Kitchenlab

For one day, Omenapuutalo will turn into a biochemical lab developed by TOP, a Berlin-based association for the promotion of cultural practice. The aim of the project is twofold: to design a modular set of tools that turn a home kitchen into a "lab," and to teach the participants to use a home kitchen for unorthodox purposes. The lab arrangement of the kitchen provides an atmosphere for discourses about the world and society, including cultural heritage and scientific knowledge, fermentation and distillation, humans and other living beings. Kitchenlab aims to gather those interested in working between the studio, the kitchen, and the laboratory, where food culture, experimental lab culture, and artistic and creative practice overlap.

At Omenapuutalo, the participants will be invited to join Kitchenlab experiences with Mindaugas Gapševičius, Elizabeth McTernan, and Wojtek Mejor. Mindaugas will conduct the workshop 'My collaboration with bacteria for paper production.' While examining a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY), participants will be introduced to bacterial paper. Led by Elizabeth, 'Sun collaborations: A workshop introducing the cyanotype process' is comprised of practical and discursive work devoted to the cyanotype technique, a photographic printing process that produces cyan-blue prints. For another papermaking workshop, 'Bacterial Love Letters', Wojtek takes back power over paper and brings it into the kitchen to make it toxin-free, natural (perhaps even edible), and out of plants readily available in the local surroundings.

The workshops are an opportunity for non-experts to connect with the basic properties of bacterial and plant-based paper production and photographic imaging, as well as to understand these as processes that are absolutely contingent on history, chemistry, environment, hand, and surface, and that anyone can access.

The workshops are joined. Please register for three in advance below. The language of the workshops is English.

About TOP Association

TOP Association has been operating in Berlin since 2002. Our members develop ideas in the air, often merging politics, economics, and technologies. Crossing many contexts, its members work with art forms that address the humanization of digital technologies through the interplay between the digital, biological, and cultural. The artworks of Mindaugas Gapsevicius question the creativity of machines and do not presume humans to be the only creative force at work. Elizabeth McTernan's artistic research of landscape is performed worldwide in the form of actions, drawing, video/audio installation, storytelling, printmaking, and artist books. Wojtek Mejor is a Warsaw-based food activist and educator involved in food co-ops, CSAs, and degrowth.

Other contributing artists: Hanna Bayer, Julia Huerter, Tanya von Barnau, Anja Knecht, Simona Zemaityte, Willem van Hest, Carola Rümper, Tine Lohr, Daniela Ehemann, Sandra Becker, Mirce Liljehult, Ulrich Diezmann, Jakob Roepke, Zuzanna Skiba, Silke Bartsch, Martin Dege, Marcos Vidal, Cathrine Constanse Gjelsnes, Nia Pushkarova, Kenneth Pils, Lotte Nilsson-Välimaa, Mindaugas Gapševičius, Ricarda Wallhäuser, Matthias Roth, Penka Mincheva, Kim Dotty Hachmann, Bertram Schilling, Sibylle Hofter, Silke Klein Kalvelage, Christine Baumann, Linda Weiss, Vilma Sileikiene, Jürgen O. Olbrich, Elizabeth McTernan.