The Art of Shapeshifting: Embodied un/learning with Fungi

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Vráblíková, Lenka. 2024. 'The Art of Shapeshifting: Embodied un/learning with Fungi'. In: Learning with mountains: recalibrating how we understand art and planet. Celadon Center for Arts & Ecologies, Nikosia and Kepedes, Cyprus 6 - 8 February 2025. [Conference or Workshop Item]

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Abstract or Description

Anyanwu, a character of Octavia Butler’s science fiction novel Wild Seed (1980), is an African woman with tremendous powers. A healer and a shapeshifter who can change her cells to embody different human and non-human forms, Anyanwu is capable of “reading” other bodies through her own. In the novel, shapeshifting functions as a narrative device that critiques the Cartesian mindbody dualism and enables the transgression of the divisions between ages, sexes, races and species. In addition, Anyanwu’s shapeshifting can also be read as a powerful epistemic tool.

Eco-critical feminist literary scholars Aimee Bahng and Stacy Alaimo suggest reading Octavia Butler as a black feminist theorist of science who strives to imagine decentralized and non-hierarchical modes of living in more-than-human commons. Drawing from Bahng’s and Alaimo’s readings of Butler’s work, I propose utilizing the art of shapeshifting as a device of critical ecofeminist and decolonizing pedagogy. The contribution elaborates this proposition through an engagement with the unbounded biology and diverse ecology of fungi. The exploration proceeds through 3 examples: 1) research of the interaction between fungi and minerals (2016) by environmental chemist Henry Teng, 2) the artwork “Nothing Nowhere into Something Somewhere” (2015) by artists Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkáčová and 3) a guided walk “Learning Collaboration with Fungi” (2022) that I codesigned with Elspeth Mitchell. Working through these scientific, artistic and pedagogic practices that engage with fungi, I show how the art of shapeshifting, which stems from the imaginative potential of entangled non-fictional and fictional stories of how humans and nonhumans inhabit the world, generates embodied un/learning for environmental and social justice. More specifically, it cultivates learning to un-learn human exceptionalism and other harmful habits fostered by cisheteropatriarchal, racist and anthropocentric capitalist societies, such as competitive and accumulation-driven individualism, in order to re-learn caring, sharing and cooperation.

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Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)