“ArtKitchenFerment” is an interactive art environment that engages with the processes, creative results, and byproducts of food fermentation. Part art installation, part interactive workshop, “ArtKitchenFerment” invites participants of all ages to expand their notions of beauty, use, taste, and liveliness in common fermented foods such as sauerkraut and kombucha. Put on your apron and participate in a cabbage-dye art demonstration, compose a bacteria-inspired recipe poem, and make a piece of kombucha “leather” jewelry. Cook some books in our fermentation library, or watch an interactive video installation as you ponder the magical microbes that make up our unruly world!
In “ArtKitchenFerment,” fermentation experimentalists Sean Nash and Stephanie Maroney combine their artistic work and interdisciplinary research to demonstrate how food fermentation practices expand beyond the plate and the palate and into the future edges of our material and sensory imagination. Each of the three stations offer aesthetic, educational, and participatory components, playing with the idea of the kitchen as a multi-faceted space of creation and inquiry. In “ArtKitchenFerment,” the “kitchen of the future” is a messy and imaginative space where food byproducts become objects of beauty rather than waste.