‘Noir d'encre’ is a living, evolving work by the De Anima collective in collaboration with textile designer Maria Elisabeth van Heesewijk. This multimedia installation, presented at the Hangar, features a series of photographs and the film ‘Mycellia 753’, taken at the mushroom farm in the Romainville market town, as well as a video produced using a microscope to study the cellular propagation of the ‘Coprin noir d'encre’ mushroom ink within the prints.
Based on the principle of reuse and second life, the De Anima collective is reusing the blue-back prints originally produced for their latest
exhibition at the cité maraîchère in Romainville. Through a meticulous experimental protocol, Maria Elisabeth van Heesewijk transforms the material of the blue-backed paper using consecutive manual processes. The image is damaged, destroyed and reworked, and her work on paper plunges us into a metamorphic universe through the unprecedented creation of new hybrid surfaces in the form of capillary rhizomes. Through these images, they accelerate erosion and, by extension, time.
‘Noir d'encre’ questions the survival model represented by fungi, but also that of the polluting system of photographic chemical prints (solvents, chemicals, paper whiteners, etc.).
How do you create an exhibition without using a traditional print production process?
As part of the process of transforming this fragile image, the artists use black coprin ink (the only mushroom capable of producing ink) made by the artists themselves and collected in the gardens of Brussels.
The work comes alive as the fungus continues to persist over time, colonising the prints by capillary action and taking over from the synthetic, artificial side of the image to reconstitute it in a natural way.
The photographs in the installation become a transformed object with a second life, a second soul, evolving over time, making the living collaborate in harmony with their creative process.
The ground comes to life, covered by the living cells of the inky black coprin and the mycelium colonising the image in real life, showing viewers the invisible beneath their feet.