OLD NEWS

FROM STINKHORNS TO ZOMBIE-MAKERS
Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam
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Sylvia Plath’s poem Mushrooms is a sinister paean to the natural world. Her observations on fungi are freighted with foreboding, noting how “very / Whitely, discreetly, / Very quietly” they “Take hold on the loam, / Acquire the air”. The poem ends: “We shall by morning, / Inherit the earth. / Our foot’s in the door.”
Plath’s ominous ode from 1959 forms the opening salvo in an exhibition dedicated to fungi’s creepy omniscience. Far from merely getting a foot in the door, the door has been blasted off its hinges by fungi’s preternatural capacity to reproduce, spread, evolve – and annihilate. How they thrive with a perverse intensity on discarded, dead and dying things, impelling the cycle of decay and regrowth. As coprophiliacs, necrophiliacs and silent assassins, they are legion, and have been around for over a billion years.
Featuring installations, films and soundscapes confected by a range of artists, Fungi: Anarchist Designers is a Dantean journey through the many circles of fungal hell, contrived to convey their terrifying ubiquity and resilience. A timelapse film of the aptly named basket stinkhorn, burgeoning from fleshy phallus into a perforated umbrella, sets the tone. The stinkhorn emits the smell of rotting flesh to attract flies, which feast on it and disperse its spores.
“Fungi refuse the commands of human masters and to abide by human standards of propriety,” say the exhibition’s curators, anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and architect and artist Feifei Zhou. “They latch on to our worst habits, turning industrial trade into continent killing machines. They leap into commercial agriculture, wiping out vast fields. They crawl into hospital beds and from there into our lungs. We cannot ignore them.”
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The exhibition is not about fungi’s increasing role as a passive building material or product, exemplified by the rise of mycelium panels. Instead, its focus is on “anti-design”, highlighting their role as “co-designers of the world”, outwitting it and bending it to their will.
From the sea to the stratosphere, fungi’s domain is vast. Taxonomically, it encompasses more than two million organisms, from microscopic yeasts, moulds and mildews to lichens and mushrooms, some laced with psychotropic properties or lethal toxins. Amanita phalloides, or death cap, is the principal culprit in most human deaths from mushroom poisoning, including the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI in 1740. Now globally established, through the cultivation of non-native tree species, the prevalence of the death cap illustrates the unintended consequences of humans tampering with nature.
Fungi thrive on our venality and shortsightedness. Monocultural forests and crop plantations, reductively cultivated for profit, are grist to their mill. The genetic sameness of industrially farmed commodities such as sweetcorn, bananas and coffee makes them especially vulnerable to fungal attack. Capable of ripping through conifer plantations, heterobasidion root rot is one of the most feared diseases. Its balefully destructive impact is crystallised in a multimedia installation by forest pathologist Matteo Garbelotto and artist Kyriaki Goni, entitled: “We shall by morning, inherit the earth” after Plath’s chilling poem.
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Plants and trees are not the only victims of fungi’s advances. A giant “tombstone” is inscribed with the names of assorted frog species rendered extinct by a microscopic fungus. Accompanying it is a magnified image of a fungal tube piercing the skin of a corroboree frog. It might look innocuous, but, to date, more than 90 amphibian species have been wiped out and many are still endangered.
Aficionados of The Last of Us will be familiar with how humanity has been reduced to mushroom-headed monstrosities through the cordyceps virus, based on an all too real type of parasitic fungus that infects insects, controls their brains, and then erupts from the host’s corpse as fungal stalks to spread its spores, an exquisitely horrific conjunction of death and sex.
Humans are, indeed, susceptible to fungal infections, mainly of the prosaic kind that favour warm, moist crevices and a lack of personal hygiene. But more sinister invaders are always lurking. A mock-up of a hospital bed bay forms an impromptu shrine to the multi drug-resistant candida auris, which spreads through hospitals and can be deadly, killing as many as one in three patients who contact it.
Yet fungi’s nihilistic propensities are underscored by a curiously compelling beauty. Historic architectural drawings from the Nieuwe Instituut’s archive are shown floridly mottled with fungal discoloration, like Rorschach inkblots, while Japanese artist Hajime Imamura creates “mycelial sculptures” as thin, intertwined coils, draped probingly across a ceiling.
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Lizan Freijsen’s “tufted floor objects” (ie rugs) resemble patches of dry rot, a fungus that thrives in damp houses and wooden ships. Originally, it was confined to a corner of the Himalayas, but has since made its way around the world through the conduits of colonial trade. Michael Poulsen’s towering, stalagmite-like model of a termite mound spotlights the symbiosis between fungi and termites; the fungi break down plant cell walls to provide food for the insects.
