Delhi Lab - Mycelium
Mycelium

The Mycelium Lab in Delhi will take place from 16 August to 26 August 2026 where participants will explore fungal mycelium as a living, responsive material for design and architecture. They will be mentored by Suyash and Bhakti, (Co-founders of Anomalia Design Studio), and Julia Ihls, (Managing Director, Biodesign Lab HfG Karlsruhe).

Delhi Lab Bio Design South Asia © Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan

About the Lab

The Mycelium Lab in Delhi explores fungal mycelium as a living, responsive material for design and architecture. It can bind agricultural waste into lightweight, biodegradable structures, enabling regenerative material systems. Beyond its functional properties, the lab positions mycelium as a collaborator, inviting new ways of thinking about material agency, growth, and co-creation.

Working with local partners, participants experiment with growth, moulding, and behaviour. The lab examines how biological growth can shape design and support circular, low-impact production, offering a glimpse into more harmonious futures. The lab ultimately offers a glimpse into alternative design philosophies grounded in ecological thinking, collaboration, and the evolving relationship between humans and living matter.

Project Pollinators

Bhakti Loonawat and Suyash Sawant are the co-founders of Anomalia (pronounced: a-no-ma-lí-a), an experimental architecture and design practice based in Mumbai. Their work is grounded in research, experimentation, and material innovation while remaining closely connected to people and place. Suyash approaches architecture as a dialogue between time, space, and people, while Bhakti views design as a means of shaping the social, cultural, and ecological fabric of a place. Both are graduates of the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia in Barcelona. In 2025, Anomalia’s work was exhibited at the La Biennale di Venezia and the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism.
Julia Ihls is an interdisciplinary designer and researcher based in Karlsruhe and heads the Bio Design Lab at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. Her work explores the intersections of biodesign, posthumanist discourse, and scenographies of coexistence. Drawing on artistic, academic, and curatorial practices, she investigates collaborative approaches to living and designing with emerging biomaterials and engages with collective forms of knowledge production.

She is a co-founder of SurrealLabor, an art and research collective working at the intersection of art, biodesign, and digital media. In her ongoing PhD project, Labmospheres, at the Technical University of Munich, she examines transdisciplinary laboratory structures through international case studies and practice-based prototypes.

