Of Boar and Fungi: A Nuclear Love Affair
2025–26 Fay Chandler Creativity Grant
Exploring radioactive entanglements in post-Chernobyl forests
About
Of Boar and Fungi: A Nuclear Love Affair examines the surprising ecological relationships that emerged from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster through an immersive multimedia installation at Rotterdam’s Nieuwe Instituut. Bettina Stoetzer collaborates with Berlin-based artist Asa Sonjasdotter and Rotterdam art collective Berkveldt to create a research-based exploration of how wild boar, fungi, soil, and radiocesium have become entangled in European forests.
The installation invites visitors into an underground world where they experience the story through the boar’s perspective, rummaging among deer truffles in Bavarian forest soil. Entering through a curtain of hanging fungi embedded with gently pulsing LEDs, visitors encounter two tilted screens displaying video montages while sitting on root-inspired soft pillows. The space embraces a deliberately messy aesthetic that mirrors the complexity of post-disaster ecology.
Stoetzer’s anthropological research forms the foundation for an audio and visual narrative exploring the mutual affinities between fungi, wild boar, and radioactive soil—a “nuclear love affair” that reveals how species are deeply intertwined in contaminated environments. The project expands her scholarly work into new media, exploring the audio-visual and spatial dimensions of multispecies ethnography while demonstrating how art and design can illuminate environmental and social entanglements.
As part of the exhibition FUNGI: Anarchist Designers, the installation runs from November 21, 2025 through May 2, 2026, with documentation shared with MIT students studying anthropology and human-environment relations.
Schedule
Upcoming Events
FUNGI: Anarchist Designers
November 21, 2025 to May 2, 2026
Nieuwe Instituut, Museum for Architecture, Design and Digital Culture
Rotterdam, the Netherlands
In this exhibition, curated by anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and design studio terriStories (Feifei Zhou), fungi are for once not at the service of humans, but independent beings with their own agenda, one that is closely intertwined with colonialism and other forms of capitalist exploitation, but which also brings to life a highly distinctive multi-species world. For the exhibition, Tsing and Zhou have brought together works created at the intersection of science, visual art, and design—with a dash of imagination thrown in. Together, they show how fungi—like the unmanageable designers of the title—can disrupt human “civilization.”
Collaborators
Bettina Stoetzer is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on the intersections of ecology, mobility, and social justice. Stoetzer is an associate professor of anthropology at MIT, where she teaches classes on urban life and ethnography, migration, environmental justice, climate change, gender in science and technology, and the politics of nature. She is also the author of several books, including Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature in Berlin (Duke University Press, 2022).
Biography: MIT Anthropology
Asa Sonjasdotter is a Berlin-based artist, researcher, writer, and social organiser. Sonjasdotter’s artistic work is driven by an urge to engage in material-narrative processes for the unmaking of violent relations through food and land.
In her practice, Sonjasdotter investigates the relationalities of crops: their nurturing generosity, the tensions around power, politics, and narratives they stir, and the ways social organization mobilizes and forms coalitions around their cultivation.
Website: asasonjasdotter.info/About
Berkveldt is a Rotterdam-based audiovisual art studio founded by Noëlle Ingeveldt and Juriaan van Berkel. Their work is rooted in scientifically-based research and explores the interplay between humanity and the natural world, looking into the complex relationship and tensions that exist between the two.
Through extensive desk- and field-based research, Berkveldt incorporates practical, local, and anecdotal knowledge to provide new insights into complex social issues. Their generative and participatory research methods involve collaboration with various disciplines, and their immersive installations and audiovisual stories offer a unique perspective on the world.
Website: berkveldt.nl