We first got to know the work of Bianca Hlywa, a Canadian artist based in London, in 2019, before the pandemic and even before we opened Atoi. Bianca was already at that time working with SCOBY—an acronym for Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast—commonly known as kombucha fungus, a probiotic drink that has become popular in the West in recent years. SCOBY grows as an air-liquid interface, a cellulose-structured film in which microorganisms, bacteria, and yeasts coexist and work together to ferment sweet tea and sugar.
Bianca grows and manipulates SCOBY on a large scale, a formal operation that poses a perceptual, aesthetic challenge. As the SCOBY grows, the first film becomes thicker and transforms into a gelatinous, beige-colored, thick microbial layer that resembles flesh and is visually difficult to classify as life or non-life. The transformation Bianca subjects the domestic SCOBY to produces an estrangement that is extensible to fungi, bacteria, yeasts, and microbial life who are generally omnipresent in our bodies and/or the environment. All of them are often invisible, so when they grow and reach human scale, they become radically unfamiliar to us. Bianca uses this ambiguity to challenge pre-established categories and boundaries, practising an interrogative intimacy with a potentially repulsive and non-human ‘other’.
Bianca uses robotic mechanisms to activate the SCOBYs in her installations. Industrial control allows her to animate them and thus engage in a dialogue with the tradition of the exhibition space as a place of stillness where stable, inert, and recognizable objects are displayed. On previous occasions, the neatness of the white cube has also favored a certain distancing. Unlike them, the adaptation of the installation we have conceived together with Bianca brings this last contextualisation operation into play.