A major new exhibition in the Netherlands is forcing visitors to confront the terrifying and fascinating power of fungi, framing them not as passive organisms but as active, anarchic shapers of our world. 'Fungi: Anarchist Designers' at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam takes audiences on a Dantean journey through fungal hell, revealing their capacity to poison emperors, hijack insect brains, and survive atomic blasts.
More Than Mycelium: Fungi as Active Anti-Designers
The exhibition, curated by anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and artist-architect Feifei Zhou, deliberately moves beyond the current trend of celebrating fungi as sustainable materials like mycelium panels. Instead, it focuses on 'anti-design', presenting fungi as wilful 'co-designers of the world' that outwit and bend systems to their purpose. As the curators state, fungi refuse human commands and standards, latching onto our worst habits—from industrial trade to commercial agriculture—and turning them into vectors for their own spread.
The show opens with Sylvia Plath's ominous 1959 poem 'Mushrooms', setting a tone of quiet, inexorable takeover. This is vividly illustrated by a timelapse film of the basket stinkhorn, a fungus that morphs from a fleshy form into a perforated umbrella, emitting the scent of rotting flesh to attract spore-dispersing flies. It's a potent symbol of fungi's perverse, ingenious strategies for reproduction and survival.
Assassins, Zombie-Makers, and Hospital Invaders
The exhibition catalogues fungi's deadly prowess with chilling detail. It highlights the Amanita phalloides, or death cap mushroom, responsible for most human fatalities from mushroom poisoning, including the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI in 1740. Its global spread, facilitated by human cultivation of non-native trees, exemplifies our unintended consequences.
Perhaps the most viscerally frightening display for many is the connection to popular culture. The cordyceps fungus, which inspired the apocalyptic video game and TV series 'The Last of Us', is shown in its real-world form: a parasite that invades insects, controls their behaviour, and erupts from the corpse to spread its spores. Meanwhile, a mock hospital bed serves as a shrine to Candida auris, a multi-drug-resistant fungal infection that spreads in healthcare settings and can kill one in three patients it infects.
The devastation extends to the natural world. A giant tombstone is inscribed with the names of over 90 amphibian species driven to extinction by the chytrid fungus. A magnified image shows the fungal tubes piercing a corroboree frog's skin, a deceptively simple sight behind a biodiversity catastrophe.
Beauty in Decay and Visions of Regeneration
Despite its nihilistic themes, the exhibition underscores a compelling, often beautiful, fungal aesthetic. Historic architectural drawings from the institute's archive are displayed floridly mottled with fungal stains, resembling Rorschach inkblots. Japanese artist Hajime Imamura creates delicate 'mycelial sculptures' of thin, intertwined coils draped across a ceiling.
Other works reframe decay as a positive, regenerative force. The installation 'architecture must rot' features plywood cocoons in sealed terraria being broken down by fungal growth, questioning the fiction of permanent structures. A lyrical animated film by Shiho Satsuka and Liu Yi tells the story of the matsutake mushroom, which was among the first life forms to emerge after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, illustrating fungi's role in making devastated landscapes habitable again.
The journey concludes in a corridor of manifestos urging a rethink of humanity's relationship with the 'more-than-human' world, advocating for futures built on negotiation and interdependence. Running until 8 August, this atmospheric and engrossing exhibition ensures you will never look at a mushroom the same way again. As Plath's poem warns, and the show reiterates: their foot is already in the door.
