We Are With the Mushrooms

Performance & Workshop ISEE conference Oslo 2025

We recently presented the performance There Are No More Dolls In the Closet – We Are With the Mushrooms, a performative sci-fi lecture set in the year 3083.

As participants took their seats, we welcomed them into a shared space of curiosity and gentle disorientation — inviting everyone to loosen their internal strings for a moment and drift into the collective mess we were about to shape together.

We began by sensing as one. With our “sensory palms,” we guided the group to move beneath the surface of their own coverings — to touch the cells, the skin, the breath — and to find a common rhythm.
We breathed together three times.

From there, the performance shifted into a narrative of deep time. We spoke of what once was, listening through our shared ear to the “newly discovered” knowledge of the far-future archaeologist guiding the session.

Participants were invited to lean back, gently close their eyes, and drift into the sound waves — the frequencies brushing against the room’s delicate hyphae. The mycelial threads that shaped the space, the walls breathing and self-regulating.

We asked them to greet the cool, fresh air generated by our fungal companions in the room — to welcome it with a soft wave, allowing the mushrooms to sense the air vibrations in return.

The performance lasted approximately 15 minutes and was followed by a conversational workshop. Together we explored future narratives and the anti-power of sensory imagination as a tool for re-envisioning social contracts.

This work grows from a longer trajectory. In 2019, I launched Death To the Death Star, a sensorial resistance movement and artistic project focused on connectedness, radical rethinking, and challenging the cold norm of exploitative relations within capitalist systems. Later I encountered Degrowth theory, which grounded my artistic, activist, and curatorial practice. This performance continues that lineage.

Relevance

To move toward socially just post-growth futures, we must expand our collective imagination. How can we step beyond our internalized conventions and inherited understandings?

This performance was developed as a method to destabilize everyday perspectives. Inspired by the Degrowth concept of decolonizing the imaginary, it uses softness and sensory attunement as forms of resistance. Our fictional archaeologist from 3083 outlines a utopian society rooted in shared sensorial connectedness — a community built on the pulse of the room, the awareness of other beings, and the power that emerges from the patchwork of living and breathing together.

Format

• 15-minute performance

• 40-minute group conversation session(whole group + breakout clusters)

• Performed in English

• Suitable for up to 50 participants; if over 20, a headset microphone is needed

• Ideally arranged with a circle of chairs(or two concentric circles)