I remember, back in the days, when i was a child, my father used to take me to the forests, to gather mushrooms with him for a nice self-hunted dinner. In that Alps area where we lived, it is kind of a common sport, which nearly everybody does. Almost strange, not to do it. In late summer and during fall, you just go for some little walk to your nearest woods, pick some Steinpilze and Maroons and have a little home-soil- flavor on your dish.

Just recently i realized, that to me, already as a child, the strongest sense about those strange little things wasn‘t so much of their kitchen-value. The main fascination towards the fungi was that intense image they created in my mind, due to their strong visual power. When i was sitting and browsing through that old guide books (which nobody ever really used) about edible and poisonous mushrooms, i remember myself idolyzing that perfect pictures of all kinds of majestic shrooms. I remember how they looked like tall colorful trees - at least 30 cm - like from a fairytale. What a shame it was, cutting up all these adorable and endlessly beautiful creatures or plants or whatever they were, into boring bite-sized pieces like some potatos and consume them :/

Later in my 90s childhood, there were cartoon shows like Biene Maja or The Smurfs (a.k.a. Les Schtroumpfs / Die Schlümpfe) on TV, that picturized tiny worlds with friendly talking insects and snails and magic woods and mushrooms big enough to live in. At the same time, the great era of the Super Nintendo and the all fungus-based world of Super Mario and the Toadstool-Kingdom, took a deep impact into my hungry little imagination back then. Ever since, mushrooms have been omni-present, just as they actually are. And i never stopped cultivating that old personal tradition of going for a mushroom hunt, that i grew up with.

In the summer of 2021, there was a short viral period of the so called #Shroomjak on instagram and the internet in general. It‘s always a matter of random coincidence why things or memes go viral. But the success of Shroomjak, this simple and silly, human- faced mushroom, may be not so much of a surprise after all. The indisputable popularity of mushrooms obviously gave a crucial basis for the catchiness of a picture like that.

Gathering this huge crowd of artists and accompanying their tiny works with this great variety of all sorts of mushrooms felt like recreating the whole of those fantastic popcultural memories. Finally the fungi grew huge like i always imagined. And the usual human-sized world of ours got shrunken into dimensions of where you can meet bugs and relax under a parasol that is a fruit of the mycelium. After all, i realized that the line up of this international group of artists became some sort of fungal network itself, spreading and revealing their blooming fruit over a global range from the depth of the ground.

An Ode to the Fungus
Text by Tobi Keck, November 2021