Spatial productions should arouse amazement or create other worlds with artfully staged immersion. But how can we counter the fast pace of spatial design - at a time when we are confronted with pressing problems such as resource scarcity or a negative climate balance? Pre-/recycling of buildings or materials are already a proven approach to this. But what happens when we take another critical step away from our anthropocentric view - with all its functionality, tight schedules and exploitation logic - and instead move into a field filled with non-human actors? How does our perspective on scenographies and exhibitions change when we no longer think of them in terms of construction, duration, and deconstruction, but in terms of growth, fruition, and degeneration? The diploma project MYCOSKENE revolves around these questions and in doing so opens up an experimental laboratory arrangement itself: the starting point for the discussion of content is the realm of fungi, or more precisely - the mycelium. This subterranean network of fungi not only represents the conceptual-theoretical center, but also the source material that orbits this experimental system of spatial design. Thus, by growing together substrates such as wood chips, spent grains, or cereals with their fine hyphal threads to form a sustainable and versatile building material, the fungi become important project partners that bring their own temporality and rhythms.

Instead of using the dispositif of a 'classical (natural) scientific' exhibition design, however, the eight-month-long examination of mycelium and its cultivation resulted in a multi-media installation that oscillated between strangeness, affectation, and polyphony. Thus, a semi-transparent, amorphous form unfolded in the dark while visuals of growing hyphae threads crept along the walls. In the center of the structure was a glowing white cube, whose interior was reminiscent of a sterile laboratory. To get inside, visitors had to undergo a "cleaning process" themselves by putting on white protective suits, clinical gloves and shoe covers. Who exactly protected themselves from whom in this utopian-dystopian arrangement remained deliberately unanswered. Thus, the guests walked in the scenographic ambiguity of a scientific-enlightenment white cube and a darkly affecting black box, while a swelling, polyphonic 4-channel sound level underscored the scenery.