Radial Paths: Mycelia as Live Resistance to Anthropocentrism and Linear Writing

• In Event: Feminist Technoscience by Other Means: Reconfiguring Research Practices for World-Making Beyond the Academy - III

Abstract

This work is an activist zine. In Brazil the zine format has become wide popular among independent writers and artists, distributed at independent fairs at the urbans centers. This zine is part of my PhD research and tries to put together anthropological, scientific and artistic thinking towards the fungal underground networks called mycelia.
Mycelia are getting growing attention by both social and natural scientists for reasons such as: i. how they challenge the concepts of individual, species and collective (Stamets, 2005 and Boddy, 2016); ii. Their mutation ability through the symbiotic relation with other species, i.e. lichen and mycorrhiza; iii. Their functionality as an underground network that has granted them the label “the internet of nature” (Simard and Durall , 2004 and Stamets, 2005); iv. Their multidirectional and radial growth.
Those particularities make the mycelia good companion species (Haraway, 2003) to think-with about theory and fiction. Inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory (Le Guin, 1997), Donna Haraway’s tentacular thinking (Haraway, 2016) and Anna Tsing’s story collecting as a method (Tsing, 2015), this zine uses a variety of materials such as poem, pictures, drawings and text to collect together a nature and culture art-science piece.
The main goal of “RADIAL PATHS” is to incite resistance towards anthropocentrism and academic typical linear writing. Mycelia networks have a lot to teach us and this work is part of the process of my research trying to learn with them.

Author

• Vitor França Netto Chiodi, University of Campinas