After Hiroshima was obliterated by an atomic bomb, one of the first living things to emerge from the devastated landscape was the matsutake mushroom, traditionally fetishised by the Japanese as a gourmet delicacy. Shiho Satsuka and Liu Yi’s lyrical animated film illuminates the relationship between the matsutake and Japanese pine forests, showing how fungi can make places habitable for trees in terrain disturbed by the impact of people, earthquakes or war.
Actual living fungi make an appearance in “architecture must rot”, an installation exploring how materials – in this case, plywood cocoons in sealed terraria – are broken down and transfigured by fungal growth. In re-imagining decay as a positive, ecologically beneficial mechanism, it questions the fiction of architecture’s physical permanence (in reality, all buildings have finite lifespans) and how fungi might mediate processes of transformation and regeneration.
The Dantean journey culminates in a corridor of manifestos urging us to rethink how we live with the more-than-human world, and to envisage futures shaped by negotiation and interdependence. Enlivened by a wealth of detail, most of it deliciously disquieting, this atmospheric and engrossing exhibition ensures you’ll never look at a mushroom in the same way again. Humanity, beware: “Our foot’s in the door”
_Catherine Slessor_GuardianUK

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PIETER BRUEGEL THE ELDER WINTER LANDSCAPE WITH BIRD SNARE, 1565
<https://tinyurl.com/ycx2hdts> _RabihAlameddine

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THE AMERICAN WEST’S MOST ICONIC TREE IS DISAPPEARING
A profound unraveling is underway in the American Southwest, happening across a thousand-mile arc from Santa Fe, N.M., to the central Sierra. In an unprecedented calamity, the most widely distributed, most iconic tree of the region — the beautiful ponderosa pine — is disappearing. So significant is this loss, both visually and ecologically, that it’s reasonably fair to say it may be triggering the first post-climate-change landscape in America.
It was the ponderosa pine that more than 1,100 years ago allowed the rise of the first cities in what would later become the United States, providing structural beams for the multi-storied dwellings of the Ancestral Pueblo. More than 700 years later, under the tutelage of the Nez Perce, Lewis and Clark hewed boats from ponderosa trunks, using them to paddle from the mountains of western Montana to the Pacific Ocean. Settlers used the tree with abandon, fashioning everything from barns to saloons, opera houses to hardware stores to livery stables. Ponderosa gave us literally millions of track ties for our railroads, then often provided the fuel for the fireboxes of the locomotives that ran along them.
Since 2000, more than 200 million ponderosa have died. More alarming still is that many of those forests won’t be coming back, likely yielding the ground to what will be grass and shrublands for centuries to come. Some ecologists caution that in just another few decades, more than 90% of the Southwestern ponderosa forests could vanish. And with them will go some of the more than 200 species that make their homes in those forests — from goshawks to white-headed woodpeckers, and from Mexican spotted owls to tassel-eared squirrels. The loss of forest will also mean much faster melting of the spring snowpacks, since the snow will no longer be shaded by trees. That means less water for streams, rivers and aquifers — this in a region currently facing its 32nd consecutive year of drought.
For us humans, there will also be profound emotional impacts. Across much of the Southwest, ponderosa are the only trees of real stature, with their cinnamon-colored trunks towering more than a hundred feet higher than the pinyons or junipers. Furthermore, the soaring trunks of a mature ponderosa forest are widely spaced — so much so that early explorers often marveled about how it was possible to ride a horse through them at full gallop. It was this combination of physique, color and spaciousness that led to the ponderosa being routinely cast in countless films and television shows, including “Easy Rider,” “The Electric Horseman,” “Bonanza” and “Yellowstone.” It’s why they showed up in the writings of John Muir, Zane Grey, Norman Maclean and D.H. Lawrence; and finally, why this tree was such a favorite for artists such as Ansel Adams and Georgia O’Keeffe. Hands down, ponderosa groves are the most iconic and most celebrated forests across the Southwest.
That this level of loss is happening to a tree long known for its hardiness, able to withstand sizzling heat and excruciatingly dry summers, not to mention the usual outbursts of pine beetles and blight and wildfires, is indicative of just how deeply we’ve altered conditions on the planet. These ponderosa pines — and plenty of other trees, including the giant sequoia — are disappearing under the blows of a devastating one-two punch: The first of those blows spotlights our terrible choice across much of the 20th century to suppress all wildfires, a move that allowed both an overly dense growth of young trees and great masses of debris and fallen trees — what firefighters call “fuel loads” — piling up on the forest floor. It was a policy that utterly ignored the fact that in the arid West, fire is the primary means by which nutrients are recycled through an ecosystem, thereby keeping it healthy.
