ARTIST SERIES: how to make fungi cups with Pedro

When I imagined who I would be talking to this year, I thought mostly of the traditional types of art: painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, etc. Perhaps there would even be people making sculptures out of aluminum cans or drawings made on recycled paper. In all of my research leading up to the Watson, I’d never expected to find someone like Pedro. 

Pedro works with mushrooms. He cultivates them - some for eating, some for medicinal purposes and, the majority, for making into cups. While I’m not yet bold enough to drink water out of it like Pedro, I can think of plenty of uses for this beautiful biodegradable cup. My favorite part about it, is that even though the fungi in the cup is no longer living, it is still a host for other insects and organisms to grow on (see photo to the left).

Those small dots protruding from the lamp are the exoskeletons of larvae that propagated on the lamp. You might think that this is gross (hence why I’m not brave enough drink from it), but think about a china teacup, for example. How much is that teacup likely to change over 10 years? 100 years? 10,000 years? What about a plastic cup? This fungi cup has changed more in one or two years than the plastic cup is likely to change in its whole lifetime. If you really don’t like the idea of your cup being a host for interesting organisms, you can use beeswax or cover it in resin. Pedro has used resin with some of the cups that he put microplastics in, but for me that defeats some of the point.

So you want to know how it’s made?  

Sample vial of mycelium

Trust me, so do I. While I learned a lot, this process spans several months and my attention span is still too short to sit and watch fungi grow. Pedro gave me an excellent overview in Spanish which I will try to explain here, but if you really want to know how to do this you should ask Pedro himself @Tallerpercan. 

It all starts with mycelium. You can either get the fungi (hongo in Spanish) in the forest, or if you want to pay around 8 mil pesos, you can get a vial of mycelium. As soon as fungi are involved, the whole process has to be very sterile. We did the demonstration using samples that were expired, so that’s why the photos are outdoors. When Pedro actually makes the cups, he puts on a hazmat suit and goes into an ultra sterilized room with high ventilation. Pedro works with reishi mushrooms but has experimented with trametes veri color mushrooms, among many other kinds. 

Where Pedro dries the grain

In order for the mycelium to grow, they need something to eat. For this, Pedro pressure cooks brown rice, trigo or wheat for about 9 minutes. Brown rice is the better of the three because of its nutrient density, smaller size and less likelihood of being contaminated (and hence contaminating the fungi). When the grain is al dente, Pedro then takes them outside to dry for 1.5 to 3 hours. The rice is ready when it is still a bit humid but doesn’t stick to your hand. Next, he puts the rice, water and some honey (or brown sugar) into a jar.

Sealed jar and its orange rubber glue

Pedro then sterilizes and seals the jar to keep out bacteria. Then, he extracts a syringe-full of mycelium and decants it into the closed car. See the rubber part on the lid? That’s a rubber glue that allows syringes and small needles to pass through without exposing the sterilized interior to external bacteria. This concoction then is incubated for about one month depending on the type of mushroom. Once the fungi has filled the container, Pedro moves it to a larger open-system container where it proceeds to grow exponentially. You could continue moving the fungi into bigger and bigger containers, but eventually you’d run out of incubator (aka refrigerator in Pedro’s case) space. At this point, you can also add sawdust or coffee grounds if you want. The fungi will consume them all. 

The brown spots are fungi growing inside the plastic

This slideshow above illustrates a very simplified process of how the cups are made.

Eventually, you’ll want to actually make the cup. Pedro designed his own 3-D printed cup molds to hold the fungus, but you could also use glass or other materials. The problem is that the fungi can penetrate almost anything. These plastic molds that Pedro made one year ago already have fungi growing inside of the plastic seams (see photo to the left). In order to putting the fungus into the plastic mold, Pedro first has to remove the top layer of the fungus. He’s currently exploring different uses for this slimy leather-like layer, but for making the cups, he’s more focused on what’s underneath it. Then, he breaks the fungus below into pieces. He stuffs those little chunks into the mold and then puts the mold into a different incubator. This one has a lamp inside that darkens the fungi color to a brown or golden color. The end result all depends on how much time you let the cup spend in the incubator. 

After the fungus has regrown around the mold for at least one week, it is then ready to be removed from the incubator. Pablo then puts the cups in the dehydrator to stop the fungus from growing.

One of the beauties of this type of art is that it is impermanent. Even though the fungi is now “dormant”, or dead, the cup will still change over time as new bacteria and insects interact with it. Similarly, the cup will expand if you put water in it, and later shrink when the water evaporates, almost as if it were breathing. 

And there you have it! There’s obviously much more involved than what I described here, but hopefully this gives you an idea of how Pedro creates his fungi cups. What are your thoughts about the process? What questions do you have for Pedro?