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Fungi

2025
Fungi

Before men and their cities. Before the trees that crept up towards the sky. Before the first creature left the ocean, there they were: silent architects of life, guardians of the hidden, weavers of the endless web that sustains the world. Fungi. In the dank bowels of the earth they pieced together their fortress, building invisible kingdoms vaster than any empire. And in their age-old patience, they learned the secret of eternal life: that nothing fully dies and that everything transforms.

Fungi are a homage to this primordial force. To something that doesn’t draw attention to itself, yet rules. To something that goes underground to be reborn. To something that doesn’t seek out light, yet shines bright. Sophisticated organisms that teach us that fragility is indestructible, that the miniscule annihilates enormity, that ephemerality sustains immortality. And that evolution, the complex web of evolution, doesn’t thrive without cooperation among species.

Sophisticated organisms that teach us that fragility is indestructible, that ephemerality sustains immortality.

Every fungus that sprouts in the semi-darkness is a sculpture of fate. Each filament is a bridge to the unknown. Their impossible forms are hymns in soft stone. Their geometries, delirious witnesses of an art before Art. They seem fragile, but they can break through pavements and move heavy stones. They seem insignificant, but they often cover thousands of hectares. They seem fleeting, but they can be over nine thousand years old, like the legendary Armillaria ostoyae that inhabits the mountains of Oregon and weighs hundreds of tonnes.

Every fungus that sprouts in the semi-darkness is a sculpture of fate. Each filament is a bridge to the unknown.

They don’t have a central nervous system or a brain, but their prodigious intelligence baffles us. Some are better than humans at finding the shortest route in a maze or the quickest way out of Ikea. Others manipulate alien species to their exquisite whim. Take the zombie fungi, capable of modifying the behaviour of its perplexed hosts. Or of carpenter ants, which overcome their instinctive fear of heights to spread spores.

They learn, they remember, they make decisions. And through their mycelia – the vibrant network of microscopic threads that stretches beneath our feet – they exchange huge flows of information. They are fundamental for fauna and flora. Without them, soils wouldn’t be fertilised. Nor would dead matter decompose. There would be no penicillin, or hundreds of medicines, or the hallucinogenic trips that we recreate here in the form of necklaces and earrings.

They learn, they remember, they make decisions. They are fundamental for fauna and flora.

Whether in the sediments of the seabed or on the surface of deserts, in the valleys of Antarctica or the forests of Siberia, in outer space or inside our bodies, fungi are everywhere: every year they release fifty million tonnes of spores (equivalent to the weight of five hundred thousand blue whales), making them the largest source of living particles in the air.