E06 - MycoDyke, “As Above, So Below”

MycoDyke (India)
“As Above, So Below” (2025)

This work is an attempt to hold space for ecological mourning. My practice – and my life – is rooted in fungi and decomposition, through which I’ve come to understand death as a transition: a process that nourishes, reshapes, redistributes, regenerates. But in the summer of 2025, Delhi experienced an early and catastrophic monsoon. Trees died in great numbers, leaving behind stumps, sap-dripping wounds, split trunks, and exposed roots. Their bodies were chopped up and cleared away within days – before fungi could begin their quiet work of unmaking. This was a process cut short: abrupt, arrested, incomplete. There was no rot, no decomposition, no transformation. Just silence. This work sits with that silence.

In my recordings are the sounds of thunderstorms and post-storm stillness; quiet, fragmented voice notes and soft conversations with the trees; the funerary lament of peacocks; and a need to sense the unseen presences just below the surface. Together, they form an embodied eulogy. A murmur. A staying-with.

To grieve publicly, across species lines, is to me an act of political listening – a refusal to rush on, a refusal to forget. It is this practice of interdependency and “shared worlding” that Third Listening invites, and that this work hopes to embody.

MycoDyke
is the fungal alter of Malavika Bhatia, a self-taught field mycologist, artist, and community facilitator. Through their engagement with fungi, they weave together ethnomycological research, community-based practices, and theoretical frameworks to reimagine relationships to place, community, and the more-than-human world. Their living installation ‘Rot & Rapture: Decomposing Binaries’ at Gender Bender 2024 combined fungal cultures with prose and poetry, guiding audiences through intimate dialogues with fungal bodies to examine dissolution as a pathway to fluid states of being. Their art books, including “Fungal Hermeneutics: (De)Compositions in the Academic Forest” and “The 'Other' Underground: A Zine of Fungal Queeriosities,” transform academic concepts into affective narratives that propose alternative understandings of queerness in ecology. Drawing on mycelial networks as both metaphor and method, they have developed participatory experiences at Science Gallery Bengaluru, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Serendipity Arts Festival, and others, challenging conventional narratives about ecology, community, and belonging.