Mould Takeover
2025
evolving installation
recycled wood, textile, single-use packaging
Kunstraum 34, Stuttgart (DE)
In July 2024, the basement exhibition space of Kunstraum 34 in Stuttgart was closed — overtaken by mould.
Working from the petri dish tests conducted on-site, Finding the Wild identified the species responsible: a whitish, orange-pink colony believed to be Acremonium — a name derived from the Latin for bitter or sharp. From this starting point, they built an immersive, time-based installation that translated the microscopic logic of mould into architectural scale.
Recycled wood formed the horizontal hyphae extending through the space. Strips of old clothing, discarded plastic bags, and bubble wrap — materials already in the process of becoming waste — were cut and shaped into spore clusters, phialides, and colonial forms. The installation was not static. Over three weeks it grew, expanded, and shifted, blocking paths and consuming the room around it.
The work responds to something most people overlook or suppress — the quiet, persistent life of decay. Mould is saprophytic: it feeds on what has been abandoned, transforming neglect into new growth. Mould Takeover takes this seriously, not as metaphor alone but as material logic. The installation asks what it means to share space with organisms that thrive precisely where human attention fails.
Photos: Johannes Ocker