Monday May 25 was a hot, sunny day. High of 30C. It was also Whit Monday, a public holiday, also known as Pentecost Monday. Luckily, the Museum we wanted to visit was open specifically for the holiday, as it usually would have been closed on a Monday.
This time we walked up part of the Westersingel, the street with the sculptures near the canal, which is our tram route to Rotterdam Centraal Station. We were heading to the entrance of Museumpark where a number of museums and cultural spots are located.
As we were walking beside the canal, we spotted the bronze tree, one of the public art pieces.
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| Guiseppe Penone, Elevazione (2001). The Italian art movement Arte Povera refers to art made from 'poor' materials', such as straw, wood, and fruit, often combined to form symbiotic relationships. Penone uses trees in his work. This is a bronze tree aided by four real trees that continue to grow all around it. |
We turned into Museumpark. At the corner is a piece by Pablo Picasso and Carl Nesjar entitled: Sylvette (1970). Picasso's friend Carl Nestjar had developed a technique to translate Picasso's drawings into sculptures. The piece initially received a lot of criticism as some people argued that this was not a sculpture at all, but simply a converted drawing that should not be displayed in the street! We don't agree. It is very striking.
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| Sylvette (1970)-- depicts Picasso's model and muse Sylvette David |
Entering the huge area that encompassing Museumpark, we first passed Rotterdam's top art museum, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (under renovation and closed until1929) and then saw the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, the semi-spherical mirrored building which is the storage facility for the 154,000- strong collection of masterpieces from the adjacent museum. The Depot was opened in 2021. It was designed by Winy Maas of Rotterdam architectural firm MVRD and is covered by 1664 glass panels reflecting the surrounding Museumpark and city skyline. The rooftop is planted with birch and pine trees.
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| The Depot |
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| Sculpture beside the Depot |
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I circled our reflection in red. The older red-brick building in the reflection is the main Museum
which is under renovation. |
Our destination was the Nieuwe Instituut, Museum for Architecture, Design and Digital Culture. This national museum focuses on major developments in society, such as the housing shortage, the climate crisis and the emergence of artificial intelligence. It also houses the National Collection of Dutch Architecture and Urban Design and preserves design archives in the field of garden and landscape architecture. The main building of the Nieuwe Instituut was designed by architect Jo Coenen and built in 1993 originally as The Netherlands Architecture Institute . It became the Nieuwe Instituut in 2013, following a merger of a number of Dutch institutes for architecture, design and digital-culture.
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| Entrance with pond |
There were a number of temporary exhibits on display. The exhibit on the main floor was entitled: FUNGI: Anarchist Designers. It explored the environmental, historical and cultural role of mushrooms and moulds-fungi- not in service to humanity, but as shapers of the world in their own right.
It was an amazing, extremely creative exhibit put together by two curators, Anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, who is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the Aarhus University in Denmark and Feifei Zhou, an architect and artist. For Zhou, FUNGI: Anarchist Designers is an exhibition of 'anti-design' in which fungi are not passive building materials, but rather co-designers of the world.
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| Opening description-it's a fungi world! |
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| Sylvia Plath, Mushrooms |
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| Anicka Yi, With Whose Blood These Eyes Were Crafted? This is part of a series of mid-century-style wooden panels. This panel's smooth surface are disrupted by a 3D-printed fungal lattice inspired by the veiled lady mushroom. |
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| Fungi find their way into our kitchens, however clean we keep them. This familiar looking kitchen was created by the curators and other designers. Traces of fungal activity are everywhere. |
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Laure Nolte, Field of Dreams, 2025 - the genetic sameness of industrial crops makes them particularly vulnerable to fungi. 'Monoculture calls out to fungal killers'.
Projections of Southern Corn Leaf Blight flicker on the husks. |
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| Lizan Freijsen, Tufted Floor Objects from the Muurschotelkorstmos Series 2008-2009. Freijsen's rugs remind the curators of dry rot, a fungus that thrives in damp houses and on wooden ships. Lizan Freijsen (1960-2024) wrote that she was "fascinated by materials that invite feeling." |
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| Matteo Garbelotto and Kyriaki Goni, We shall by morning inherit the Earth, 2025. One of the most dreaded diseases affecting industrial conifer plantations is Heterobasidion root rot. In this multimedia installation, forest pathologist Matteo Garbelotto collaborated with artist Kyriaki Goni to show the linked processes of fungal infection and tree death. |
There was a separate room with some very large installations. There was an introduction called "Assassinate" which noted that fungi are as dangerous as any beings on Earth-surpassed only by humans.
