"I’m of a mind that what’s rather needed in a culture of global connectivity is an appreciation of beyond-human body intensities."
Interview with Piotr Bockowski (NeoFung)
from Chronic Illness (UK)
by Georgi Pavlov
18.05.2025
GEORGI PAVLOV: What is Chronic Ilness?
PIOTR BOCKOWSKI: Chronic Illness is a site specific performance art event series taking place at a Victorian sewage in North London squatted a decade ago. The space is conceptualized as a fungal living entity that digests & transmutes the body forms of humanoids who enter down there. The event series hosts live acts in the narrative context of decomposition ecologies, posthuman fetishism & dark vitalism. The idea of a squatted sewage space as a bioactive agency of infectious urban decay is essential to curation behind Chronic Illness, although we also bring our acts to other alternative art spaces in Europe, including Oslo, Poznań, Paris, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Lisbon, Madrid , Valencia, Berlin, Cosenza, Barcelona. This time we were invited by our Bulgarian friends to organise an event in Sofia.
GP: Can you tell me more about the history of how Chronic Illness came to be?
PB: The sewage space is the underbelly of an abandoned bookstore I took over with a group of Eastern European squatters at the beginning of 2015. Initially I was using the space as a private shibari venue, then a rehearsal space for body theatre in collaboration with post-industrial music of my friends. Eventually, we started inviting audiences to public events in the format of exploratory performances intertwined with electronic music gigs, body art, biomedia installations, expanded cinema, multichannel video projections & bioart, immersive theatre, sessions of explicit fetishism, as well as exercises in sensory deprivation.
GP: In your book - Fungi-Media - you write about а reworking of human subjectivity through a specific blend of mycelium-inspired, post-internet mutant performance art. Can you share more about the subject and how this is tied to the sewage space you inhabit?
PB: I’m fascinated by the idea that everything that happens at the sewage in terms of human action is actually part of a broader, open ended digestion process of the fungal entity, which we enter on our way down there. The body performance of humanoids is just a part of vitality of mysterious nonhuman entity, which fascinates me. I'm saying that, the ‘hollowness’ or ‘porousness’ of humanoid bodies, which open up for fungal mutations inside the sewage, is the ambiguous condition of “chronic illness” - that always defies the closure of health & keeps on relapsing into confusing biomorphs.
These biomorphs can be described as ‘post-internet’ as the internet presence is the initial presentation of the sewage that lures online users in and they come down there with imagination framed by internet mediations. Only to face the gutter of fungi that embody all sorts of digital body manipulations anew
GP: Are these ideas tied to any emancipatory end goals and if yes, how?
PB: There is certainly no promotion of any emancipatory identity politics here (or any other socialist agenda typical for many squats) - in fact the opposite. The “emancipation” of the Chronic Illness narrative could be understood as ‘emancipation from identity’; in its philosophical interrogation of and complicity with anonymous living matter. There is an element of ‘nihilistic mysticism’ perhaps in our attempt to account for generative force of decomposition as the ultimate medium behind human cultures, technologies, civilizations, ideas etc.
GP: Seeing as your art thrives on decomposition, how do you position it in relation to popular conservative current days views that contemporary art is degenerate, the west is dying, beauty is gone, etc?
PB: I’m of a mind that what’s rather needed in culture of global connectivity is an appreciation of beyond-human body intensities, observation of living cycles, de-acceleration of populations and industries in relation to environmental conditions; contemplation of decay aesthetics, indulgence in infertile fetishism and performative excess instead of ‘family values’ or ‘production values’. The first may probably have immense though unrecognized yet ecological importance.
GP: Currently who is part of Chronic Illness and does everyone follow your philosophy of fungisexuality? What does Chronic Illness represent for the current members and partners?
PB: Fungi-Media is a report from the 7 years long research that happened at Chronic Illness sewage & overlaps with the first events. Chronic Illness is my curatorial project, although the original events were initiated with a Peruvian ‘organic industrial’ musician CAO, who is also a philosopher interested in dark materialism. The list also includes the brain diseased performer Luke Jordan & conceptual artist Richard Crow from the Institution of Rot, a decaying building where he lived in 1990s and hosted performance art events embedded within organic decomposition. My most important collaborator is Trojanovskx, who has been the sound engineer of Chronic Illness since 2016 & who composed most of dark ambient soundtracks for Chronic Illness Theatre as well as short films made at the sewage. The other close collaborator is Laboranta who lives with us and has been performing regularly with Chronic Illness Theatre, inviting acts, contributing creative approach to tech and mixing sounds for shows.
Other close collaborators in the past include Mis Saigo, the Judgement Hall, Aliceex, Sin of the Father & Aurora Gasm, all engaging with the vitalist philosophy behind Chronic Illness.
Moreover, there are almost hundred other performers that contributed their body intensities to Chronic Illness & worked with its ideas.
CHRONIC ILLNESS WILL PERFORM AT CLUB MESMERIC 22.05. TICKETS CAN BE FOUND HERE OR AT THE DOOR.