The Hut

The Hut (Jared Gradinger, Angela Schubot, Shelley Etkin, Alm Gnista, and Stefan Rusconi) is a living, co-created artwork exploring the deep entanglements between humans, fungi, soil, and time. Originally from Pomarkku, Finland, it has journeyed through urban and rural landscapes, the Stoa Square in Helsinki, a schoolyard in Töölö, and is on its way to it’s final resting place in a nature reserve in Suomusjärvi. The Hut has throughout its journey been transforming each space through fungal collaborations and regenerative practices, leaving both subtle memories as well as physical footprints behind in form of a garden in Töölö.

As part of the larger research project Herbarium (Gradinger & Schubot), the Hut is both a site for durational performance as a durational performance in its own decomposing presence, it is a forum for multispecies encounters, and ecological knowlege. Inside its wooden walls and soil, fungi grow and voices echo from human and nonhuman collaborators alike.

The Hut offers a space for slowness, decay, and transformation. Visitors, are they to find it, are invited to sit, lie on the earth floor, listen deeply, and experience the presence of fungal life. It is a space shaped by care, by breath, by darkness, by unseen networks beneath our feet.

The timeline of The Hut spans centuries. The log-house was built a century ago, and the timber used for it started growing a century or more before that. The ongoing decay process and the ecological footprint of The Hut will also span decades or centuries into the future.

Since 2022, the project has evolved in three brief phases:

• Phase 1 (2022–2023): The Hut was placed in Stoa Square, Helsinki, and mycelium was inoculated into its structures and the piano residing in it. A living garden of decay was invited.
• Phase 2 (2023–2025): The Hut moved to the schoolyard of Tölö Gymnasium, where students built its foundation, studied soil and fungi, and used it as a living classroom.
• Phase 3 (2025–): The Hut was dismantled and reassembled one final time in Takalanlehto Nature Reserve, where it will be left to decompose at its own pace. The garden remains at the school as a trace, a memory, and a continued site of growth.

The Hut is an ode to the Symbiocene, a place where humans and fungi co-compose new ways of being.