Social fermentation: her | storiesMaya Minder @ HEAD Genève

Workshop "Social fermentation: her | stories" in collaboration with Maya Minder and La Cantine pop-up during the meeting "IMAGINE" organized by the newspaper Le Temps at HEAD.

We propose to collaboratively create new recipes using fermentation, as well as collectively explore the stories associated with this ancestral technique by imagining various future speculatives or hidden past stories.

Maya Minder‘s Gasthaus lays in these current practices, an example of relational aesthetics in the age of the postdigital. Through the setting of a functional kitchen provided with all the necessary tools, it offers a local gathering point for people to cook and eat together while sharing ideas. What is more, it invites groups of artists and militants active in the field of nutrition and ecology - in particular those who built their praxis by developing new approaches to biotechnologies and DIY/DIWO methodologies - to discuss their visions and endeavours, using as a starting point and a mutual concept the process of fermentation. Similar to the concept of culture, which has its roots in an agricultural context and now encompasses concepts related to knowledge, values and civilisation, the concept of fermentation, describing metabolic processes such as the chemical transformation of sugar into acids, refers as well to social phenomenon of agitation and uprising. Fermentation is an ancient cooking practice allowing the autonomous production of enriched nutriments. In Maya Minder‘s work, fermentation is a suitable and metaphorically charged activity to invite the guests not only to share their receipts and their alternative solutions to nutrition but also to debate on subjects such as home-made agriculture, food circulation, ecological issues, collectivism and gender roles.