FUNGI: Anarchist Designers
21 November 2025 - 2 May 2026
Fungi – better known as moulds or mushrooms – fulfil a wide range of human needs. We have eaten mushrooms since ancient times and used penicillin to fight bacteria. In the world of design and architecture, we celebrate fungi as a new, trendy material, in the same way that we once embraced concrete and plastic. Now the exhibition FUNGI: Anarchist Designers tells a different story. Fungi can be inspiring master builders – but also formidable demolition workers.
In this exhibition, curated by anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and design studio terriStories (Feifei Zhou), fungi are for once not at the service of humans, but independent beings with their own agenda, one that is closely intertwined with colonialism and other forms of capitalist exploitation, but which also brings to life a highly distinctive multi-species world.
What's on display?
For the exhibition, Tsing and Zhou have brought together works created at the intersection of science, visual art and design – with a dash of imagination thrown in. Together, they show how fungi – like the unmanageable designers of the title – can disrupt human ‘civilisation’.
An installation by Ivette Perfecto and Filipp Groubnov, for example, maps the spread of coffee rust, the fungus that benefits from monoculture in industrial coffee plantations in Latin America. Alyssa Paredes and Maia Cruz Palileo investigate the toxic effects of ‘fungicide cocktails’ on industrial banana plantations in the Philippines. Bettina Stoetzer and Berkveldt have developed a multimedia installation about the spread of radioactivity through the consumption of radioactive mushrooms by wild boars. And Rob Dunn and Baum & Leahy present an interactive, multi-sensory work on how yeast has changed human digestion