Fungal Lab, conceived and built with the specific conditions required for mushroom growth.
Working collectively, in pairs, or individually, Pedro, Corentin, Ugo, and Anouk research different techniques to create new materials and objects. They question various ways of transmitting their research, as well as the inquiries that emerge from their dialogue with these microorganisms (exhibitions, immersive installations, publications, workshops in social centers, the design of pedagogical tools).
Affiliated with the non-profit organisation Fungal Lab, the Maÿtu collective has explored innovative approaches since 2019, using fungi as sources of diverse materials. These fungi, harvested in Brussels parks and surrounding forests, are cultivated under specific conditions, feeding on organic waste to produce a tissue called mycelium. Composed of long cells called hyphae, this mycelium displays chemical properties similar to silk.
Alongside their research on fungal textiles, the collective investigates the use of ceramic containers within their experiments. These containers offer precise control over parameters such as humidity and temperature. The intersection of these two research paths opens multiple perspectives—from creating fungal textiles shaped by the containers to practical applications that aim to democratize these techniques through the widespread availability of clay.
The ontological dimension is also explored, taking into account the current crisis context and the desire to develop a new semiotics aligned with the paradigm shift in contemporary ecology. As artists, the collective seeks to generate new narratives emerging from interactions between living organisms and ancestral techniques, thus developing new artistic practices, production models, and functional design solutions adapted to our present moment.
The stories shaped from their individual experiences belong to the collective, and once shared, new narratives emerge. The rhizomatic model is essential for deconstructing the hierarchical model that often monopolizes the storytelling of our species. Through the use of ceramics, mycelium, and textiles, the collective strives to develop new narratives.
TALK | Making The Invisible Visible: The Food System as the Mycelium
Some lived experiences are less visible than others. Visibility is political. Despite women of colour and indigenous people working the land, cooking the meals, doing the unpaid labour, we rarely see them celebrated and acknowledged in the food spaces. Join us for the talk 'Making The Invisible Visible: The Food System as the Mycelium' where we explore together the many ways throughout history in which women and indigenous people survived, innovated and played with codes against all odds.
We make a parallel between the mycelium growing in impossible places and climates and the marginalised body. What can we learn from the resilience of fungi? What can we learn from the resilience of marginalised bodies within the food system?
EXPO | Under The Mother Mushroom
Sadaf, Fairouz & Philsan take you on their curatorSHIP. Navigating through their research, collection of food memories, artist crushes and random facts about mushrooms and spores.
