Product Details
- Publisher: Semiotext(e) (2019-11-05)
- Language: English
- Paperback: 144 pages
- ISBN-13: 9781635901009
- Item Weight: 181.44 grams
- Dimensions: 8.06 x 5.44 x 0.41 cm
In a novel set against a transforming Berlin, an artist confronts a diagnosis of breast cancer.
Going to openings and parties, setting up a studio and breaking up with her longtime boyfriend, Noora is living the post–art school life in Berlin when, in 2005, she's diagnosed with breast cancer. Vaguely restless, until now she's been neither happy nor unhappy, but her entry into what she calls “Cancerland” forces her to question the assumptions by which she lived her life so far. Uneasily, she realizes that the “relationships of the soul” she and her friends value over everything else might not be as indelible as family, after all.
In this sharp and picaresque first novel, conceptual artist Annette Weisser depicts the transformation of Berlin from the frontier city of the cold war to an international art hub as an analog and backdrop to the chaotic, corporeal transformation Noora undergoes through cancer and its treatments. Written in the casual, associative style of a female coming-of-age novel, Mycelium examines German trauma, art school dramas, and the inevitable parsing into winners and losers that her generation undergoes as they enter their mid-thirties.
About the Author
Annette Weisser is an artist and writer who lives in Berlin. From 2006 to 2019, she taught in the MFA program at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Her writings have appeared in Die Zeit Online, Springerin, Texte zur Kunst, Afterall, and other publications. She has had solo exhibitions at venues including Kunsthaus Dresden, Westfälisches Landesmuseum, Münster, and Reception Gallery, Berlin. The monograph Make Yourself Available was published in 2015 in conjunction with her solo exhibitions at Heidelberger Kunstverein and Kunstverein Langenhagen.
