Following on from three living installations and as part of the Unbound section of the Unseen photo fair in Amsterdam, the DeAnima collective tackles the subject of the intelligence of the plant kingdom and its communication via the networked organization of mushrooms thanks to their “mycelium”, a set of more or less branched filaments forming the vegetative part of the fungus.
Through a practice of experimentation and observation that decompartmentalizes the photographic, artistic and scientific mediums, they link the necessities of scientific research with the poetic contingent of the artistic quest.
De Anima presents the living installation Song of muschrooms as the fruit of a collective, multi-disciplinary thought process creating a dialogue between the image and the living through the development of an experimental, ecological and evolutionary approach, rather than through the exhibition of a finished object.

Song of muschrooms features three 4m-high circoncentric organza sails made of recycled polyester, onto which are projected animated macroscopic photographs of mushrooms taken at the mushroom farm in the Romainville market town. These evolve in three dimensions towards a network of mycelium and its exchange of bio-electrical information, observed through a microscope. Mushroom silhouettes metamorphose in infinite movement, accompanied by mushroom song: a kind of coded language like a natural Morse code.
At the center of the installation is a mysterious suspended container of liquid mycelium, connected to electrodes and a futuristic mycelium-based gramophone/parabola that reproduces the music of its interactions. We analyze the electrical activity of the oyster mushrooms via information perceived by a microscope and by differential electrodes inserted into the substrate colonized by the mycelium. Interpreted images and sounds are reproduced within the installation.
This science-fictional object becomes a metaphor for a chrysalis, a cocoon in full bloom, as the liquid mycelium inside evolves and grows.
We make audible an interpretation of the poetic dialogue conveyed by mushrooms. The viewer is plunged into the heart of the earth's song, where the infinitely small things he tramples on with each step he takes in nature become bigger and louder than he is.
This photomorphic installation reflects a fascination with the technological advances of market gardening and the principle of soil-less cultivation, but it also casts a critical eye on mankind's continual drive for perfection in the world around us, to the point of destroying it.
According to a study published by the royal society, mushrooms are capable of exchanging information with each other thanks to their electrochemical activities. The study shows that fungi use up to 50 “words” to communicate, and that fungal word length distributions match those of human languages. The mycorrhizal network that carries out these exchanges, acts as a carbon sink and stores nutrients, is extremely vast and absolutely essential to the survival of plant and animal species. The Song of muschrooms installation aims to raise public awareness of the importance of fungi, and the need to understand and protect them.

The Song of muschrooms installation offers a sensitive reinterpretation of fungal dialogue, questioning the possibility of creating a space and a moment for harmonious observation and listening between humans and the plant world, in an optimistic attempt to restore the balance with fauna, flora and soil that is tending to be disrupted. By staging an iconography of the third kind through a form of wild mimesis, the installation resulting from a perception that animates and amplifies the imperceptible but essential living matter becomes the vector of a visual and sound language that generates echoes in our bodies, each word of which has a meaning.