On Nature, On Architecture: Eyal Weizman and Victoria McKenzie

(This transcribed conversation took place on March 21st, 2019, Goldsmiths’ University at the Forensic Architecture Agency.)

—————————————————————————————

Victoria: Ok so I guess I’ll begin by just giving you a synopsis of what I’m working on right now which is ‘The Mycoremediation of Radioactive Soil in Nuclear Landscapes’

Eyal: mmm... how very Schuppli of you.

Victoria: [soft laughter]... So mycoremediation is the utilisation of mushrooms to heal “toxic” soil. I am a mushroom cultivator meaning I grow them in my home but I’m also fascinated by their natural capabilities. Even though they’ve never been placed in the radioactive environment, they’ve been placed in the “toxic” environment such as in the Ecuadorian Amazonian rainforest when the Chevron (Texaco) oil spills happened in 2002. Oyster mushrooms have been used as a type of citizen science to remediate toxic soil in that area because they break down petroleum hydrocarbons by releasing enzymes and acids that...

Ok, but before I began interrogating the workings of the mushroom, my research was looking at a different kind of particle, that being the radioactive isotope. My introduction to this was the Fukushima ‘3/11’ disaster that completely perpetuated for me this rhetoric of invisibility surrounding radiation. Radiation, it appeared, became something of a visible invisibility, hauntingly mobile, toxic and uncontrollable— a fatality of sorts. The radiation came to be not from a single “accident” but from one “accident” after the other where you have this earthquake, that triggered a tsunami that hit the nuclear power plant which then released radioactive isotopes into the environment and out of the capable hands of man. The isotope in its mobility attaches itself to the particles of the ocean, the particles within soil complexes and the particles within our own bodies causing all sorts of mutations and atrophies that the government know longer has “control” of. The fatality in this perceived loss of control has people in a state of distrust with their government as they question a life of mutated living or rather, a situated living in disaster.

I’m trying to interrogate this fatality and I plan my intervention within what is happening with the radioactive soil in Fukushima. At the moment the soil is being gathered within garbage bags that are then collected as mountains of waste awaiting either ‘burial’ or ‘burning’. I perceive this moment as an enactment — of trauma, where public memory is literally being collected, shoved and shunned. The bags are awaiting either burial or burning which only releases the radioactive isotopes back into the environment. So there’s a cycling happening here — a destructive one.

This is where the notion of ‘slow violence’ comes in — the exhausted but extremely relevant term. The type of violence I see happening here is one that isn’t necessarily spectacular or instantaneous but temporally demanding over its incremental use of time as space. Slow violence builds upon itself in the same way that the radioactive isotope continues travelling. When I think about slow violence I also think about its counter-part being ‘kinetic violence’ — a term I once read about in an interview with you. In many ways Forensic Architecture as an agency makes its propositions between the spectrum of slow and kinetic violences. Can you speak on this a bit more, or perhaps tell me whatever you are thinking?

Eyal: Yeah, I mean this is a fascinating project and obviously nuclear power is the most diagrammatic representation of molecular history — something happens, something is being discovered on the molecular level or on the atomic level and it has geopolitical implications. So there is this full scale happening and I think this is something that is incredibly interesting.

And then there is this sort of kinetic violence of an explosion as an accident or as something of a nuclear attack which also has a latency, in time. So it is really the best kind of example in terms of entering into a folding of scales of time and space that is necessary as a way of thinking. I think also what I would hope to see from a project in that field is an exercise in thinking across scales, and durations also, in order to ask the question — what is mushroom politics in a sense or what is mushroom geopolitics?

But what I would take from the atomic and its violence, its latency is the effect of an action on the smaller scale of the atom as an effect on the larger scale of the earth. I would take this as an epistemology — as a mode of describing and acting politically. Ask yourself how can I go deep in order to interrogate wide?

Victoria: mmm, well its interesting to hear you say “mushroom politics” because I look to it as this political actant in that it really handles crisis management in an interesting manner. It uses recycling and waste in a different way than what is commonly known as the anthropocentric approach. And I’m thinking about recycling in a very functional sense where what we view as toxicity, that being this radioactive soil or toxic soil, they view this as food to be digested and transformed into “healthy” soil. Therefore what they view as waste, is essentially our food. So we have this cycling and recycling occurring at a level of natural phenomena, and it is here I have to reiterate this idea once introduced to me by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa — soil is the infrastructure of life.

But before I go into that I want to talk about structure for a little bit because the characteristic mushroom we see on the top of the soil is the last piece in the process so to speak. It’s the floral body of the organism and the vegetative body is called mycelium. My real interest starts with mycelium — completely hidden, invisible, within the soil — and this is where all the remedial work takes place. Mycelium is often called the ‘mycelial network’ or ‘Earth’s first internet’ because it acts as a communication device in which tree and plant roots can tap in, to access a platform of speech. This is how trees speak across forest floors. This is how mushroom bodies grow because when a tree dies and falls, mycelium sense this death and begin communicating amongst each other to send all the nutrients of its body to that particular space allowing mushrooms to feed and grow.

