aramu /ikiamia
Cohabitation protocols to tame each other

Residence at Maison Composer in collaboration with Zoltan Babos, mushroom grower / les champs potes

John Cage was a great lover and researcher of mushrooms.
In 1976, in Pour les oiseaux; entretiens avec Daniel Charles (p 216), he wrote: ‘What I am trying to achieve in my field is music that is ecological. Music that allows us to inhabit the world [...] The world as a whole, not separate fragments, parts of the world. The world as it is, at last. [...] We have to accept the idea of humanity as living in a global village. [...] I'm trying to point out a way of listening to this new inhabitation of the world [...]’.

After a prayerful visit to Zoltan Babos, a mushroom grower, the idea of protocol is based on a double duality, taking - giving / the domestic - the wild.
How can we find new civilities with fungi? Mushrooms are the ‘fruits’ of beings that make up a particular taxonomy, the order Fungi. They are heterotrophic organisms, i.e. unable to photosynthesise.

take / give
Using bioacoustic sensors, record for long periods the subtle variations in sound that might pass through the culture blocks of different species of fungi, while playing them selected pieces by John Cage.
Attempt to analyse whether the compositions affect their growth behaviour in any way.

aramu/ ikiamia
Contemporary anthropology is challenging the notions of wild and domestic.
For the Achuar, ‘Aramu’ refers to plants that have been manipulated by man, and applies equally to domesticated species and those that have simply been acclimatised. Aramu does not, therefore, denote ‘domesticated plants’; it refers to the special relationship forged in gardens between humans and plants, whatever the origin of the latter. Nor is ikiamia an equivalent of ‘wild’, firstly because a plant can lose this predicate depending on the context in which it is found, but also and above all because, in truth, plants ‘from the forest’ are also cultivated. They are cultivated by a spirit called Shakaim, whom the Achuar see as the forest's resident gardener and whose benevolence and advice they seek before opening a new grove. The terminological pairing of aramu and Ikiamia therefore in no way represents an opposition between domestic and wild, but rather the contrast between plants cultivated by humans and those cultivated by the spirits’.
Descola Philippe. Le sauvage et le domestique. In: Communications, 76, 2004. Nouvelles figures du sauvage. pp. 17-39

I'd like to deploy this notion of Aramu in the meadow of the composer's house by attempting to ‘set free’, to ‘enslave’ blocks of cultivated mushrooms, which, once exploited for our consumption, still contain living mycelium.

La maison composer