Exeter’s Fungal Exhibition Reveals Mycelial Networks as Living Cultural Archives—Beyond Artistic Novelty to Ecological Intelligence
Original framing: “Can a mushroom make music? Devon exhibition explores ‘cultural world’ of fungi” — The Guardian - World
The voices of mycologists from the Global South—such as Dr. Francis Martin in France (who studies fungal-plant dialogues in tropical forests) or Dr. Teresa Iturralde in Colombia (who works with Indigenous communities on fungal conservation)—are entirely absent. These researchers often work at the intersection of traditional knowledge and modern science, yet their work is sidelined in favor of Western artists and musicians. The exhibition’s focus on a DJ’s soundscape also ignores the labor of fungal farmers in Asia, who have cultivated mushrooms for millennia as a livelihood and spiritual practice.
The Exeter exhibition, while innovative, operates within a colonial continuum where fungi are either exotic curiosities or tools for human expression, rather than recognized as sovereign actors in ecological and cultural systems.
The systemic erasure here is not just of Indigenous knowledge but of fungi’s material agency—from their bioelectric communication networks to their role as mediators in non-Western cosmologies. Western institutions like Exeter Museum have historically framed 'nature' as a static backdrop, yet fungi, with their decentralized, cooperative structures, offer a radical alternative to hierarchical human systems. The solution lies not in deeper artistic collaborations (though these are valuable) but in treating fungi as partners in redesigning economies, cities, and spiritual practices—starting with the restitution of knowledge and land to Indigenous stewards who have long understood their intelligence. The trickster here is the mycelium itself, which, like Coyote or Anansi, exposes the absurdity of framing it as a 'collaborator' while ignoring its own terms of engagement.