Kaspars Vanags is one of the initiators of Art Bureau OPEN who has worked on different art and community initiatives and was one of the masterminds behind Latvian t-shoom project.

Kaspars Vanags: We first made this expedition to 30 people who have their own t-shroom at home and then we made a documentary. As they opened the door we were there with a small camera and some of them didn ´t even notice it. But it was quite a hard thing, because most of them are people who are so called underclass or people who have financial difficulties. There was part of mushroom growers who did it because of health issues and there were others who did it because they couldn´t afford to buy corporate soft drinks. Just for the financial reasons. So when you are getting in the appartment, some of them are really horrible or without any sanitary conditions... They are really dirty and thats why we used them in the project. This is actually 1­/5th of the video material we had. In Riga we made a longer documentary, there you could see that the appartments and some of the mushrooms were really dirty and they were very thick and grey,  even black. For example, in Riga there came visitors, took a glass of t-shroom. Only then they were asked to watch the video. Sometimes when they noticed the appartments where these mushrooms came they stopped drinking.

Eve Kiiler: The rice mushroom was quite popular here, but about tea mushroom I hear first time.

In Latvia actually we didn´t have this rice mushroom, we had this one from tea and lot of people knew it so when we started the project first time it was so easy to work. You just gave a call explaining the project and everybody understood immediately. Really, wherever we went and asked for something, no problem. Usually when you work with conceptual contemporary art, people have this more or less negative attitude or at least they mostly don´t understand what are you talking about and why? They simply don´t want to understand. In this case, it was completelythe opposite, it was an absolutely easygoing project. We had queues, like you come to open the shop and you have like 20 people, babushkas standing in the crew, if only we were 10 minutes late.

What you were selling in the shop?

We gave the mushrooms for free away, like here in Tallinn. The idea was just this networking thing and our fairy-tale story is that as t-shroom is a symbiotic colony, its a fungus and a bacteria living in a symbiotic colony together. And our idea is that the humans are the third part in this symbiotic colony, then fungus is the parallel to networks. Actually what we can do with the help of the t-mushroom. We can use this t-mushroom as a  basis for networking. All these mushrooms come from one family, one mama-matrix and people who take this t-shroom with them, they become a part of this network or as we say they become a mushroom. Just think of mushroom mycelium, thousands of square kms huge network under the earth. When you pick up a mushroom, its just a visible part of it, not the mycelium. The same iswith those who are growing the mushroom. Some people, for example, Hanno and me are the visible part of the mushroom. The t-shroom which we have at home is this mycelium which makes us to be a part of the whole, of the network. That´s the idea, but you have a lot of layers in this t-shroom project. Another one is that we have become addicts of designed visuality or designed reality. People come in, they see the mushroom, and the first thing they say, is – its so ugly! They prefer coca-cola just because it is designed and looks marvellous, but they never ask what is in there. The visuality is the new belief-system. It could be ok, if only we are not starting to interpret nature as something ugly. Thats the thing – for us the natural thing has become terribly ugly. There was a nice situation in t-shroom distribution center in Riga. A lady came in,  approximately 50 years old and she sat down and tried t-shroom and checked out the situation and read the texts and took the sample and then she asked, but it is not for real, is it? We really loved it, because it sounded like coca-cola in the 1970s, selling line of coca-cola in the ads was “its the real thing!”.  There is this change in the way we contemplate reality, that´s another topic that can be discussed in t-shroom project. Besides it is good for hangover because its rich of vitamin B.

How do you treat this network between people in this project, if now you came here and in Estonia t-shroom is a new thing, here the connection could be the same kind as with rice mushroom...

I think its a very interesting Soviet aspect, because actually we can say that in Soviet time the market was controlled  by the power and you couldnt buy t-shroom in the shop. We can now say that t-shroom was a dissident product, a consumption that was out of the system of control. Nowadays, when our everyday life is also controlled by the market and we see that in the 1990s because of the neoliberalism and the privatization processes, we see that more and more  fields of our private life and public life are controlled by the market. T-shroom is a controversial network, a give-away network. A grandmother gives mushroom for her grandaughter and a granddaughter can´t buy this mushroom in the shop. That means that there is a small part of our everyday life which exists outside the market, consuming outside the market. So, I think that especially because of the Soviet prehistory of t-shroom we get a double meaning working with it. At that time t-shroom was a dissident, as it was out of this control and also nowadays it is possibile to find an alternative way how to exist outside the market.

It also seems quite important that the whole network is based on trust, because you give something to somebody which is not controlled by any power, eurostandards and you are responsible for what you give to other people.

Trust and belief systems – there is always this question – where they are coming from. Actually nobody can give a secure answer where the mushrooms are coming from. Even the stories about Korean doctor called Combodza who had the t-shroom with him and who came to the emperor of Japan. We can´t trust this story either and at the end of the day t-shroom is something like an alien. To live with this alien is nice experience. We had a discussion that in EU this sauerkraut and also cabbages will not be allowed and we were laughing that we could use this argument for anti EU campaign.

No sauerkraut, no t-shroom, it will be all illegal, it will be all again antieuro movement.

If somebody wants to make this campaign, they can use this argument.

Because you cant be standardized... How did you advertise it?

 I would rather not use this term advertise. We were more like popularizing it. But also in a way that it worked like a subversion. We made a very low budget and low quality TV spot in the style of TV-shop, where people were telling their own experiences. We used the same thing, we made the documentary, we asked people to tell their own relationship to t-shroom and then we used extracts of this material to make TV-shop on TV. It ran on the biggest TV channel in Latvia. The owner of the TV company was a filmmaker before he started TV career and he is very open  to art projects, so he gave us this possibility to use prime time up 15 times per day 1 minute long ads. Therefore we had queues in front of the shop. There was an old guy who said well, I am drinking it every day, its good for your heart, its good for your stomach and for liver and its better than Pepsi-Cola. Pepsi-Cola is, I am not sure, if bottled or distributed by Aldaris, the biggest brewery in Latvia. Aldaris wanted to take us to court. He said it by himself. We didn´t push him, it was real documentary. And it was said in the newspapers that Aldaris is going to sue us. It took a month for them to realize that it was an art project, that it wasn´t a commercial, that we were not doing it because of the profit, as we were giving the t-shroom for free.

In similar situations in the west corporations have taken artists to court.

We had the same situation with our advertising project last year. With this project we tried to show how brands are slowly taking over the public space and how nowadays our everyday life is not controlled by direct power but through brands. To do subvertising and adbusting, you make parodies about advertising. But you don´t parodise the media, but concrete companies. We argued with real companies but at the same time, no company sued us, because they knew that if the process will start, the arguments we mentioned will be blown out in the media and most of them are true and it won´t work for them. We had a marvellous example in Riga. Norvegian company who owns Rimis has invested a lot in Latvia. They got a central railway station for reconstruction. And it was the same as in the Soviet times – they didn´t allow to take photos in there...

Kaspars Vanags was interviewed by Eve Kiiler

Eve Kiiler and Andres Lõo in the t-shroom shop