Every month, Alice Audouin, art & sustainability curator and expert, founder of Art of Change 21 and Impact Art News, explores a new theme and selects the cream of the crop within the art, fashion, and design worlds.
The potential of mycelium (comment of the editor: the underground mushroom network) unveiled through art – the fourth installment of our new series by the wonderful Alice .
Imagine a hidden kingdom ruled by mushrooms, a vast and invisible tapestry of life interwoven by millions of microscopic fungal fibers, spanning thousands of kilometers within just a few kilos of soil. Welcome to the hidden world of Mycelium!
Mycelium is the underground part of a fungal organism, which forms expansive networks between plants and fungi. Acting as conduits of nutrients, water, and information, mycelial threads quietly orchestrate the health and resilience of entire ecosystems.
Emerging at the crossroads of nature and innovation, this living material is becoming a muse for designers and artists, inspiring creations that echo the rhythms of Earth itself.
1. Rooted
French artist Benoît Lefeuvre has incorporated mycelium into several of his collections; for his latest work, Rooted, a highlight of the 2024 Paris Photo fair this november, he depicted landscapes and forest scenes via laser-engravings on a mycelium and hemp shaving based canvas.
His previous series, released in 2023, Erosion, united a number of natural themes and motifs, underscoring the industrial pollution poisoning our planet’s soils. Burying fragments of film underground in a winter forest, the mycelium that lives within and among the tree roots weaved its way onto the surface of the negatives, reacting with and altering the chemistry of the film, leaving behind ghostly traces of discoloration and bleaching.
2. Mycocaster
Rachel Rosenkrantz is a New England-based guitar maker who has integrated mycelium and other sustainable biomaterials into her craft in order to create environmentally friendly instruments. Motivated by the ever growing list of plants on the CITES list (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora), Rosenkrantz dived headfirst into sustainability, proactively seeking out alternative materials that could be substituted for many of the older, rarer woods which are most commonly found in guitar fabrication like ebony, mahogany, and rosewood—some of which face serious threats from illegal logging.
Inspired by mycelium used to replace food packaging, Rosenkrantz created the “Mycocaster”, an electric guitar eponymously named after the mycelium which serves as the foundation of its body. The unique acoustic properties of a mycelium-based body give the guitar a twangy and nasally tone, which Rosenkrantz believes may serve niche and novel genres of music. But before you add it to your Christmas list just yet: a custom made model will set you back $4,000.
3. Dafne Phono
Currently on display until January 12, 2025 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, within The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio, Lebanese-American multidisciplinary artist Nour Mobarak’s latest sonic installation entwines experimental mycelium structures with the world’s very first known opera. This earliest opera, Dafne, originally staged in December 1598 at Florence’s Palazzo Tornabuoni by composer Jacopo Peri, recounts the story of the Greek god Apollo’s pursuit of the nymph Daphne. Mobarak’s reimagining, titled Dafne Phono, revives this lost opera by rerecording the libretto in various languages and emitting those voices via loudspeakers placed within the installation’s mycelium-based constructs—which represent the characters of the original opera. The rudimentary, geometric forms of the mycelium structures allowed Mobarak to study the scale and capabilities of working with the biomaterial.
4. Mycelium Muses
Heading back to Paris, this next collection celebrates the groundbreaking mycelium-leather material Reishi™, invented by biotechnology company MycoWorks. This dedicated thematic exposition titled Mycelium Muse was exhibited during the last Art Basel Paris at Design Miami from October 15th to 20th, 2024. The collection comprises seven unique objects crafted by seven French women.
The collection’s pieces interrogated the versatility and adaptability of the biomaterial under various applications, such as its ability to diffuse light, serve as an architectural element, or even as functional furniture. Artist Sarah Valente’s contribution to the collection was a monumental fresco titled Magic Ancestors, which consists of ten sheets of treated Reishi™, displaying the materials capacity for diverse finishing techniques and large-scale artistic application. “These seven women embody the very essence of what it means to be a modern muse – creative, powerful, and unafraid to push the boundaries of design,’ shares Guillaume de Saint Lager (founder of MycoWorks’s partner Paragone).
5. Mycelium – Christos Papadopoulos
Inspired by the network of fungal organisms that lie beneath our feet, Greek choreographer Christos Papadopoulos gives physical form to the intricate dance of mycelium’s branching filaments, winding and wending their way through the soil. Created at the Opéra de Lyon in September 2023, the performance is touring around France into the 2025 season. The dancers’ performance relies on micro-movements, rhythm discrepancies, and minute variations to unify their inscrutable web of dance into a singular, collective entity. Papadopoulos’s latest creation is a collaboration with the Nederlands Dans Theater company titled Ties Unseen, which is currently on display at Amare concert hall in The Hague.
6. Fungal Faculty
Our next selection fuses the novel and revolutionary power of AI intelligence with the ancient intelligence of the underground mycelial network. With his piece, Fungal Faculty, Thijs Biersteker, one of the most environmentally conscious artists of our time, challenges the audience to consider the fluidity of intelligence and questions the paradigms of human intellectual superiority. Created in partnership with an AI research team at the Vrije University Amsterdam, the artwork is currently on display on the ground floor of the university’s new teaching and research building.
The structure consists of a unique blend of recycled steel and 3D-printed recycled fungal elements; dispersed throughout the artwork is a network of lights directed by artificial intelligence, seamlessly giving testament to both sustainability and the emerging incorporation of nature’s wisdom into human ingenuity. This striking marriage of technological and biological evolution offers us a glimpse into a sustainable future of harmonious interaction with Earth and its resources.
7. Fungi Forms
On display until December 8th at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh’s Inverleith House Gallery, the Fungi Forms exhibition transports visitors on a spectacular journey exploring the scientific, innovative, and cultural power and influence of fungi via music, literature, fashion, design, and visual art. Renowned fashion designers like Stella McCartney and Iris van Herpen rub shoulders with eco-conscious artists like Simon Faithfull, presenting us with pieces such as fungal-print dresses, mycelium pants, or 3D printed heads playing host to various mushroom species. Highlighting almost every incredible fungal contribution to food, art, medicine, and modern technology, this exhibition is an absolutely unforgettable modern monument to mycelial majesty.
8. Fungi Film Fest
Premiering at Cinema 21 in Portland, Oregon on December 12th at 7PM, the Fungi Film Fest, which describes itself as an “Audio-Visual Celebration of Mushrooms and Mycelium”, brings otherworldly fungal narratives to life through the medium of film. First launched in 2020, this entirely community-sourced festival is created by and for fungi lovers and invites seasoned and aspiring filmmakers alike to submit documentaries, music videos, experimental films, or animations for the festival’s program. The full festival program will be available to stream on demand from December 13, 2024 to January 13, 2025. From the microscopic fungi, lichens, molds & mildews, to the mushrooms on your pizza and yeast in your bread, this one of a kind international festival has something for anyone and everyone looking to get their fungal fix. This year’s nominations might be closed but keep a close eye out for next year’s selection timeline and it just might be your fungal film on the silver screen next.
Selection & Text by Alice Audouin
PS: Finally, for those of you who had your hearts set on a different sort of mushroom, perhaps of the greater psychedelic variety, you’ll be glad to hear of the recent Mycelium Festival in Thailand. Though…your mileage may vary.
