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The research investigates the significance of urban mold as a representation of larger environmental and social issues within housing conditions.

March 16, 2026Environmental Humanities0 citationsOpen Access

Abjection

CSChristoph Schemann

Puntos clave

The research investigates the significance of urban mold as a representation of larger environmental and social issues within housing conditions.
Analysis of photographs provided by a former participant from a study on urban mold damages.
Field observations conducted in a working-class neighborhood in Bayreuth.
Discussions on the material conditions of housing in relation to microbial life and its implications.
Visual documentation highlights the harsh living conditions exemplified by discarded moldy food.
Findings suggest urban mold raises critical questions about the human microbiome and its relationship with broader microbial environments.
The study indicates that even mold, often viewed negatively, has potential benefits, such as antibiotic properties.

Resumen

S ome years ago, in 2017, a former research participant sent me two snapshots from her mobile that she took in front of her housing block to demonstrate the "unruly" housing conditions.I had visited this research participant several times before in the course of my research on urban mold damages, often talking about the wider social and untidy material conditions of her accommodation.Her housing block is a past workingclass quarter located between the central train station and the municipal prison in the northeast of Bayreuth (Bavaria) in a district called "Burg" ("castle"), which is known for its social segregation of lower income earners and a sizable population of migrants from the former Soviet Union and some from Turkey among other groupings like students.The first photograph showed an abandoned, greenish, moldy loaf of bread that has been bluntly discarded in front of a housing entrance together with an expired egg box, while the second one depicted the wider access area of the same building at that time.Initially, the moldy bread might seem like a trivial object, but it might pose some important environmental questions about the way we might think of abjection-for instance, as contamination in relation to decay, or mold colonies as lively matter of microbic agency inhabiting differently contested urban spaces and symbiotic bodies.While we can't identify from a distance the kinds of mold that have grown on the rotting bread, it is important to bear in mind that this moldy outcast risks disconnecting the human microbiome from our wider microbial entanglement (the macrobiome) due to reinforcing a simplified dichotomy of either pro-or antibiotic effects and values in an anthropocentric view of a supposedly delimitable infrastructural shelter and (human) body.In fact, even mold can be used as "antibiotic" (e.g., penicillin) for the sake of human health. 1 1.For more valuable encounters and functions of fungi in general, see Sheldrake, Entangled Life.For a more versatile perspective on mold fungi, see Schemann, "Spores of Speculation"; Schemann, "Rotten Capital."

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