Mushrooms on the ruins

NoguerasBlanchard is delighted to present Mushrooms on the Ruins, an exhibition curated by Borbála Soós that was selected for the sixth edition of the curatorial Open Call organised by the gallery.

How do forests think? Do plants communicate? What are animals dreaming about? Humans live in the entangled connections of a complex system created by other beings. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that in children’s tales mushrooms are often called little men in hats. Anthropomorphising plants, or thinking about subjects that are interchangeable are symptoms of a search for familiar features and abilities, in our attempt to understand them.

The relationship between fungi and humans, including the stories that they unfold, can be used as metaphors for our future survival. As Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing put it, it is time to pay attention to mushroom picking, not that it can save us – but it might open our imagination when we are stuck with the problem of living despite economic and ecological ruination.

The exhibition maps relations between various species in a landscape both strange and familiar. It strives to open up a world of imagination where all other beings have the same agency as humans, and where, if you wish, species are capable or becoming, or transforming into one another.

Thinking about a future landscape, on the ruins of capitalism, we can envision a new type of structure. Humans might soon disappear and leave behind a blasted and disturbed landscape – one, however, fertile for mushrooms like matsutake to dominate. These fungi will choose and enable other types of trees and forests to grow as their companions, and hence aid new landscapes to emerge. Human activity, or more precisely, the memory of human beings will be transformed into mushrooms, and then plants and other new species.