Fungi build up and dismantle ecosystems, materials shape our ways of life, and the very idea of ‘nature’ remains open to debate. Three developments spanning September to November, in Linz, Hamburg and Lyon, revolve around this active material world. They bring together Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and Feifei Zhou, Tim Ingold and the debate surrounding Philippe Descola’s work, each inviting us to reconsider how we think, build and inhabit the world.

Linz · Tsing and Zhou present fungi as anarchist designers

The exhibition FUNGI: Anarchist Designers featured at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, held from 9 to 13 September 2026, as part of Negotiating Beyond Humanity, and was among the projects nominated for the S+T+ARTS Prize 2026. It arrived after a run at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, where it was on display from November 2025 to August 2026. The exhibition was curated by anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Aarhus University, and architect and artist Feifei Zhou, who founded the terriStories studio in Nanjing in 2024 to explore how more-than-human life shapes architecture and landscapes. Tsing and Zhou had previously co-edited Feral Atlas with Jennifer Deger and Alder Keleman Saxena, with whom they also co-authored Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene.

The exhibition challenges the tendency in architecture and design to celebrate mycelium as a sustainable material while paying little attention to the lives of fungi themselves or the ecological relationships they create. Tsing and Zhou present fungi as builders and dismantlers with agendas of their own, entangled in histories of colonial and capitalist exploitation. One installation, by ecologists Ivette Perfecto and Zachary Hajian-Forooshani alongside artist Filipp Groubnov, maps the spread of coffee rust through monoculture plantations across Latin America, where the drive to maximise yields ultimately makes room for the fungus.

In the manifesto We Encounter Others in Form, Amanita, Nidula and Dactylella speak in the first person to suggest that form arises through encounters among beings and, in turn, shapes future encounters. The text draws on the Chinese expression 一劳永逸 (yi lao yong yi), the idea of a single action whose effects would endure without maintenance, to describe the fantasy of permanence that materials such as plastic and concrete have helped embed in our cities.

Can a design be called ecological if it changes its materials while leaving its desire for control intact?

Sources. Ars Electronica, festival exhibition listing · S+T+ARTS Prize, 2026 nomination · Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam exhibition · Nieuwe Instituut, Tsing and Zhou’s manifesto (PDF)

Hamburg · Ingold and materiality in the transition of the construction sector

The Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study (HIAS) has announced the workshop Societal Relationships with Materiality for 20 November 2026. Tim Ingold will present his reflections on the challenge set out by the organisers: finding new ways to think about and care for materiality. The workshop is convened by sociologist Cordula Kropp of the University of Stuttgart, a visiting fellow at HIAS from October to December, and Frank Adloff, Professor of Sociology at the University of Hamburg. The event will be held in a hybrid format and in English, with particular attention to the construction sector. HIAS invites anyone interested in attending to contact Kropp.

The announcement argues that the Western idea of progress has pushed the planet beyond its limits and devalued other forms of knowledge about nature and earthly materials. In support of this diagnosis, it cites Ingold’s own article How to imagine a sustainable world (Acta Borealia, 2024). The programme proposes discussing how materials take shape, come together and dissolve within the continuity of life, connecting with Kropp’s research on the material transition in architecture and construction.

For AIthropology, the interest lies in shifting the question from which material should be used to which relationships we make possible when we build. Sustainability thus comes to involve processes, timescales and forms of coexistence, alongside the properties of objects.

Sources. HIAS, workshop programme · Acta Borealia, Tim Ingold, ‘How to Imagine a Sustainable World’ (open access, University of Aberdeen) · TATuP, Cordula Kropp and Simon Aicher, ‘Building the future’

Lyon · Descola’s naturalism under debate

The seminar Naturalisme, Sciences et Environnement, co-organised by the Institut de recherches philosophiques de Lyon (IRPhiL, Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3) and the ENS de Lyon, devoted its session on 1 October to ‘Philippe Descola : querelles autour du naturalisme’. The speaker was philosopher Catherine Larrère of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University.

The seminar begins by asking what has caused the ongoing ecological catastrophe, listing possible explanations including human selfishness, capitalism, productivism, dualism and a mechanistic view of nature. Its framing recalls Descola’s argument linking the onset of the Anthropocene to the Western naturalist mode and the position of exteriority it assigns to humans in relation to a nature that can be known and mastered. The programme contrasts this thesis with that of philosophers who understand naturalism as a monism emphasising continuity between species, in the manner of Darwin, and instead locate the problem in a dualism inherited from Christianity. In Descola’s broader ontological framework, naturalism combines physical continuity between humans and non-humans with a discontinuity of their interiorities; it is at this second level that the separation lies. The session announcement does not specify which position Larrère defended.

The discussion continues this week. On Thursday 22 October, Léo Magnin (Université Gustave Eiffel) is scheduled to speak on ‘Faire le bilan du carbone’, and Jean-Baptiste Vuillerod (ENS de Lyon) on ‘Le concept de Bildung par-delà nature et culture’. Descola himself is due to close the series on 18 March 2027. His ontologies remain a framework for critical debate, open to challenge.

Sources. Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3, session on Descola · IRPhiL, Naturalisme, Sciences et Environnement seminar programme

Living in a world we do not control

Tsing and Zhou challenge the assumption that only humans design. The Hamburg workshop with Ingold proposes understanding materials as part of living processes. The debate surrounding Descola keeps open the discussion about the categories through which we separate nature and society.

These are distinct interventions, without a declared shared programme. Read together, they point to a task for contemporary anthropology: to think through the consequences of how we inhabit the world without assuming that it exists solely to fulfil our intentions.

Social sharing image. Photograph: Slunkopunk / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0.