This collaborative contribution engages mycorrhizal encounters to explore feminist un/learning as a creative practice that is vital for the possibility of working and living inside and outside educational and cultural institutions. We follow the path taken during a series of feminist reading & mushroom hunting walks we first initiated in 2017 during a workers' strike to defend Statute protections for staff at the University of Leeds (UK). Attended by union members, students, their friends and families, the walks involved foraging for mushrooms and reading aloud together texts that made us reflect on what life, work, leisure, creation and invention are and could be. Going 'out of office' in the context of a strike provided space and time to collectively reflect on the forms and conditions of labour in which we and our co-readers and co-foragers engage. The presentation tests a premise that encounters with mycorrhiza – a symbiotic association between a fungus and a plant understood as partial, situated, embodied and entangled practice-in-motion – allows for a re-consideration of individual and collective relationships to what we are calling 'the art of feminist un/learning'. Drawing from a notion of 'learning to unlearn' (Tlostanova and Mignolo 2012), we envision feminist un/learning as striving to imagine and try out new forms of collectivity, creative and political work. Addressing feminist un/learning as creative practice through mycorrhizal encounters invites new perspectives and solicits interventions within, against and beyond current institutional conditions, toward alternative institutional structures and creative horizons.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/33494