But the feeding and the growing, the eating and the breaking down of enzymes across forest floors reveal an architecture to me. I want to talk about what I’d like to call the ‘Mycelial Architecture’ — and in making that claim I have to ask the question what does it mean to be an architecture? In my readings so far I’ve come across the term ‘network’. Mycologists have described the mycelium as something underground that acts as a network in the name of co- opting the logics of cybernetics and mesh networks. But I think there is something different in calling it an architecture, and this is one of the reasons why I reached out to you because I want to interrogate this notion of architecture so that I can apply it to the natural world to perhaps, see what’s there.

Eyal: Mmm... But architecture — the foundation of architecture — is the act of drawing a line between nature and what is known as architecture. It’s in the environment in as much as its designed by humans. It’s the line against the forest — it’s the deforestation. Cutting the square or circle in the forest is the ground zero of what architecture is. But if you want to use the notion of architecture you need to unhinge what architecture is and work with it in a different way. Or you need to say that Architecture is deforestation, especially when you take into consideration the state of nature from the enlightenment period. What is the moment that the European force turns into a boat? Because you need about 9,000 oaks to build one boat which means Europe floats on its forests to the Americas — the forest line disappears and with it, the state of nature becomes a concept rather than a reality for European enlightenment. So I think that understanding architecture as deforestation or architecture as environmental simplification, architecture as an attack on biodiversity —and then somehow biodiversity breaks apart this tension that is continuously ongoing.

Now if you want to say that architecture is simply any anthropogenic process in the sense that humans are a part of it, then you need to redefine architecture in a way that, for example, Paulo Tavares did. It is and could include forms of biological—human interactions that have no direct volition in it. The thing about architecture is that it is an act, and it is an act of a will. It is a will of whoever is in power — a king, the architect, the housemaster etc. When you open it up, the will starts to become diffused. But why do you actually need architecture in its whole sense and what will you do with it?

Victoria: I suppose I was thinking about this entire underground structure, or this entire underground world as operating as an architecture in an infrastructural sense. In that, if architecture is everywhere, and I’m saying that loosely, and it acts like an infrastructure where it is both everywhere present and invisible at work — I’m imagining the mycelium in this way as well. It courses through the underground, out of sight, out of mind, and yet it is responsible for the growth, communication and building of a forest — an entire ecosystem.

Eyal: What kind of mushrooms grow inside buildings?

Victoria: Hmm, it depends. It’s mostly mould.

Eyal: Is mould a mushroom? The thing that people escape from.

Victoria: No, but it is a part of the fungi kingdom. This vast, vast world. Actually my moment of intervention in real life wasn’t the mushroom in the environment but the mushroom in the body.

For years I was fascinated by certain medicinal mushrooms known as ‘adaptogens’ — lions mane, reishi, cordyceps mushrooms that are said to have amazing effects on your brain and on your body through “adapting” to our body's need. This is truly a moment I could only understand through Frederik Jameson’s notion of the ‘dialectic’ — so instead of the ‘vitamin’ that enters your body with a prescription, the adaptogenic mushroom goes in to sense the landscape of the immune system. If you have an under-active immune system it raises it, but if you have an overactive immune system it lowers it. There’s a notion of balance already embedded in the ontology of the mushroom.

Eyal: I’m so fascinated by the way you speak

Victoria: No — You are the guiding light of rhetoric.

Eyal: Me? I barely speak english!

Victoria: But anyways I’m interested in conceptually taking the mushroom outside of the body, outside of the kitchen and into the landscape. Which in itself is an anthropocentric act but as you said even though it’s the will of the human it opens up to something else.

Eyal: Mmmm... So what I suggest to you is not to use architecture as a metaphor for complex systems. First, it gives architecture too much of a good name because its actually an act of brutal intervention — an act of simplification because it is based on the production of the tabula rasa. It’s the designation of something that has no boundaries as being bounded, before you deforest anything it is the conception of that area. Then you, you know, shave it off. You take all complexity out of it and build something that is so much more simple than what was there before. So it is a problem of taking the impoverishment of architecture as a metaphor for the infinite complexity of biological relations and the borderlessness, in a sense. But where I am actually interested in mushrooms is exactly as you say, their capacity to enter into areas that have been degraded and abandoned — so it is actually the inter-stitches between architecture or between human intervention and complex biological relations. It exists there — maybe at some point it will disappear because other biological forms will take over but it exists as that kind of part-artifice, part-biological relation. And the complexity that we have is not simply the kind of pure forest complexity of trees communicating with each other through their roots and passing on messages about this and that but in the ability of the biological world to understand its new inhabitants, to register them, to sense them. There is a biological substance that ties together a simplified structure of infrastructural networks that are limited by the design capacity of humans and the incredible kind of sets of relations that exists in the biological world and in-between them there is something that could communicate — you could say ‘Mushroom is how nature speaks to architecture’ or ‘mushroom is the language by which architecture speaks to nature and nature speaks to architecture’

