Many urban farmers face the problem of not having enough space to grow produce. But growing mushrooms can be done in the corner of a flat — and the "shroom boom" is taking off. During the Covid lockdowns, many people started reading up on how they could grow mushrooms at home as a cooking ingredient. The documentary Fantastic Fungi on Netflix, the Ted talk by renowned mycologist and fungal activist Paul Stamets and medical research on the psychedelic compound psilocybin in certain types of mushrooms have also greatly stoked public interest.
Multimedia artist Stephen Hobbs was living in rural Ireland during the Covid pandemic and became fascinated by fungi during forest walks, when he and his family tried to identify them. "Having spent much of my professional life working in Johannesburg, the purposefulness of mycelial networks became a powerful metaphysical lens for exploring ideas of social cohesion, especially in the context of the mental health fallout that came with months of lockdown social isolation," says Hobbs.
"Through The Trinity Session — the artist collective and public art consultancy I've co-directed since 2001 — we used our workshop space at The Orchards Project in Orange Grove to explore an art- and nature-centred Green Projects Programme, which, with a variety of partners, implemented a range of interactive workshops that drew on play and art therapy principles in relation to permaculture practices, fungi cultivation and so on."
Part of the Green Projects Programme was allowing Afrifungi to set up their mycology lab in the Orchards workshop, and the exposure to their cultivation and growing methods spawned "an entirely new trajectory" in Hobbs's art. He has incorporated mycelium into a number of his exhibitions, as an attempt to create new commentary on Johannesburg's intrinsic nature of collapsing and rebuilding.
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