Project Cultivators

Anurag Singraur is a visual practitioner whose work explores the intersections of art and technology. His practice investigates translation, media, and the ways different forms of data interact with hardware and software systems. Through these inquiries, he reinterprets existing knowledge by examining the infrastructures that shape it. He holds degrees in Social Sciences, Fine Arts (Sculpture), and Visual Arts, and has served as a visiting faculty member at Sushant University, Gurugram. He is also a co-initiator of the studio collective StudioA68.
Bharat Raj Thukral is an architect, industrial designer, worldbuilder, and founder of Dasein Lab, a climate-fiction worldbuilding studio working across material research, circular systems, spatial design, and experimental arts. Educated at CEPT University and shaped by experiences at Shigeru Ban Architects, Meglab Tokyo, and the Healthy Materials Lab at Parsons, his practice bridges indigenous material systems and speculative climate futures. Through installations, objects, biomaterial experiments, and ecological interventions, he explores how waste, soil, bamboo, mycelium, and memory can become vehicles for repair, play, and planetary imagination.
Dasha Tsapenko is a Dutch-Ukrainian biodesigner and artist based in The Hague, where she runs Atelier Dasha Tsapenko. Her practice brings together design, architecture, biology, and craftsmanship through collaborations with living organisms, particularly fungal mycelium. Combining experimental material research with traditional craft techniques, she explores the dialogue between human intervention and biological growth. Her work spans textiles, furniture, architectural elements, and installations, and has been exhibited internationally. Through her practice, she investigates new approaches to design that embrace growth, making by hand, time, and coexistence with living systems.
Harsha Durugadda is a multidisciplinary artist based in India. A finalist for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize 2026, he has received international recognition including The Arts Family Emerging Artist Award for South Asia (2023) and the Rio Tinto Sculpture Award in Australia (2017). His work was featured in a Sotheby’s contemporary auction in New York in partnership with Burning Man in 2021. He has also presented at the British Museum at the invitation of the Courtauld Institute, and his sculptures are held in major public and private collections, including Bangalore International Airport and the RMZ Foundation.
Kaanchi Chopra is an artist and biodesigner whose practice works with plant matter, agricultural residues, and natural fibres such as wool and silk. Informed by research into ethnobotany, circular design, and ecological inequality, her work seeks to restore intimacy with nature through textiles and site-responsive installations. She studied Industrial Design and Sustainability Studies at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), completed residencies at Jaipur Rugs and Fondazione Pistoletto Cittadellarte, and was a finalist in the Biodesign Challenge. Central to her practice is an inquiry into plant blindness and the role of art in fostering attentiveness to local ecologies.
Kuldeep Patil is an artist, researcher, and writer whose work investigates the visual and sonic infrastructures through which images are consumed, mediated, and interpreted today. Situated at the intersection of theory-making, cultural critique, and archival inquiry, their practice draws on training in sculpture, installation, social practice, and performance. They have previously worked with institutions including the Delhi Art Gallery (DAG), Kochi Biennale Foundation, Neekoee Foundation, documenta Institut, and Asia Art Archive in India. Their writing has appeared in publications such as Art + Australia, The Wire, Takshila Yearbook, and Mash India. They live and work in Delhi NCR.
Laura Waterstradt (b. 1998) is originally from North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, and has been studying Exhibition Design and Scenography at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG Karlsruhe) since 2023. Alongside her studies, she works as a graphic designer and combines visual practice with site-specific research. From an ecofeminist perspective, she explores landscape as a social, ecological, and political space. Her work is collaborative in nature and continually develops through interdisciplinary exchange.
Luisa Tovar Méndez is a designer and artist based in Valencia, Spain. Her practice brings together material and ecological research, critical digital fabrication, and visual technologies. Through collaborative projects that combine field research, material experimentation, and technological systems, she explores new ways of perceiving and engaging with biological processes. She is the co-founder of Sirope Lab, a platform dedicated to the development of biomaterials derived from organic waste.
Mantej Kaur is a new media designer from Delhi and currently studies at the National Institute of Design in Gandhinagar. Her practice spans experience design, research, visual communication, and material exploration, with a growing interest in bio-based materials and process-led experimentation. Moving between digital, spatial, material, and narrative media, she uses design as a tool to understand how technology, materials, and people interact.
Pim van de Noort is a Dutch mycologist whose work spans the diverse world of fungi, from wild mushroom foraging and the cultivation of gourmet and medicinal species to the development of mycelium-based materials. His practice focuses on sustainable applications in construction while exploring the creative potential of fungi through design, art, and experimental research. By bridging science, ecology, and innovation, he investigates how fungi can transform the ways we build, create, and connect with the natural world.
Ruby Richter (b. 2003, Berlin) has been studying Exhibition Design and Scenography at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design since 2023. Her practice explores socio-political relationships embedded in space and the mechanisms through which these relationships are organised, negotiated, erased, or made visible. Working primarily in collective and interdisciplinary contexts, she seeks to create conditions that allow multiple realities, conflicts, and contradictions to coexist. Her work combines methodologies from performance, installation, exhibition design, scenography, cartography, curation, and videography.
Sebastián Trujillo-Torres is a Colombian architect, writer, educator, and co-director of Chaal Chaal Agency. Working between India and Colombia, his practice develops design-research strategies that engage with public conditions shaped by movement, ephemerality, and everyday negotiation. His work has been presented through fellowships, exhibitions, and biennales, including the Godrej Design Lab Fellowship, Architectures of Transition: Emergent Practices in South Asia, the Seoul Biennale, the IN SITU Biennale in Macau, and the Chiba Arts Triennale in Japan.
Shivangi Agrawal is an industrial designer, interior designer, artist, and doctoral researcher whose interdisciplinary practice explores the intersections of ecology, craft, biotechnology, and material innovation. Working with mycelium cultivated on agricultural waste, she investigates biofabrication as both a creative practice and a pathway towards regenerative and decentralised futures. Through material experimentation, design research, and biological processes, her work challenges conventional ideas of making and manufacturing and explores design as a collaboration between human intention and biological intelligence.
Shreni is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores the intersections of ecology, memory, technology, and impermanence. Working across photography, installation, sound, and generative media, she creates immersive experiences grounded in field research and close observation. Drawing on a background in architecture, design, and visual communication, her work reveals hidden relationships between people and more-than-human worlds, approaching systems as living processes that evolve, adapt, and accumulate meaning over time.

Project Keepers

Shroomery is a mushroom farm and educational platform dedicated to making fungi more familiar, accessible, and appreciated in everyday life. Through cultivation, workshops, storytelling, and community-driven initiatives, the organisation creates opportunities for people to engage with mushrooms beyond food. Its work highlights the potential of fungi to reshape perspectives on ecology, materials, food systems, and human relationships with the natural world.
Shared Ecologies is a program by the Shyama Foundation supporting initiatives at the intersection of art and ecology – through critical, creative, aesthetic approaches, and collaborations with various disciplines and knowledge systems. Through grants, programmes, and conversations, we aim to facilitate a regional and international ecology of individuals, practitioners and institutions, who share overlapping concerns, philosophies and methodologies.
Project Otenga is a food design studio and Northeastern gourmet restaurant based in Delhi and Ahmedabad. The collective works at the intersection of food, design, and experience, focusing not only on what people eat but also on how they eat. Rooted in memory, connection, and emotion, its approach views eating as a multisensory, slow, mindful, and intentional act. Through food and shared experiences, Project Otenga explores new forms of engagement, behavioural change, and multidisciplinary collaboration, while fostering a growing community of creative practitioners.