Textbooks that were stored away for 27 years are given new life and value when they return to the school where they were once read and studied. The books and notebooks serve as a breeding ground for the oyster mushroom. Instead of storing the knowledge in the basement any longer, it is absorbed by mycelium. This intervention transforms an old textbook into the question: what do you do with knowledge? Do you use it, share it or do you store it and quietly move it from your memory to a cardboard box? During six weeks, pedestrians on the street could follow how white downy fungal threads grow on math, economics, French,... until they fruit and the mushrooms shrivel. The books revive on the old school desks where Pieter-Jan Peeters also studied Commerce in the period 1993-1997. By bringing his old textbooks back to his high school, he meets again Peter De Laet, his aesthetics teacher of yesteryear who in turn also added some of his textbooks to ‘feeding knowledge’. They also invited class 6 Accounting Computer Science to fill some books with the oyster mushroom spawn themselves and let the books mature in the archives of Sint-Lodewijk.
in situ intervention with text books and oyster mushrooms
in former restaurant of Sint-Lodewijk Instiuut in Antwerp, 2024
For more information on the project and how to grow mushrooms yourself, go the the following website: