WITHIlvia Plath's poem “Mushrooms” is an ominous paean to the natural world. Her observations of mushrooms are full of foreboding: she notes how “very / White, imperceptibly, / Very quietly” they “grasp the loams, / Capture the air.” The poem ends: “By morning we will / Inherit the earth. / Our foot is in the door.”
Plath's ominous ode to 1959 was the opening salvo of an exhibition dedicated to the eerie omniscience of mushrooms. The door was not just stepped on, it was ripped off its hinges by the uncanny ability of mushrooms to multiply, spread, develop – and be destroyed. How they thrive with twisted intensity on discarded, dead and dying things, starting a cycle of decay and new growth. Like coprophiles, necrophiles and silent killers, they are legion and have been around for over a billion years.
It features installations, films and soundscapes created by various artists. Mushrooms: anarchist designers is a Dantean journey through the many circles of a mushroom hell, designed to convey their terrifying omnipresence and persistence. The tone is set by slow motion footage that shows the aptly named stinking basket horn growing from a fleshy phallus into a perforated umbrella. The stinkhorn emits the smell of rotting flesh to attract flies, which feed on it and carry its spores.
“Mushrooms refuse to obey the commands of their human hosts or submit to human standards of decency,” say the exhibit’s curators, anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, an architect and artist. Feifei Zhou. “They cling to our worst habits, turning industrial trade into continent-killing machines. They leap into commercial agriculture, destroying vast fields. They crawl into hospital beds and from there into our lungs. We cannot ignore them.”
The exhibition is not about the increasing role of fungi as a passive building material or product, as exemplified by the emergence of mycelium panels. Instead, his focus is on the “anti-design”, emphasizing their role as “co-designers of the world”, outsmarting it and bending it to their will.
From the sea to the stratosphere, the range of mushrooms is enormous. Taxonomically, it covers more than two million organisms, from microscopic yeasts, molds and fungi to lichens and fungi, some of which have psychotropic properties or deadly toxins. Amanita phalloides, or death cap, is the primary culprit in most human deaths from mushroom poisoning, including the death of Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI in 1740. The prevalence of death caps now established worldwide due to the cultivation of alien tree species illustrates the unintended consequences of human interference with nature.
Fungi thrive thanks to our corruption and shortsightedness. Monoculture forests and agricultural plantations farmed for profit are grist for the mill. The genetic similarity of industrially grown foods such as sweet corn, bananas and coffee makes them especially vulnerable to fungal attack. Heterobasidione root rot, which can affect coniferous plantations, is one of the most dangerous diseases. Its destructive impact is crystallized in a multimedia installation by forest pathologist Matteo Garbelotto and artist. Kyriaki Gonientitled: “By Morning We Shall Inherit the Earth” based on Plath's chilling poem.
Plants and trees are not the only victims of fungi. The giant “tombstone” bears the names of various species of frogs that became extinct due to a microscopic fungus. Accompanying it is an enlarged image of a fungal tube piercing the skin of a corroboree frog. This may seem harmless, but today More than 90 species of amphibians were destroyed. and many of them are still endangered.
fans The Last of Us will be familiar with how humanity has been transformed into mushroom-headed monsters by the Cordyceps virus, which is based on a very real type of parasitic fungus that infects insects, controls their brains, and then bursts out of the host's corpse as fungal stalks to spread its spores—an exquisitely terrifying combination of death and sex.
People are indeed susceptible to fungal infections, mostly prosaic ones that prefer warm, moist crevices and lack of personal hygiene. But there are always more sinister invaders lurking. A mock hospital bed forms a makeshift temple to multidrug-resistant Candida auris, which spreads through hospitals and can be deadly, killing nearly one in three patients who come into contact with it.
However, the nihilistic tendencies of mushrooms are emphasized by their unusually attractive beauty. Historical architectural drawings from the Nieuwe-Institut archive are depicted with brightly speckled fungal blotches, like Rorschach's ink blots, while Japanese artist Hajime Imamura creates “mycelial sculptures” in the form of thin interlocking spirals, artfully draped across the ceiling.
Lizan Freisen“Items on the floor” (such as rugs) resemble stains of dry rot, a fungus that thrives in damp homes and wooden ships. It was originally limited to one corner of the Himalayas, but has since spread throughout the world through colonial trade channels. Michael Poulsen's towering, stalagmite-like model of a termite mound highlights the symbiosis of fungi and termites; Fungi break down plant cell walls to provide food for insects.
After Hiroshima was destroyed by an atomic bomb, one of the first living creatures to appear on the devastated landscape was the matsutake mushroom, traditionally revered by the Japanese as an exquisite delicacy. Shiho Satsuka and Liu Yi's lyrical animated film illuminates the connection between matsutake and Japanese pine forests, showing how fungi can make habitats suitable for trees in terrain disturbed by humans, earthquakes or war.
Real live fungi appear in the installation Architecture Must Rot, which explores how materials—in this case, plywood cocoons in sealed terrariums—are destroyed and transformed by fungal growth. Reframing decay as a positive, ecologically beneficial mechanism, he questions the fiction of physical permanence in architecture (in reality, all buildings have a limited lifespan) and how fungi can mediate processes of transformation and regeneration.
Dante's journey ends with a corridor of manifestos calling on us to rethink how we live in a more-than-human world and to envision a future shaped by negotiation and interdependence. Enlivened by a wealth of detail, most of it delightfully unsettling, this atmospheric and engrossing exhibition ensures you'll never look at mushrooms the same way again. Humanity, beware: “Our foot is already in the door.”
