Vinciane Despret, Christine Aventin, Juliette SalmeDemeurer en Mycélium

In Demeurer en mycelium, Vinciane Despret, Christine Aventin and Juliette Salme project us into a future in which mankind has finally reconnected with living materials.

The historical starting point for this new era, called “mycelocene” by the authors, is “In Vivo”, the proposal built for the Belgian Pavilion by the Bento architects (Florian Mahieu, Corentin Dalon and Charles Palliez) and their multidisciplinary team from Wallonia and Brussels, for the 18th Venice International Architecture Biennale.

“In Vivo” questions our voracious extractivist production system by giving us the chance to see, feel and experience an alternative constructive universe made up of living materials. Mycelium, wood and earth are all sourced from the urban area of Brussels, with a view to sustainable, ultra-local sourcing.

The publication puts the concrete reality of this temporary installation into perspective and extends it throughout this century with an inspiring fiction in the form of an investigation carried out in the 2050s.

Based on clues and fragments collected by Christine Aventin and Vinciane Despret, this investigation brings together a wide range of archives, including exchanges of letters, extracts from mycological and philosophical texts, the field notebooks of an anthropologist – Juliette Salme – who followed Bento in his practice, and reports from psychologists, historians and experts in therolinguistics (the discipline that studies non-human languages and literature).

Everything she witnessed (because there is a lot of truth in these stories), and everything she imagined (because there were so many possible futures to ferment in order to give them a chance to contaminate reality) took root, branched out and unfolded from an architectural proposal, a new way of living proposed by Bento.

The book is the mouthpiece for this proposal, which aims to move away from “an inert world, without intention or project, a disposable world in which non-human living things were sometimes a vague landscape, sometimes a useless or annoying encumbrance, sometimes resources to be extracted or consumed”. And the fertile imagination he unfolds takes us entirely into this perspective, tracing the furrows for the development of the possible realities of this new constructive era.