For mushrooms, the oil spill or the toxin in the bricks of a building is of interest. This is where it transfers what is “toxic” back into biological relation. It brings it back. So when you say remedial it already has a kind of ethics which I love but perhaps we need to work towards it rather than take it as good.

I love this project Victoria, but what I want to suggest is that before you call it remedial, poisonous, disruptive or destructive you think about the ecology of possibilities.

Things that are not only wonderful or poetic but something that communicates a flow of information and infrastructure all based on a kind of intelligent system that allows you to move from one class of things to the other. Right? The oil spill, for example, is a type of building, and when I say building, it is that which is foreign or introduced into a particular ecosystem or environment that is negotiated with it and the ambassadors, the people that do the negotiation, the mushrooms (!), translate something. This translation can be both good or bad.

Victoria: Definitely good or bad because there are poisonous mushrooms out there.

Eyal: (laughter) Yes, I was thinking...

So the “remedial” you say from a particular perspective, first from a human perspective, then from a particular human perspective that wants things to be more natural and this and that.

(more laughter)

We need to epistemologically take it a step back to see where it sits on a scale of communication and intelligence. Communication is nothing if it does not communicate between others and the better a language is the more it is able to break alterity. Language exists in-between, it does something very awkward, its full of misunderstanding and imperfection but it does something. And then, you know, humans speak to dogs, and language does something else, and we never know how it feels to be a dog. Then humans speak to a tree the alterity gap becomes bigger and then a building has to speak to a forest or an oil spill has to communicate to a forest. So I’m not trying to be poetic but I’m actually trying to think about communication across nature. It’s funny enough to think about forests that can think, talk and transfer information, but it is more interesting to me to cross that line and see how the government building speaks to the grass.

Victoria: Yes! And I think that once we start to think about language and communication as it happens in nature then there is a vitality to every living thing — the soil itself becomes a living organism. Soil is an inscribed body, a sacred terrain, a living organism with multiple other living organisms. Soil is a vessel, a body and a carrier of time — it holds a historical past as well as a speculative and collective future. Soil is not just a container of worlds but a world in itself. I’m thinking now about my ecofeminist foremothers — Jane Bennet, Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, Maria Puig de la Bellcasa who speak about the relationship between ecology, care and matters of care. But who also force me to ask how might we conceive of this planetary information system? How do we begin to make sense of it, understand it and utilise it?

But I also think about my practice of permaculture or permaculture as practice. In permaculture the top layer of the soil is living, it’s where all the living material lies. It’s where the roots go, where the worm societies live, its where all the components and exoskeletons exist. Then beneath it is the subsoil which is the infrastructural area that keeps it afloat. The soil itself acts as a translation — a translation device — the babel of the natural world, where the mycelium and other organisms tap into.

The soil itself is communicating with what is toxic to try and translate it into something non-toxic.

Eyal: And the translators are the mushrooms!

Victoria: Yes!

Eyal: Ok, but wait, I still think we need to take a step backwards. If you say there is an “out-of-placeness” I can understand that better than you saying that it’s “toxic”. You need to start building your ontology from bigger building blocks of classes of things and then out of that you make claims. Before the oil spill in the forest is bad, it is something. The encounter could kill, yes..

Victoria: But before that it’s just an event?

Eyal: It’s an event, a material. And this material has to negotiate.

Victoria: So I need to create my ontological context before I situate myself in that event.

Eyal: I think so, because why the conversation is going there is because you want to think mushrooms conceptually and you want to think about architecture so now let’s go back to your terms of architecture. So for me, the forest isn’t architecture or I don’t think architecture is a good metaphor to understand the natural world, but a bucket of oil poured into the forest , the nuclear spill— that is the architecture. It is the introduction of something that was not there before, and encounters now something else. The building, the oil spill, the nuclear fission are classed as architecture and then you have your biological networks of relations.

Victoria: This makes sense.

What you’re describing is what I have been originally interested in interrogating which is this notion of disaster. But now as you speak, architecture has become this notion of disaster.

