BurSe travelled with a small army of scobys (symbiotic cultures of bacteria and yeast) to set up a lab/office at Schmiede, a peer-to-peer festival where artists from different fields and different corners of the world get together to experiment, teach, learn, create and network. Monique gave workshops about making kombucha & other things a scoby can be to you and found adoptive parents who used the scobys in a multitude of ways. Some were mere companions, stood on desks almost motionless, slowly producing kombucha, others were involved in experiments with sound and movement, design, storytelling, virtual reality and so on. During the public presentation on the last day of Schmiede the collectively produced kombucha was tasted, some of it infused with site-specific ingredients like rose petals from the inner courtyard. Symbiosis was a keyword in the project and process: the symbiosis between bacteria and yeast leading to kombucha was symbolic of the symbiosis between the scobys and the Smiths, but also of the gathering of many people from completely different fields exploring and working together.
A lot of materials, stories and new ideas were gathered during this working period and will be processed and given new shapes in the coming time. The Bureau will contribute to a book about this year’s Schmiede “Sloth” that will be published in 2025. You can read in more detail about some of the things that happened HERE