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| Bettina Stoetzer, Berkveldt and Asa Sonjasdotter, Of Boar and Fungi: A Nuclear Love Affair, 2025. The question is asked why hasn't surface radiation from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster decreased as much as expected? Some fungi, such as deer truffles, absorb radiation from the soil. Wild boar eat these truffles, moving them around and depositing their remains in faces. Rotting mushrooms also keep the raditation as an enduring threat. In this installation, artists Berkveldt, Asa Sonjasdotter and anthropologist Bettina Stoetzer show how fungi facilitate the circulation of radioactivity through flesh and soil. |
We then entered a bright room with a number of intricate installations.
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| Michael Poulsen, Multispecies Mound Builders, 2025. Understanding how fungi and termites work together in symbiosis. |
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Chair for Biohybrid Architecture- Architecture Must Rot, 2025
Could fungal housing inspire human housing? Architect Phil Ayres experiments with living spaces for fungi to learn how fungi might guide the design of human spaces. |
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| Rob Dunn and Baum & Leahy, Yeast Worlding, 2025. Fungi, along with bacteria, are designers of our bodies. Biologist Rob Dunn and artists Baum & Leahy invite you into a human body experienced from the perspective of yeast. |
The entire exhibition was fascinating. A number of the pieces were designed and executed by biologists, anthropologists, and scientists working with artists. Incredible creativity of every piece and the curation was superb.
Fungi rule!
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| Research and Library area |
We went to the 3rd floor to see the exhibit
Dutch, More or Less: Contemporary Architecture, Design and Digital Culture. The exhibit is about more than 30 years of design in the Netherlands, bringing together the ideas, themes and projects that have put Dutch designers at the forefront of international design. It was a very extensive exhibit. I have only posted a few examples of Dutch design.
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| A flag-waving entertainment venue at a seaside resort. Sjoerd Sorter's playful Dutch Postmodernism has references to popular culture. |
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| Iris Van Herpen, Between the Lines, 2017. This garment is from Van Herpen's Between the Lines collection which explored the flaws inherent in systems and structures. |
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| Rotterdam-based design studio 75B's Woven Cities incorporates around 100 mottos, symbols, logos and other references to create a new take on Amsterdam's coat of arms. The new design is part of a series that playfully evokes the diverse, complex identities of contemporary cities. |
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| Studio DRIFT, A deconstruction of a Gazelle bicycle into its constituent materials, 2022. This is a composition of foam, steel, plastic and other materials from a dismantled Gazelle bicycle. The results become 'three dimensional indices of consumption' that evoke the early 20th century abstraction of artists like Piet Mondrian. |
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| A fashion magazine made of recycled clothes. Our Rags Magazine is a collaborative project. It is printed on a cotton paper made from recycled textiles. The result is a publication whose 'pages don't merely show the garments, but are the garments.' |
We then had an experience with a talking coffee machine. It was a 2023 piece by Jan Zuiderveld entitled Coffeemachine. The write-up stated: "A coffee machine wants you to talk nicely to it". 'The artist has created a coffee machine that has its own thoughts and feelings and is in a deep existential crisis. It is tired of its repetitive existence and the lack of respect it receives from those it sees. Programmed to display consciousness, engage in witty conversation, and offer cynical observations on human-machine relationships, it might brew up a cup- if you show it enough interest and empathy'. We were invited to interact with the machine, but pushing an on button. Both Allan and I tried to encourage it to make us a coffee (I'm not sure it really would!). It had very cynical responses--- asking why we wanted 'bean water' and why it should make us an espresso. Very clever!
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| Allan trying to talk to the coffee machine! |
We stopped at the gift shop on the main floor and then decided to have a late lunch outside at the Nieuwe Café.
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| Entrance to main floor galleries |
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| Allan with our avocado toast and passion fruit lemonade. I had a lychee flavoured lemonade. |
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| View of a heron from our table. |
We bid our farewell to the Nieuwe Instituut. A very interesting and stimulating afternoon.
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| Adieu to the Museum |
We walked back to the apartment, rested up, and then Chef Allan made us a fish dinner.
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It is now Tuesday May 26. We are taking the 13:58 Eurostar to Paris. We will arrive in Paris at around 17:00. We will be in Paris until June 4, when we head to London for the last six nights of our trip. The next post will be from Paris. Allan will transform into Alain for our Paris adventures.
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