The second blow to ponderosa, as you might guess, is climate change, which has led to measures of heat and drought severe enough to leave tens of millions of trees as easy prey for insects and disease. When heavy fuel loads and climate change collide, there often come the extraordinarily big, hot wildfires we now routinely see roaring across the landscapes of the West. And when those severe wildfires come often enough, as they increasingly are, all that can survive in the end are grasses and shrubs.
It’s not that we’re just sitting idly by. Fire crews are increasingly conducting prescribed burns, a technique that can create healthier forests by clearing debris and reducing the overcrowding of young trees. But with some 300 million acres in the West currently under excessively heavy fuel loads — an area about three times the size of California — we’re only managing to perform prescribed burns across about 10% of the lands that need it. At the same time, replanting efforts are underway in many places. But that task, too, is incredibly daunting. So far, in any given year we’re replanting only about 3% of the fire scars that really need it.
For untold thousands of years, ponderosa have fed and sheltered an astonishingly varied collection of life across the West — humans and butterflies, woodpeckers and warblers, foxes and owls and squirrels. And at the same time, for many humans these forests offered up a profound, soul-deep satisfaction, the gift of a singularly peaceful yet soaring natural beauty. Beyond all the practical losses that will be laid at our feet as these forests vanish, there will surely be a cavernous, tree-shaped hole in our hearts
. _ Gary Ferguson_LATimes

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MAX KLINGER, DEATH PISSING, CA. 1880
<https://tinyurl.com/hs2xsn4t> _RabihAlameddine

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WILL FUNGI THWART THE DESTRUCTIVE RISE OF THE ANTHROPOCENE?
It’s not every day that you encounter dirty dishes in a museum. A domestic kitchen greets me as I enter Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam to see the group exhibition Fungi: Anarchist Designers, complete with mouldy bread on a plate and a dirty sponge by the sink. The kitchen (created with spatial designers Marloes and Wikke) offers an immediately familiar backdrop to the omnipresence of fungi, a kingdom of living things closer in phylogeny to humans than to plants. Intimately connected, they are like us but not entirely like us—an oddly uncanny mirror that co-curators Anna Tsing and Feifei Zhou hold up throughout the exhibition in custom-built sets that make visible the unseen networks of our mushroom relatives.
Like spores, mushroom-themed exhibitions have been in the air in recent years. At London’s Somerset House in 2020, Mushrooms: The Art, Design and Future of Fungi brought together more than 40 artists, including collages by Cy Twombly and John Cage’s Mushroom Book of recipes. Fungi – in art and science at the Nobel Prize Museum in Stockholm in 2023 combined artist works with the literary world of novelist Olga Tokarczuk (in House of Day, House of Night (1998) she writes: ‘If I weren’t a human being, I would want to be a mushroom.’). Meanwhile, in 2022, experimental band The Observatory presented REFUSE, an exhibition about music, mushrooms and decomposition at the Singapore Art Museum.
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If artists and curators have been delighted to encounter mycology as an easy metaphor for alternative sources of knowledge and epistemic value systems, Tsing and Zhou’s show resolutely tries to do something different. Where prior exhibitions attempted to sublimate biological knowledge by putting these organic forms into the white-cube gallery space, this one is lucid in the curators’ drive to demystify and deromanticise fungi. Fungi: Anarchist Designers is an interdisciplinary show that tries to connect artistic creation and ongoing research by bridging art, science, design, set-making, interactive works and film.
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Notably, Tsing is not a traditional curator but the anthropologist behind The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015), the book that took, among others, the art world by storm. References to this book (both direct and indirect) can be detected in publications such as Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodriguez’s Let’s Become Fungal (2023); in artworks about matsutake and other mushrooms, such as Liu Yujia’s Mushrooms (2023), Long Pan’s Matsutake Rain (2022), and Mooni Perry’s 2019 Mushroom Orchestra (also inspired by Czech musician Václav Hálek and his 2003 score book Musical Atlas of Mushrooms); and in programmes including 2023’s Vevey Foodculture Days’ Fungi Cosmology.
Since then, Tsing has worked on several collective projects with Zhou, including the influential Feral Atlas (2020), a website featuring a constellation of ‘patches’ where human and non-human relations are entangled, followed by Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene: the New Nature (Stanford University Press, 2024). In both, Tsing worked with scientists and artists to explore how human-built or initiated infrastructures have developed and spread beyond human control, from chemicals seeping out of industrial tanks to the systemic transfer of radioactivity via the global trade in blueberries picked from the radioactive forests of northern Ukraine.