Eyal: Architecture is always a disaster! You can say, we need to look at architecture through the notion of a disaster. The minute a building lands on a piece of soil, in the forests, that is the disaster. Now that disaster needs to negotiate its surroundings, and how that negotiation, how you get to speak, not between survivors or the plants that are there but how you speak across ontological categories through this you’re trying to propose the mushroom as a carrier of messages, as a means of communication.

The negotiation of the building is the same family as the negotiation of the oil spill and the nuclear.

Victoria: What I’m thinking about now and for this presentation or CRITS that’s coming up next week is to reconstruct and deconstruct the architecture of the mycelium. I’m thinking about just focusing on that through the medium of a ‘dream-analysis-lecture-performance’.

Eyal: Oh I see, how did we get here?

Victoria: (laughter)

Ok, well the project from its birth focuses on notions of trauma and collective memory through looking at the Fukushima ‘3/11’ disaster. But I also kept having these reoccurring dreams in March. During my undergrad I read alot of psychoanalysis —Lacan, Freud, Winnicott— so I’ve been taking these dreams very seriously.

Eyal: What did you do for your undergrad?

Victoria: I specialised in Literature and Critical Theory and double minored in Urban Studies and Human Geography at the University of Toronto.

Eyal: ohhh, that makes sense.

Victoria: So, I was having this dream, and I can lay it out for you. It happened about three times and on the last time the mushroom made an appearance. It was truly a moment in which the personal, political and aesthetic align in research! It was Freud who once said that the interpretation of the dream is part of the dream itself which is to say that the analysis and the dream are both the medium and the message.

In this dream, I would see myself standing in front of a forest — a vast wilderness, which is important to know because in dream analysis the “wilderness” is often seen as the “unconscious” or a field of emotions. It was beautiful, like a garden, with all my favourite flowers and trees. It felt light towards the front but then further down was a darkness that lined the horizon. In front of the forest was a large picket fence, neatly constructed and painted, which indicated to me that I had been here before, or that someone had been here before or that the space had been previously colonized. As I prepared to enter the forest, conscious in the dream that I was dreaming, I said to myself: “Here I go into the wilderness of myself, again.”

The dream then switched scenes — I was in a kitchen, hanging out with three guys from my high school in Jamaica. Due to our relationships in waking life, each one represented something different to me that perhaps only I would know: one represented guilt, the other shame, and the last, anxiety. For some reason we all decided to take a road trip and I remember images of driving through a desertous landscape. We somehow ended up stopping at the side of the road near a motel — one of those shitty looking 70’s-esque romantic California ones. There was an exchange of money taking place and yet no one demanded money from me, nor would they tell me what the money was for. I soon felt this overwhelming sense that I was about to be raped. As I got out of the car Tiago (my colleague in the Masters program) appeared and asked to speak to me. I said yes and we huddled underneath a staircase. He told me that I was about to be gang raped, and that I needed to run for my life.

Eyal: Sorry, They were going to what?

Victoria: Gang rape

Eyal: oh!

Victoria: So of course I began running with all my might. But I was running slowly, in extreme slow motion with an urge to run fast. I remember thinking in my dream that I was running slowly but perhaps from the perspective of someone outside of me I am actually running quickly but because I was the one doing the act of running it felt slow. I interpreted this as the ‘healing act’. Where you want to heal from your traumas but it feels like the process is slow and yet its only because one is embedded within it, blindsided from perspective, but fuelled by a certain trust or intelligence of pursuit. How to continue when we cannot see? It makes you wonder, what are the visible—invisible elements of progress and progress for whom?

On the third night this dream would change. I would be running again, thinking to myself about speed, velocity, perspective and all of a sudden what was running beside me was mycelium. The mycelium was exactly in line with my body, not one step ahead nor one step behind. It moved symbiotically with me without instruction on the act of pure sentience as we established some sort of connection. It made me feel calm, an overwhelming sense of safety and serenity as it stretched throughout the time and space of my dream which could be described as a ‘no-time’ or a ‘non-space’.

As I begin to think about the dream now and analyse it with my research I think of the fact that unlike animals that digest food inside their bodies, fungi digest food outside of their “bodies” and then absorb the nutrients into their cells. In a sense my act of gaining “perspective” felt like a form of breaking down time so that I could make sense of it, so that it could become more digestible, and that is the healing act, no? The recognition of trauma as a body that exists in attachments, transference and repetition until dealt with. Trauma will always repeat itself till dealt with. I felt out of control at the act of running slow but reminded myself that it only appeared that way because I was the one doing the running. Through perspective, connection and shift, the moment not only became digestible, but nourishing.

Eyal: I think the interest here for me is, as you said, the act of crossing and crossing again — entering again. It’s the movement across those lines between the artifice, the world as we’ve built it to be politically and socially, and the world as it is, as it’s always been.

You cross that line, and you cross it again. You are like the mushroom, Victoria, transferring messages between worlds.