Sunday 1st May 2016, 2:30am
Getaway #16: Julien Berberat & Romain Berger
Julien Berberat and Romain Berger chose this Sunday’s getaway destination.*)
– „How do we meet?“ seems to be an important question to us: both to Outside Sundays and to Urgent Paradise. That’s why we decided to invite the Outside Sundays duo Mirjam and Philip to export their meetings to Lausanne. And that’s why we thought of another duo to go on this getaway: Julien Berberat and Romain Berger. When collaborating, they don’t work under a common name, they just meet and act. They are both great storytellers who like to play with myths and the notion of the archive. And both grew up in the countryside and have kept a relation to nature and to wandering around as explorers, never sure of what they will find and what they are really looking for. –
*) Urgent Paradise, an independent art space in Lausanne, invited Outside Sundays to come to Lausanne. They also invited Julien Berberat and Romain Berger for the sixteenth Outside Sunday.
[Report]
Did you know, Lausanne is based on a big hill?
On top of the hill a beautiful installation waited for those who arrived, in the shop window of Urgent Paradise. It consisted of: Two Omawäggeli, one of them with a log, one Akkubohrer with a drill, two jars with undefinable content – seedlike things with mold –, two candles, a stack of butter wrapping papers and one lighter. The set was framed by two jackets hanging loosely from the heater, indicating the presence of their owners, Julien and Romain: it was raining.
Before we went downhill again, we knew we were going to plant mushrooms. Pleurotes. Because it would be too difficult to find them this time of the year.
Here’s the procedure:
You order myzenaefl, the roots of a mushroom, at the mushroom farm that supplies / delivers to Migros and Coop.
You cultivate the myzel with grains / seeds in old confi glasses. In a humid and cold atmosphere it will grow.
you find a piece of fresh wood. You drill holes it it. (If it is too old, the wood will be already contaminated with poisonous mushroom myzel.)
You stuff the grains with myzel into the holes, the myzel likes to be compact.
You cover the stuffed holes with hot candle wax, making it sterile – meaning that once again you keep other mushrooms from intruding.
You choose a comfy spot for them: not windy, not sunny – cool but humid.
And before leaving them alone, you shock them: we tried shouting and making faces – the secure way to tell the myzel that the dead tree fell is dropping the log.
If you pass near the lake, in October – and if you share la passion de champignon – you might want to check. If you find a pleurote *), blossoming from a piece of l’etre **) which is leaning against the tallest dead tree you can find, you know it’s the life we planted.
This last paragraph tries to point to all the layers inherent in the mushroom topic. Life, death, life after death, and human manipulation on life, death, life after death.
At some point you start perceiving everything visible as connected through invisible rhizomatic structures ***). Then it’s time to add this story: When Philip got off the train in Lausanne the conductor finished his announcement, after listing the next connections: And don’t forget about death guys.
Philip was still quite shocked when telling us about this.
*) pleurote: Austernseitling (Pleurotus ostreatus)
**) l’etre
***) what we call mushroom in everyday language is only the fruit, the rest of the true mushroom is much bigger and invisible because it’s located beneath the surface