Installation at Kunsthaus Lauenburg
Kombucha, wooden basin, hair, PVC, cooking desk

The work is part of a long-term-research for ways to enter into non-hierarchical connections with mushrooms and to merge the biological and cultural rhizomes into a common rhizome. It takes its starting point in the Symbiosis between humans and domesticated kombucha, reaching out to expand and highlight the connections between the two organisms.
Stabilized by hair threads, the basin in the center of I was hoping to go without Psychoanalysis… is growing a shape of Kombucha skin, which can be folded around a human body to form suite. Its shape is inspired by “Mushroom Burial Suites” – mycelial shrouds that promise rapid decomposition of the corpse.

“Vinegar Mother” is an old name for Scoby. Sometimes they are called Kombucha babies as well. These nicknames point to a relationship of love and care with an alien being, living like a fermenting tamagotchi in a mason jar. Understanding Kombucha as a pluralistic skin-entity is challenging the idea of a body limited by it´s skin. This opposition to what is called an individual shaped the narration of the dialogical performance in Lauenburg.
Normally Kombucha is drunk, enriching the human intestinal flora. Laying down in a Kombucha pool is like laying down in one’s own digestive juices. The kombucha skin metaphorically becomes a stomach turned inside out. What is digested may not be the body itself but rather the social construct of the singular body, which opposes the monstrous, symbiotic being rising from the basin.