A multisensory experience

The Istituto Europeo di Design, IED Madrid, invites us to shed our human skin and go through room 1.2 of the ILE through a tunnel made of mycelium skin.

This room, with its white walls and rounded shapes, evokes the aesthetics of a laboratory. The metal branches through which the light from the façade filters visually connect with the garden outside.

It inspires us to think about all the processes and exchanges that occur underground, in a natural laboratory that happens beyond human control. Can we sneak through a hole that leads us underneath the garden?

The mycelium weaves a non-visible, subway network beneath the garden, generating symbiotic relationships between fungi, trees, plants, insects and bacteria. The installation proposes a material, light and sound experience made of invisible processes, growths and transformations. The mycelium skin sounds when it dries, it contracts. When it receives water, it begins to expand again, growing and regenerating in its own space. A delicate but immense network that connects life in natural ecosystems.

The proposal is inspired by the growth patterns of mycelium, similar to those of branches and roots, growing and extending above the substrate in which it is found, generating a soft, light and fragile tissue.

Entering this space invites us to wander among that fragility: an environment of fabrics in process, a place to reflect on the vulnerability of the ecosystems we inhabit and of which we are a part.

Materials: Mycelium, natural substrate, cotton fabric, metallic structure.