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smells like kin

2025, solo exhibition

STUDIOTOPIA
LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial
Bionuc
Schemerlicht festival Nijmegen

Every day, you digest living microbial cultures – cheese, dough, yogurt, sidra – as fermented fluids and foods. Smells like kin started with inquiries into these processes of „eating life“ as an art science collaboration, gathering traditional and laboratory fermentation practices, microbial communities both inside your body, in Asturias and beyond. The suspended silicone membranes— moulded on the concrete floor of LABoral comprising its bacterial cultures—evoke
scoby, a living organism that ferments tea into sweet-sour taste.

The exhibition invites your microbes – collective organisms fermenting the fluids in your body – to smell, touch, rest, and listen. Can you synchronize with the fermented rhythms surrounding you?

The artists recorded sounds, vibration and smells, and reconstruct fragments of their year-long research: apple press vibrations, chorizo making, moulds growing in cabrales caves, dosa batter bubbling, flesh decomposing. Morcilla is fermenting in Asturian kitchens, while laboratories are
producing blood taste and smell from fermented soy.

Rethinking kinship (consanguinidad) and questioning inherited ideas of connection, the artists present bonds based on sensory processes and microbial relations. The project is part of Studiotopia, an initiative funded by Creative Europe that explores the intersection between art and science to shed light on the pressing issues of our time.

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