Anna Tsing

How have fungi shaped human history? And how have humans, in turn, influenced the evolutionary trajectories of pathogenic fungi? At the invitation of DE SINGEL and the Vlaams Architectuurinstituut, Chinese American anthropologist Anna Tsing will give a lecture on the future of virulent fungi. We explore how dominant economic structures exhaust communities, ecosystems, and forms of life, and how human and nonhuman actors can develop new ways of living together in damaged environments. What has gone wrong in our relationship with the living world, and what can we still change?

Anna Tsing (University of California, Santa Cruz) is an anthropologist and author of the internationally acclaimed book The Mushroom at the End of the World (Princeton University Press, 2015). Together with Feifei Zhou, she curated the current exhibition FUNGI. Anarchist Designers at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. In this lecture, Tsing returns to the questions that preceded this exhibition.