Mykestesia
conceptual framewor Giulio Musso | direction Francesca Francesca Melluso, Federico Pipia | choreography, performer Francesca Melluso | sound design, set design Federico Pipia | costume Dora Argento | production PinDoc | with the contribution of MiC and Regione Sicilia | The project is the winner of the Bodyscape residency, and was produced with the support of Dancescapes 2025, promoted byDanza Urbana ETS, with the support of MiC, the support of h(abita)t, the collaboration of O.R.A. and the Rassegna Rami d’ORA by Associazione Laagam.
An audiovisual study was independently produced by the company and wasselected as a finalist at three festivals dedicated to dance film—InterfacciaDigitale 2024 (Hangar Fest, Pesaro), Fuori Formato (Genoa), {te}che(Savona)—as well as at Tendermesh FilmFest (Berlin).
A posthuman intruder in the theatre of the Anthropocene, a plausible mutant, Mykestesia reproduces the involuntary strategies of resistance developed by fungi “at the end of the world,” which grow in the degraded landscapes of capitalist exploitation through productive collaboration with other species.
This fatally anthropomorphic subject, resistant to death, is an involuntary and illegitimate byproduct of globalization, capable of surviving by extracting meaning from every stimulus that constantly traverses it, in order to return the sense of its being here and now, while attempting to establish a relationship of reciprocity with the living and non-living entities that surround it.
Mykestesia emerges by chance in a forest of rotting trees at the edge of the ruins of a shopping mall; it is the result of a stratification of waste, binary codes, consumer objects, spores, and chemical exhalations that activate an unthinkable form of being. This extreme metaphor of identity, by staging a
utopian, formless body that brushes against the possibilities of an intelligence that is simultaneously fungal, vegetal, animal, cyborg, and virtual, invites us to choose the vertigo of contamination over a programmed extinction achieved through the elimination of everything that the landfill of the “human” does not recognize as its own.
