“If I were not a human being, I would be a mushroom. An indifferent, insensitive mushroom with a cold, smooth skin, firm and delicate at the same time. I would grow on fallen trees, gloomy and ominous, and in perpetual silence I would suck the last remnants of sunlight from them with my mushroom fingers spread wide. I would grow on what is dead. I would penetrate it all the way down to the pure earth, and there my mushroom fingers would stop. I would be smaller than trees and bushes, but larger than the bilberry shrubs (...) I would have the same gift as all mushrooms: the ability to hide from human sight by sowing confusion in their erratic thoughts. (...) I would grow only at the most important moments of day and night, at dawn and at dusk, when everything is busy waking up or falling asleep.” (1)

In October 2025, shortly after the sudden death of a friend, I wandered through the forests of the Jura day and night. The moss covered forest floor, the damp air, and the gentle rhythm of my steps soothed and carried my grief. With a heightened sensitivity brought about by loss, and an acute awareness of the fragility of existence, I encountered the mushrooms of the forest. Looking at them placed me in a state between overwhelming beauty and profound awe. The series Mushroomness seeks to give form to this experience combined with an invitation to wonder:

“For perhaps the strangest thing of all, and the most wonderful, is that there is something rather than nothing.” (2)

(1) The title Pilzheit and the quotation are taken from Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night.

I first engaged extensively with this book in 2023 as part of the exhibition project House of Day / House of Night, realised in collaboration with Kasia Jackowska, Jennifer Kuhn, Caroline Singeisen, Nina Weber, and myself.

(2) Quotation from An Essay on the Uncanny by Tobias Büchi, the friend mentioned in the text.