Mushrooms: A Review for Chaotic Designers – A Demented Dive into Mushroom Mayhem, from Stinky Pods to Zombie Makers | art

SSylvia Plath’s poem “The Mushroom” is a sinister paean to the natural world. Her observations of fungi are charged with terror, noting that they “seize the loam, / Seize the air.” The poem ends: “By morning we shall be, / Inheriting the earth. / Our feet in the door.”

Plath’s ominous poem from 1959 forms the opening salvo in an exhibition dedicated to the terrifying science of mycology. Far from simply stepping through the door, the door has been blown off its hinges due to the supernatural fungi’s ability to reproduce, spread, evolve – and annihilate. How it thrives with a harmful force on neglected, dead and dying things, driving the cycle of decay and regrowth. As necrophiliacs and silent killers, they are legionnaires, and have been around for over a billion years.

Featuring installations, films and soundscapes by a range of artists, Fungi: Anarchist Designers is Dante’s journey through the many circles of inferno, designed to convey their terrifying pervasiveness and resilience. A time film of the aptly named Stinky Baskethorn, which emerges from a fat penis into a perforated canopy, sets the tone. The stinkhorn emits the odor of rotting flesh to attract flies, which feed on it and spread its spores.

“Fungi reject the orders of their human masters and adhere to human standards of physical fitness,” say the exhibition’s curators, anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tseng and architect and artist Vivi Zhou. “They cling to our worst habits, turning industrial trade into killing machines for the continent. They are jumping into commercial agriculture, wiping out vast fields. They are creeping into hospital beds and from there into our lungs. We cannot ignore them.”

The exhibition is not only about the increasing role of fungi as a building material or passive producer, which is evident in the emergence of mycelium panels. Instead, its focus is on “anti-design,” highlighting their role as “co-designers of the world,” superior to it and subject to their will.

From the sea to the stratosphere, the field of fungi is vast. Taxonomically, it includes more than two million organisms, from microscopic yeasts and molds to lichens and mushrooms, some of which are filled with psychotropic properties or deadly toxins. Amanita phalloides, or death cap, is the primary cause of most human deaths from mushroom poisoning, including that of Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI in 1740. Now the worldwide spread of the death cap through the planting of non-native tree species is an illustration of the unintended consequences of humans tampering with nature.

Fungi thrive because of our corruption and short-sightedness. Monocultural forests and crop plantations, farmed sparingly for profit, form the grist for their mills. The genetic similarity to industrially grown commodities such as sweet corn, bananas and coffee makes them particularly vulnerable to fungal attack. Heterogeneous root rot, capable of tearing apart conifer plantations, is one of the most terrible diseases. Its devastating impact is woefully captured in a multimedia installation by forest pathologist Matteo Garbelotto and artist Kyriaki Juni, titled “We Will Inherit the Earth by Morning,” after Plath’s apocalyptic poem.

Plants and trees are not the only victims of the fungal advance. A giant ‘tombstone’ has been engraved with the names of various frog species that became extinct due to a microscopic fungus. It is accompanied by a zoomed-in image of a fungal tube penetrating the skin of a corroboree frog. It may seem harmless, but to date, more than 90 amphibian species have been wiped out and many are still endangered.

Fans of The Last of Us will be familiar with how humanity has been transformed into mushroom-headed monsters by the Cordyceps virus, based on a very real species of parasitic fungus that infects insects, controls their brains, and then erupts from the host’s corpse in the form of fungal stalks to spread its spores, a wonderfully horrific marriage of death and sex.

In fact, humans are susceptible to fungal infections, especially the vulgar variety that prefers warm, moist crevices and lack of personal hygiene. But more evil invaders are always lurking. A mock-up of a hospital bed bay is an impromptu shrine to multidrug-resistant Candida auris bacteria, which spread through hospitals and can be deadly, killing up to one in three patients who come into contact with them.

However, the fungi’s nihilistic tendencies are underscored by their intriguing beauty. Historical architectural drawings from the Nieuwe Instituut archive appear stylized with fungal discoloration, like Rorschach inkblots, while Japanese artist Hajime Imamura creates “fungal sculptures” in the form of thin, interlocking scrolls, draped prominently across the ceiling.

The “tufted floor objects” (i.e. rugs) designed by Lisanne Frijsen resemble patches of dry rot, a fungus that thrives in damp homes and wooden ships. Originally, it was confined to one corner of the Himalayas, but has since made its way around the world through colonial trade channels. Michael Poulsen’s towering stalagmite-like model of a termite mound highlights the symbiosis between fungi and termites. Fungi break down plant cell walls to provide food for insects.

After Hiroshima was destroyed by the atomic bomb, one of the first organisms to emerge from the devastated landscape was the matsutake mushroom, which the Japanese traditionally cherished as a delicacy. The lyrical animation film by Shiho Satsuka and Liu Yi highlights the relationship between matsutake forests and Japanese pine forests, showing how fungi can make habitable places for trees in terrain disturbed by the impact of people, earthquakes or war.

Actual live fungi appear in “Architecture Must Rot,” an installation that explores how materials—in this case, plywood cocoons in a sealed terrarium—decompose and are transformed by fungal growth. In reconceptualizing decay as a positive and environmentally beneficial mechanism, it questions the fantasy of architecture’s material permanence (indeed, all buildings have a finite lifespan) and how fungi can mediate processes of transformation and regeneration.

Dantian’s journey culminates in a passage of statements that urge us to rethink how we live with a more-than-human world, and to envision a future shaped by negotiation and interdependence. Lively, detailed, and most of it deliciously disturbing, this exhibition ensures you’ll never look at mushrooms the same way again. Humanity, beware: “Our feet are in the door.”