Fungiphilia Festival

Register through filling this form: https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/vsVmSB2Drt33bBc5frQWxt0l3tq2RmGeU1RittYC9dc/

INVITATION

Join our journey into the delicious depths of the emerging mycocene as we cozily cocreate the first Fungiphilia Festival, an intimate celebration of the animate Earth through the lens of all things fungi!

Fungiphilia is a self-organized, communal mushroom festival, hosted by The Foundry.

You are welcome to share your practice, research, mycelium, art, food, medicine, inspiration, wisdom, intention and beyond during 4 days of transforming in The Foundry together - along the 4 stages of mushroom life cycle:

4 September, Thursday we GERMINATE
5 September, Friday, we MYCELIATE
6 September, Saurday, we FRUIT
7 September, Sunday, we SPORULATE

Following the pactices of self-organisation & participation offered by the Radical Mycology Convergences, the Burning Man, and Rainbow Gatherings, all participants are invited to co-create Fungiphilia by making the space, offering a workshop, showing a presentation, initiating a ceremony, realizing a performance, sourcing and preaparing food or enriching our shared time in any other wonderful form.

As we immerse ourselves in a kaleidoscopic multi-sensory journey of perceiving, feeling and thinking with our many fungal allies, we flesh out a pluriverse of pathways towards the co-creation of resilient new kin-centric cultures - based on reverence and reciprocity.

Our preliminary program includes lectures, workshops, foraging forays, ritual theater, tender explorations around the themes of “inimacy, lifecycles and mushrooms”, mythopoetic soulcraft, wilderness awareness practices, mycelial meditations, mushroom-assisted massage, storytelling, banquets, regenerative practice demonstrations, movement sessions, music jam, poetry, film, food and medicine experiences, somatic explorations, community learning and citizen science processes, and collective rituals of grief and celebration. We enthusiastically invite contributions by all participants in any of the above fields, preferably involving mushrooms - whether physical or metaphorical.

Centered around the mycelial model of sensuous intercourse and inter-bodily connectivity, we will journey joyfully and mournfully, playfully and painfully through the realms of grief, death, and collapse, regeneration, reinvention and rebirth at the personal, social and ecological levels, exploring how connecting with fungi can help us adapt to the deepening polycrisis of our time. As we traverse the terrain of the experimental, the imaginal, the magical, the liminal, the revolutionary, the prefiguritive, the fugitive – those unruly creative eruptions of embodied poetry through which we discover in tangible form the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible – we will carefully, intentionally, happily and haphazardly unite the spheres of embodiment, radical politics, art, science, soil, soul, sacred economics, meditation, literature, systems thinking, gastronomy, dreaming, philosophy, agroecology, foraging, psychedelics, dance, design, medicine, eco-psychology, ethnomycology, practical learning and applied mysticsm – all mingled together in a hot compost heap of convergent convivial consilience, raucous revelry, post-individual joy & communal luxury.

We will explore experientially the mind-meltingly multifarious creative and practical methodologies by which we may work with fungi to fortify our bodies, psyches, societies and ecologies, and the myriad ways in which the metaphorical mental model offered by fungi can teach us to compost pathological patterns within ourselves, our interpersonal relationships, our political economies and our cultures, in the service of individual and collective healing, system change, and global liberation.

PRACTICALITIES

You can read about how to get here on our website >> https://bravosfoundry.com/basic-information

What to bring?
Bring food and drinks to share, music instruments, costumes, scores for performances, sense of community for ceremonies, skills for workshops, knowledge of species, mycelium to grow, materials to collectively activate, pracices of any relevant kind and everything you you need to complete the festival.

Contribution
The financial contribution requested for participating in the festival is kept as low as possible - on a sliding scale from 5€ - 50€ per day per person, in addition to the low accommodation fees charged by The Foundry. Costs for a room are 20€ per person per night and costs for camping are 10€ per person.

Accomodation
There are 12 bedrooms and 6 bathrooms in the building to house about 25 people indoors, and space for another 25 people camping or staying in vans.

Register through filling this form: https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/vsVmSB2Drt33bBc5frQWxt0l3tq2RmGeU1RittYC9dc/

VISION

This is the dawning of the mycocene, the age of fungi.

In the age of fungi, connections between seemingly distant entities become sensible. The dominance of the gaze and the visual realm fade. We gently and seamlessly experience the human and more-than-human spheres as continuations of each other. We become capable of mingling in-between what we know and how we feel. Our hands, like tips of mycelium, learn to know while touching, while our bodies transfer information to our interbodily informational web, where a decentralized nervous system secretes decisions that make abundance for all. All forms of consciousness are welcome and surrounded by acceptance.

Power returns to the people, as we create home for ourselves and each other and decompose what does not support us anymore.

World-making raindrops precipitate around 8 billion spores of transfigured experience, feeding the roots of insurgent forests that rise from toxic wastelands and the ruins of abandoned cities. The earth heaves a sigh of relief, remembering the hubris of the anthropocene as little more than a momentary hallucination, a furious fever dream forgotten minutes after waking. A new humanity and a new earth fruit exuberantly from the rotting compost heap of the old world, full of fervour, vigour and voluptuous deliciousness.