International Interaktionslabor 2018

Images from the labwork / Bilder aus der Werkstatt

Michèle Danjoux at work in the painting sessions

found object (branch) with acrylic

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Uschi Schmidt-Lenhard's hands at work (left), Andreas Lenhard (center) and Johannes Birringer (right)

Horst in early morning, acrylic on canvas, 18 x 24 cm (c) 2018 Michèle Danjoux

"Interlude / Dancing"

Foragers have their own ways of knowing the matsutake forest: they look for the lines of mushroom lives. Being in the forest
this way might be considered dance: lines of life are pursued through senses, movements, and orientations. The dance is a form
of forest knowledge - but not that codified in reports. And, although every forager dances in this sense, not all the dances are alike.
Each dance is shaped by communal histories, with their disparate aesthetics and orientations. To lead you into the dance, then, I step
back into the Oregon forest. First I go alone, then with a Japanese American elder, and then with two middle-aged Mien.
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To find a good mushroom, I need all my senses. For there is a secret to matsutake mushroom picking: one rarely looks for mushrooms. ...
I am searching for signs of mushroom smells.....

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Tanzen

Pilzsucher lernen den Matsutake Wald auf ganz eigene Weise kennen: Sie halten Ausschau nach den Lebenslinien der Pilze. Solcherart im Wald unterwegs zu sein kann als Tanz aufgefasst werden: Den Lebenslinien wird mit den Sinnen, miot Bewegungen und Orientierungen nachgespürt. Der Tanz ist eine Form des Waldwissens, ein Wissen, das nirgends aufgezeichnet ist. Und obgleich jeder Sammler tanzt, sind nicht alle Tänze gleich.

Jeder Tanz ist auf seine Weise durch gemeinschaftliche Geschichten mit einer jeweils eigenen Aesthetik und Orientierung geprägt. Um Sie in den Tanz einzuführen, kehre ich wieder in die Wälder Oregons zurück. Zunächst bin ich alleine unterwegs, dann mit einem älteren japanischstämmigen Amerikaner und schliesslich mit zwei Mien im mittleren Alter.

Alle meine Sinne kommen zim Einsatz, um einen guten Pilz zu finden. Denn beim Matsutake-Suchen gibt es ein Geheimnis. man hält eigentlich nicht nach Pilzen Ausschau.... Manchmal weht mir, bevor ich überhaupt einen Pilz gefunden habe, schon der stechende Geruch in die Nase. Dann sind meine anderen Sinne alarmiert...

from

Tsing, Lowenhaupt, Anna (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 241f:

Der Pilz am Ende der Welt: Über das Leben in den Ruinen des Kapitalimsus, trans. Dirk Höfer, Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2018.

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The plein air workshop spent the morning of Saturday, July 28, with a collective Qigong warm up followed by an excursion to the "Horst" forest to do studies in foraging (matsutake dance), photography and collections of impressions and objects. These were to be incorporated into the painting and wriring workshops in the afternoon/evening and following days.

Subsequently, participants began to exchange reflections through writing. A further connection was made to the "Kunst im Wald" project staged this year at the forest near van der Heydt, Saarbrücken, and also to the internationally known and respected Waldkunst festival curated by Ute Ritschel in Darmstadt (every two years).

We treated our collection, in the forst walk, somewhat differently, we had not planned to make art in the forest environment, but gain inspiration, draw in the collected impressions from ouyr nature sanctuary for the work with the colors and paints, the drawings and the writing, and the photography which, in some sense, also implied movement and a form of contact improvisation.

As attempted above in the reflections and the citations, I propose to recontextualize our forest excursion by placing it in relationship to the foraging dance described by ethnographer Anna Tsing in her book on matsutake. The forest knowledge, Waldwissen, derives from a kind of dance which is also a search for the life lines we recognize or intimate in our walk through the forest.

Johannes Birringer, 08/28/2018