Capacity Dampening: An Antidote — Taylor Le Melle’s Mushroom Concoction at A Tale of A Tub
When gas prices were rising in 2022, Brianna Leatherbury decided to take matters into her own hands and started making solar panel heaters. A Tale of A Tub showcases Leatherbury’s Your Own Sun (2025); a heating system made up of recycled materials. In the workshop Replenish Your Capacity, Taylor Le Melle comments on the implications of Leatherbury’s work with their own DIY experiments and research. Anastasia Shin attends the presentation which explores how capitalist structures can coerce us towards burnout and learns how medicinal mushrooms can provide something of an antidote.
In Leatherbury’s minimal installation, working thermostats report temperature and recycled insulation boards block out the downstairs windows’ daylight, blocking-in the central brick floor of the old bathhouse, which becomes a focal area with its double height ceiling. Looking down from the mezzanine, I think of a zoo enclosure, though the insulated inner area is uninhabited and has no visible door. The projected inhabitants would of course be ourselves: electricity-bill-paying-citizens, extorted by ever-greedy profit seeking corps, or landlords, making the effort to maintain the necessary heat, life, and resources to survive.
I’m here for Replenish Your Capacity, a workshop which complements Leatherbury’s solo show The Drain with a combination of presentation and mushroom drink tasting by Taylor Le Melle, in the basement of A Tale of A Tub. Continuing Leatherbury’s commitment to probing the material aspects of precarious living conditions, writer and curator Le Melle reflects on the organisational structures which shape our mindbody experiences, coercing us to function in exploitative infrastructures.
Le Melle looks into (and experiments with) the adaptogenic qualities that mushrooms can bring to the struggle of corporeal capacity within these systems. Their work is manifold; the research they share contextualizes the development of the mushroom drink and the effects of the mushroom concoction bring new elements into their experimental, bodymind-based project. This not only relates to the social structures touched on in Leatherbury’s show upstairs but also to the location of the workshop – as we sit in the now cool, concrete, basement space – where the regulatory temperature systems servicing all 264 small homes (50 m²) in the original Justus van Effencomplex (1922) would have been installed. Humid, dark, microbial air – ideal mushroom growing territory?
We sit at pop-up poker style round tables in small groups of 5-6 and Le Melle’s rhythmic, powerful, rhetoric carries us through many asides and video visuals which cover the various times and places which have significance for the research entwined with its outcome: a medicinal drink. As efficiency regimes wear away our peace of mind and competitive practices destroy community, ‘the body is the place to start,’ Le Melle says.
We move quickly through diagrams and descriptions of essential cortisol, cardiac, and hormonal systems that provide the physical pathways and a sense of capability to our inner lives. Then, the narrative takes a diaristic turn; Le Melle shares entries that highlight the personal imperative for immune support and stress reduction. They speak about sleep cycles, emotional connection and desire (or lack of); painting an anxious picture. Later describing their physical experience of joint pain, sinus infections and gut issues which were the basis for designing and experimenting with a mushroom elixir in ‘the lab’.
‘I’m a writer, and there have been times when I’ve felt I couldn’t really meet the embodiment of the things I believed in with the physical capacity I had,’ they say after describing lying on their back in pain with knees at 90 degrees for their laptop – the clash of contorted action over rest seems to not acknowledge the necessary break from relentless overthinking and overworking. ‘Acting on what we believe in’ often ignores the cognitive dissonance which is part of being human, with a body and a mind that don’t always agree on their collaborative directive. Riffing on the struggle for bodily vitality in a time of capitalistic nervous system destruction that privileges the few, Le Melle’s research itself seems to offer a way out, learning new ways to adapt and modify physical responses to stressors. But because of the ideology that some of the experts are bound up within (super capitalist and individualistic), it is also something to get trapped in: a groove of despair and contradictory feelings border the information gleaned.
The context is both societal and personal. On one level, Le Melle has been focused on creating the right conditions to be able to write a book. Their practice has previously included building infrastructures and curating exhibitions, and now, in facilitating the production of text, they have been working on parallel ‘draft objects’, of which I suspect this mushroom drink is one. The information they share in Replenish Your Capacity focuses a lot on the ‘ideological tightrope’ they have traversed, amidst the scientific literature (and podcast information) by Stanford professors turned self-optimization gurus and books on burnout.
Burnout as a subject brings in ideas of boundaries, precarity, and a sense of control, while capacity speaks to the efficiency drive within capitalist production. With the development of the ‘replenishing’ mushroom drink Le Melle practices mastery over this past experience of depletion; the drink integrates knowledge from Traditional Chinese Medicine but symbolises a scientific solution for mental health efficiency.
The curation of mushrooms brought together in powdered form for the drink that Le Melle shares with us include: Lion’s mane, Reishi, Chaga and Shiitake. A mix designed to host a collection of qualities including identifying metaphorical wounds, enhancing memory, building strength and stamina, and calming the mind.
There’s a slight bitterness to the warm drink and it’s earthy tasting. Le Melle specifies that the drink is ‘not a work’. The lecture lands as a manifesto for a more just world with enhanced capacity and emotional safety at the core, within a sensorial taste-based experience. As Le Melle goes through the ingredients list, the characteristics of each medicinal plant become qualities and values to enact in self-reflection and action in the world; an ongoing (collective) process for which a medicinal antidote alone, will not be enough but which is perhaps the place to start.
The exhibition The Drain by Brianna Leatherbury is on show until the 11th of May at A Tale of A Tub
Anastasia Shin
