Juan Ferrer

He is the founder and director of the Museo del Hongo, a pop-up and virtual museum that explores fungi both as objects and as a methodology, building bridges between contemporary art, biological research, and cultural narrative. 

Since 2016, his curatorial and artistic projects have activated museums, forests, and digital platforms in Latin America, the United States, Asia, and Europe. His practice encompasses immersive installations, virtual reality, and experimental archives, where, through these hybrid formats, he investigates how mycelial systems offer alternatives to hierarchical thinking, proposing non-linear, decentralized, and affective models for the collective imagination. 

His work draws on mycology, queer theory, and environmental history to explore an aesthetic of transformation, contamination, and interdisciplinary connection.

Local Fungi that look like human body parts, 2020

Digital Video and Installation

33’30’’

Observing some fungi’s sporomes -or fruiting bodies-, we can notice that their forms resemble other organic structures, other tissues belonging to species from other Kingdoms of Life. We can find fungi that look like brains, other intestines, a lot of genitalia, a heart, and a breast with a nipple. Even the common names of some allude to parts of the human body such as Xylaria polymorpha, dead man’s fingers, or Hydnellum peckii, the bleeding tooth.

In the pandemic context, the collective consciousness that emerged around the microorganisms that surround us allows us to see how our bodies are fertile substrates for the proliferation of microorganisms; in our feet, in our genitals, in our armpits, in our mouths, in our hair, in our intestines and everywhere.

The interconnections between both ideas are translated into Local Fungi that look like human body parts, a digital (Virtual Reality) video installation composed of a 3D model of a decomposing body, where mushrooms that resemble the organ where it is located bear fruit, and the video where a diversity of bodies that transgress the hegemony of binarism grow species of Chilean funga, on their body. The invitation is to think of our bodies as not only our own, to live in symbiosis with the microorganisms with whom we share it.

Juan Ferrer (he/they) is an interdisciplinary researcher and multimedia designer who works with art, ecology, and speculative science. 

To glorify each bodies’ complex contructions

we generate synergy with the funga that live inside and on us

the sharing of our body with other beings

our physique as a fertile territory for life to thrive

and some fungal sexualities looking like parts of our human

anatomy

a symbiotic, ecosexual approach to transformation

in this interspecies performance that goes beyond our sensitive

borders

Exhibitions