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Part of: Tomorrows

Biohack like your grandma: fermentation & the future of food

Denisa Kera & Matthias Fritsch

Dates

Prices

FREE

Location

Athens

Time & Date

Day
Time
Venue
Day
Saturday-Sunday
Time
17:00-21:00
Venue
Diplareios School (Theatrou sq 3, Athens centre)

Information

Addressed to

Adults

Cost

Participation is free

Full attendance is required. Please reserve your participation at the workshop until July 12th, 2017 by completing the registration form. Due to limited space, participants will be selected by the instructors and should confirm their attendance on the next day of the reservation deadline

Language

The workshop will be held in English.

Explore

A two day workshop involving walks, taste panels and discussions. Participants will explore fermentation techniques, exchange fermented products, and rethink traditional food preservation practices in relation to city’s “biotech” futures.

Wishing to question the homogeneity imposed by upcoming smart city agendas,emphasis will be put on sustainability issues and their dependence on the particularities of different geographical regions. The DIY fermentation practices that will be explored rely on peer sharing of knowledge and look into how a sustainable food production, accessible to citizens of diverse socioeconomic background, can become possible. The workshop will aim at creating a physical space for informal dialogues and hands-on interactions, empowering a symbiotic community of the “Internet of Microbes”, rather than a techno-utopian "Internet of Things". As a speculative mockup of a smart city environment, the workshop will rely on contributions by both human and nonhuman actors, including yeast cultures, humans, and various low-cost sensors on a peer-to-peer level, in order to performatively envision various scenarios of alternative food futures.

The workshop is organized as part of the Fermentation GutHub - a global citizen network of fermentation geeks and bio-enthusiasts, which was started in Singapore in 2015.

Day 1

Workshops on yogurt making & bread

A chance to learn about short time fermentation techniques like yogurt and sourdough for healthier bread and experiment with sourdough pancakes receipts. The program will include a presentation about fermentation and its role for the future, a fermentation walk, exchanges & presentations of your grandma’s products & cultures. Bring your own grandma, recipe, story, product, jars and feel free to show, tell and taste!

Day 2

Workshops on pickles and tea-mushroom

An opportunity to learn how to transform veggies into dishes like Kimchi, Sauerkraut and pickles & name the jars at the end of the session. We will also ferment tea with Kombucha. The program will include short lectures and discussions about fermentation and its B12 potential, taste panels on the yogurts made in the first day and the creation of a "library" or public fridge “prototype” for fermentation exchanges in Athens. Bring your own grandma, veggies, jars, ideas and feel free to show, tell and taste!

Credits

  • Led by

    Denisa Kera, GutHub Pimp & Matthias Fritsch, GutHub symbiont

  • Advisors and contributors

    Markéta Dolejšová, GutHub Mother Scoby & Nancy Mauro-Flude, GutHub Chief Witch

Read more

Denisa Kera

Denisa Kera is a philosopher, designer and science "artisan" supporting open and citizen science projects around the world. She experiments with various creative strategies of public engagement in science, such as Ethereum blockchain platform, open science hardware, Tarot cards, consumer genomics and food. She is recognized for her ethnographic work on the hackerspaces and makerspaces in EU and Asia, which she discusses as a revival of tinkering culture of the 16.century mechanical arts and alchemy. She is part of GOSH (Gathering for Open Science Hardware) and Hackteria networks of artists, designers and scientists who support science in the Global South. She spent the last decade as an Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore, Senior Lecturer in Prague college and Charles University in Prague, and most recently as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Arizona State University, where she continues to cooperate as an affiliate member with the Centre for the Study of the Future.


Matthias Fritsch

Matthias Fritsch is a visual artist and film maker from Berlin. He studied Media Art at the University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe (HfG) in Germany and Film, Fine Art and Curating at Bard College, Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), New York State, USA. Has made several short and long movies, and media-based installations. He strongly believes in the freedom and accessibility of art, culture and ideas. Fritsch is most known for the Technoviking Meme and collaborative projects in the Internet where he examined digital communities and their importance in the formation of the contemporary cultural production. Correspondingly, his works are not only shown in an art context, but he also uses other platforms and distribution channels. In the last years he shifted his main interest from the recycling of media towards circles of real matter. Fritsch researches and develops systems for recycling, urban food & soil production.

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