El sexe dels fongs [The sex of fungi]

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The author, a prestigious set designer who was awarded the City of Barcelona Theatre Prize in 2019, also writes her own shows. It has not been possible for her latest show to come to fruition, but it has given rise to this installation, created to be seen by a single spectator.


In March, the set designer Delagneau started work on a new creative project which she called The sex of mosquitoes, which was scheduled to premiere at Barcelona’s 2020 Grec Festival. It was a 70-minute show conceived for an audience of over one hundred people, who were immersed in an experience featuring the metamorphosis of living beings and inanimate objects. A week before the authorities declared the lockdown, as a response to collective impotence in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic, the artist already had all the material she needed for rehearsals, but fate decided that, given that it was now impossible to continue with the slow process of experimentation that her work required, her script now languishes in a draw of future dreams.


Inevitably, something new has arisen from contemplating the ashes of the metamorphoses contained in The Sex of Mosquitoes. It is as if a different form has hatched from the remains of that show, something convulsive but without any recognisable animal language. Like a cloud of stage insects with a life of their own, a strange orchestra of termites or a metallic plague of locusts. Like an abandoned stage, where maybe one can sense the hum of some previous theatrical experience through the beating of its own absence.


Fungi belong to a different kingdom than plants, animals or bacteria. In the same way that bacteria reproduce asexually, fungi can also reproduce and multiply. But, just like insects, fungi have cell walls made of chitin, a substance also found in the exoskeletons of some insects, spiders and other arthropods. And, like plants, fungi also reproduce sexually, through their spores: branching out into living networks known as hyphae, which in turn are structured into mycelia, from which mushrooms often sprout.

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