GMU:Re-enchanting the field/Nina Bendix Igleses

THE STORY BEHIND

So..

ABOUT THE WORK

GENERAL INFO

MUSHroom blankSPACE is a poetic meditation on destruction, shame, and resilience, exploring what lingers when something is deemed “useless.” Born from a shared commitment to embrace uncertainty and confusion, the poem invites to hold space alongside nature’s silence, its ruins, and its quiet acts of resistance.

CONTEXT

“MUSHroom blankSPACE” explores post-industrial ruin and ecological reclamation through the anthropomorphized voice of a discarded oil site. The work began not with a grand concept, but with two words:

“MUSHroom” evoking both fungal resilience and a state of emotional fog, a “mush” of grief, shame, and uncertainty; and

“blankSPACE” - a site wiped clean, emptied, but also a void between meanings, between use and disuse, between ruin and renewal.

From this pairing, the project emerged: a poetic reflection on destruction, shame, resilience, and the quiet, stubborn return of life. What happens when something is no longer seen as “useful”? What grows in the aftermath?

Created during the artistic research residency in Narva, Estonia (May 19–25, 2025), the project took shape inside the remains of a Soviet-era cinema, now repurposed by the Narva Art Residency (NART). The site itself - a threshold between abandonment and reuse - mirrored the project's thematic concerns. With Estonia’s oil shale legacy looming in the background, we confronted the environmental scars left behind by extractive industries: places we came to see as “sacrifice zones.”

Walking into the space that housed the work, one felt the air thick with memory. This wasn’t merely about a derelict site; it was the site, speaking. “MUSHroom blankSPACE” embodies the Anthropocene’s residue  poisoned land, stripped of purpose, shamed and silenced. It resonates with concepts of solastalgia (the grief of environmental degradation) and thoughts about bioremediation, especially via fungi. In the poem’s voice, this is reflected as tension between shame and resistance, between toxicity and the stubborn resurgence of life.

PROCESS, METHODS, FINDINGS

We approached this work as ecopoetic research, where form and content were deeply entwined. The words MUSHroom blankSPACE became both method and metaphor, guiding our creative and conceptual decisions. We embraced contradiction, confusion, and cyclical patterns refusing clarity in favor of not-knowing.

The poem gave voice to a post-industrial oil site, anthropomorphized and ambivalent. Fragmented, cyclical verses mirrored the rhythms of exploitation, abandonment, and the tentative beginnings of healing. We layered sensory language  "tangles," "hugs," "wallow," with stark juxtapositions: the roar of past industry versus present-day silence and decay. Typography and spacing (e.g., “blankSPACE,” “MUSHroom,” “RUINS”) visually echoed the psychological fragmentation and ecological disruption of the space.

We grounded our process in field research: visiting oil shale extraction sites, connecting insights on solastalgia, ecological grief and fungi growing everywhere we went, but also the talks on ideas of finding new purpose for post-industrial land (new usefulness?) and human controlled renaturation. However, our most meaningful findings were emotional. The land felt like a body, abandoned by its maker  always measured by its usefulness. The voice we created was not that of a victim or villain, but of something confused, liminal, shamed, and yet still alive.

A key discovery was ambivalence: the site was a scar, toxic and "useless" in the eyes of its exploiters but not silent. Nature, embodied by the tenacious MUSHroom, begins the slow, tangled work of reclamation. The fungal growths are more than biological recovery; they’re acts of defiant care. "as it hugs me, as it tangles across my bare ribs." Yet, this hope is fragile. The poem questions whether legacy, shame, and residual poison might erase even this return:  "As my poison will ruin - blankness, yet again?"

The exhibition itself staged confusion. In Narva, visitors followed a handwritten riddle into a hidden room, the former projection booth, where a video played on faded wallpaper. What looked like a drone-shot ocean was, in truth, a stream of acidic water near the oil ash mountains. Ocean sounds layered with voices reading the poem—sometimes in unison, sometimes breaking apart. Visitors often couldn't tell what was artwork and what was leftover ruin. And we welcomed that. Confusion became a form of resistance to quick understanding. A way of sitting with the unknown.

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  © Nina Bendix Igleses

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  © Nina Bendix Igleses

THE RESULT

© Nina Bendix Igleses

What we created was a multi-sensory, site-responsive ecopoetic installation a poem not just to be read, but to be inhabited. “MUSHroom blankSPACE” is an attempt to step into the psyche of wounded land, where the text is not just narrative but material: spaced like ribs, broken like memory, merging everything together in a MUSH space.

In Narva, the work lived within its original environment. The old wallpaper, the hum of the architecture, the ambiguity between installation and decay became part of the experience. A small chair held a zine-book of the poem. The projection layered visuals and sound: toxic water disguised as sea, overlapping voices, and the fragile dissonance between beauty and harm.

© Eric Beck

At the Summary 2025 exhibition at Bauhaus University (July 10–13), the work took a different form. In a clean glass room overlooking the city, the projection played on a white screen. A long scroll of paper, again handwritten, unrolled across the table and floor, next to oil-shale stones and glass worn smooth by the sea. Visitors could listen through headphones, hearing the overlapping voices of the poem alongside ocean sound. The view outside invited a new kind of contemplation, distance, change of view and perspective.

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  © Yue Wang

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  © Nina Bendix Igleses

In both versions, the work asked if we see the "MOSS", the small, persistent life, as important, challenging our definitions of value and purpose. The MUSHroom, like the poem itself, becomes an unlikely witness: a quiet, persistent thing, recreating itself from ruin, refusing to be erased.