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In Rotterdam, Tsing partners up again with architect-artist Zhou to deliver an exhibition in three acts: BREAK, ASSASSINATE and MOBILIZE. In ‘BREAK’, the exhibition’s opening section, coming right after the kitchen, we encounter works at the aesthetic crossroads of design and the mycelial network. Artist Anicka Yi presents a budding 3D-printed fungal lattice within an elegant, carved dark wooden wall panel in With Whose Blood Were My Eyes Crafted? (2019). The fungal network is not immediately obvious, forcing the viewer to turn to admire the piece if they are to discover it, and offering an implicit tension between making a work that lasts and the decomposing force growing from within it. Yi’s modern and minimalist approach in demonstrating how fungi are woven into the fabric our daily lives is echoed by biomaterials researcher and artist Laura Nolte’s Field of Dreams (2025), a large installation in which fungal stains are visible when light flickers on an infected corn husk. While abstract, the work’s formal qualities are reminiscent of a large monoculture field within the so-called ‘Corn Belt’ of the U.S. Midwest.
A few steps away, UV light reveals fluorescent spores on a prop hospital bed infected with Candida auris, highlighting the (at times fearful) relationship between the human body and fungi as a signifier of decay. The set-up (created again by the curators in partnership with Marloes and Wikke) encapsulates the challenge of arbitrating the fine line between flattening an otherwise invisible scientific phenomenon into an aesthetic conceit through the process of visualisation, and successfully synthesising these concepts for a broadly non-science-focused audience.
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The exhibition’s second section, ‘ASSASSINATE’, serenades a much darker poetry. The entry and circulation of radioactive matter from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster into the global ecosystem via boars and truffles—as explored by Bettina Stoetzer, Asa Sonjasdotter and Rotterdam art collective Berkveldt in the video installation Of Boar and Fungi: A Nuclear Love Affair (2025)—indicates that there is no longer nature without man. Set within a tent-like structure covered with light veils, the floor is covered in materials resembling a moist forest ground, while two video projections hang close to the tip of the tent showing footage of mycelial growth and pig snouts sniffing for truffles, the close-up framing conjuring an urgent, visceral tone alongside a recorded voiceover. The Anthropocene (a newly created epoch of geologic time defined by humanity’s changes to the planet), the curators seem to argue, has grown into something wicked and uncontrollable. The argument that the system is broken (or at a tipping point) is woven throughout the exhibition, which actively resists embracing fungi as a new design and architectural material (as seen in the rise of mycelium panels). Instead, they are shown as organisms whose boundless growth more closely resembles the expansionism of colonial and capitalist endeavours.
A theme of decimation and death quickly becomes evident; the exhibition space acts as both memorial and cemetery. Examples of manmade monocultures or species at the mercy of ‘fungal’ agents include coffee, trees, corn and frogs. An installation by ecologists Ivette Perfecto and Zachary Hajian-Forooshani and artist Filipp Groubnov maps the spread of coffee rust, a fungus that thrives in industrial, monocultural coffee plantations throughout Latin America, and highlights how attempts to ‘civilise’ an ecosystem for commercial ends can quickly spiral out of control.
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However, if interspecies entanglements between human and nonhuman forces provoke disasters, this exhibition ends on an optimistic and dialectic note of possible collaborations and redemption. ‘MOBILIZE’ features an array of mycorrhiza (the symbiotic association between a fungus and a plant) and mycosis (fungal disease) shedding light on new ways of living together. Rob Dunn and Baum & Leahy’s yeast worlding (2025) explores the productive, symbiotic yeast present in the human body, while Liu Yi and Shiho Satsuka’s Matsutake Lead the Way (2025) uses a poetic animation in the style of an ink painting to reflect on the mushroom reoccupying a ruined landscape. Michael Poulsen’s Multispecies Mound Builders (2025) gives sculptural quality to this vision, in which several tall structures imitate actual termite fungus and bacteria symbiosis, with vitrines showcasing small samples.
Tsing and Zhou present the world as an ecosystem that is not made up of individuals but instead rooted in infinite interdependency. In their hands, the mushroom becomes not an object but an inescapable feral imagination, with the exhibition a proposal to clean the plate and start over. Yet while fungi may refuse to yield to industrialisation and domesticity alike, with their so-called ‘anarchism’ feeding into an all-too-human anxiety around the realities of the Anthropocene, we are still talking about fungi in a human world, and not humans in a fungal world—even if we can begin to glean what it may feel like. _Lou Mo_Ocula