The Hut by Jared Gradinger, Angela Schubot, Stefan Rusconi, Alm Gnista & Shelley Etkin, 4.11.2022, Stoa Square
“… all places that never were visited
…all explanations that never were given
…all the encounters that never we had…”
(The Hut podcast text, by Shelley Etkin)
The eyes are getting used to darkness, the smell of tar and moist is entering the nostrils. A felt sense of the ambiguous familiar-unknown, breath is held in infantile anticipation of wonder. I was longing for this place, the generosity of uncomprehended, the vastness of the unspoken; a potentiality of what only exists in brief moments in-between.
The Hut is deep time, entangled being, bodies suspended in trust. The Hut is a shelter; a refuge from tyranny of reason, transparency and control. The Hut is a microcosmos, a multiverse: we, many, intertwined, growing, blooming and decaying in this shared soil. A silent communion and an ongoing encounter.
This space is made of infinite human and nonhuman forces, mixing and mingling in a tangible manifestation of speculative, sensuous and sacred. Uncountable forms of life are composted and composing in slow movement, wrestling intimacy, and secret transmission.
Initiated by Jared Gradinger, Angela Schubot, Stefan Rusconi, and Alm Gnista, this multispecies plenum is hosting and being hosted by fungi.
Their sprouting, luminescent bodies; their being in the uncertain, unpredictable; their modest omnipresence; their otherworldly, yet grounded wisdom. Their ability to sustain and be sustained by relationships: clusters, networks, threads, webs, spreading, referencing, re-connecting, re-visiting…
Fungi make and re-make this temporary structure, yet they have been here forever. In cracks, in shadows, under the ground; on edges of thinkable, at margins of visible, in traces of all life.
– Nina
Nina Vurdelja
Nina Vurdelja is a performance researcher and cultural worker of international background, based in Tampere. Her interests reside around more-than-human sensuous encounters and ecologies of being together. She has been doing Ph.D. studies at Tampere University, dwelling in meeting spaces between culture, art, and philosophy.