Georg Dietzler

When I was performing in Cologne last year, the man who picked me up at the train station (with the black-rotting cathedral overhanging it), was Georg Dietzler. Looking like Doc from BTTF, a mad scientist on vintage bicycle. Long white hair poofed out, and a quite pleasant humor. Good guy. Before the show, we had ice cream and he told me about his work.

Seems like a long time before Paul Stamets, there was an understanding of the primal importance of Fungus, as a sort of universal solvent made out of living foam, that can eat anything, including crude oil. Unfortunately for the Gulf of Mexico, fungus needs earth to survive, thus it cannot be grown in the sea, but perhaps this is where some more research can be done?

Georg Dietzler is one of these visionary artists, who derived his piece from a fundamental question: how do we cure the PCB problem? Not Printed Circuit Boards, but Polychlorinated Biphenyls, which land in our earth after they fall out of the many wires of a electrical transformer, and then soak into the ground. After that, they keep on falling down until they hit groundwater, and then Boome, they're in your power supply and you have cancer.

So... The goal is to decompose them while they are still above ground. This is Georg's work. You see, PCBs resemble cellulose chemically, which makes them "feel" like wood, although they are a lot worse. So George built structures of grass and organic materials on a "cursed ground", to encourage our myrical foam to arrive, fungus, which then penetrates the ground and eats the "cursed wood".

http://www.dietzlerge.org/

http://www.greenmuseum.org/content/artist_index/artist_id-33.html