Lots of impressions

Where to start? I’ve met many people this week and so there’s been lots of exchange, imaginative experiences, discussions about circularity, nature, humanity and more… and general feelings about it all.

Tuesday, I’ve had the pleasure to take part in the Radboud Impact Festival on the campus. We took a walk in the woods together with students, and did a make-believe exercise upon a biobased future as seen by other beings. This led to interesting reflections. My companions expressed their ideas of what it could mean to live closer to nature. We all agreed that we need a different understanding of who serves whom in this human and nature relationship. We imagined that cities could perhaps entangle more with the natural world in a biobased future and so both the human environment and natural environments would become pockets alongside each other. In this scenario, a few aspects that came from the students stayed with me: in such pockets humans would have to act very different than now and interfere as little as possible with the life of other species (empathy, more empathy!), and pockets of nature for the wild life would push large scale changes in the wild landscapes to become condensed, micro-landscapes of wild. Throughout the day, there’s been discussion about growing biobased stuff in a carbon neutral fashion with the help of natural occurring electric fields (think of the electric charge of a spot where lightening hits and how that affects the life of plants on that spot), about how innovation needs to distribute outside of patents for humanity’s sake, about the ownership we like to exercise on nature right now, and much more.

And then it was Wednesday again, and I welcomed two groups of participants in the Besiendershuis to put together bio-waste and fungus to let it grow into object pieces. This brought up plenty of reflections too. We talked about fungi in general, edible or non-edible, how difficult it actually is to grow them or grow with them. We talked about the extent to which what I do during this residence can be automated and the reality of it being applied into neighbourhoods in the future. The question that remains with me is: how much do you want to automate to still have an educational and playful experience around this new biobased adventure we’re in? We also spoke about how in this moment in time, the overall process is not perfect and leans on practices and products known to be part of the right-now non-sustainable situation. And we talked about how it is difficult to jump steps to perfect something without leaving some space for less desirable parts as well. What keeps coming back for me in all these exchanges is that all people who decided to be part of this journey don’t just partake. They take initiative, fill-in where needed and continue to think about what we are doing outside of our moments together. I think this is an important aspect to keep in mind in the context of our background culture of ‘the human is inherently bad’.

And now I am ready for the weekend, my headspace to let everything cook and settle for the next time.

Testing, testing...

Still incubating, but nevertheless: the first tests for this shared, Nijmegen based journey are there, all wet and smelling of forest floor right after the rain. They’re gonna have to sit a bit longer though, now that they are out in the open. I know my manners of allowing the mycelium network to develop a skin, alright.

So where are we at… The last two weeks have been fully set in for designing the moulds you can see in the picture (disclaimer: not final moulds in the picture). Different iterations were analysed, 3D printed, re-designed… (aaand repeat) A filament was chosen, an overall shape of the future object has been conceptualized, analysed, 3D printed, re-designed… (aaaand repeat again :P). It’s been a memorable 2 weeks of travelling with the 3D printer as weekend companion and baby-sitting it at night here and there to make sure I can stay on schedule to put the fungal ladies above together within the desired timeframe.

This being said: it’s a nice feeling when the tests worked, the moulds were not faulty enough to destroy the pieces (yes, I am not ashamed to admit this is also part of the process) and the wet white stuff of magic looks healthy. Go me and mycelium for a great collaboration on this one!

You are here 📍

Processing. Not much to say, everything to say, all at once. Design is forming. Behind me, Jaap Scheeren’s photograph [#ditisnijmegen] makes me want to go out and get myself some fries.

the birds & the bees.

We brainstormed. About now, the city, the future. Thoughts came up about what we see or would like to see around.

• trees, quiet, birds;

• art that invites to reflection;

• nature is our nature;

• family, friends make you root in a place;

• no waste: re-circulate everything;

• Nijmegen has the character of a village with stunning surroundings;

• everything influences each other, everything helps each other live;

• a sense of place is who we are;

• vines, the sea, rocks;

• nature is the source of quiet from within;

• the Waal river, the history;

• local goods and services;

• in a circular society people are interested and involved with how stuff is made, where it comes from and where it goes to;

• a clean environment, a clean natural world;

• flowers and green, animals who live a happy life;

• in it healthy, together, united, joyful;

• Nijmegen is the students;

• take good care of yourself, surroundings included;

• use only what you need while enjoying what lays around;

• small, near, necessity only, back to basics;

• biobased food, clothes, packaging, cooling systems, furniture, cutlery, pots and pans, jewelry, estate;

• lots of wild flowers;

• go with the flow;

• a trench filled with wild and its noises;

• big roads with no cars;

• live conscious of your surroundings, keep your loved ones near, maintain balance between what you take and what you give back;

• Nijmegen is the friendships and memories, the long walks in nature;

• Nijmegen is its socialist history;

• raw materials are not ours; “it’s all just borrowed” (Thomas Rau);

• a monetary switch to something that enables barter exchange within communities;

• we ask too much of Earth, we need to learn to give back;

• vehicles only for social use, shared is the new norm;

Organic waste

After the first week of separating organic waste (5 households in total), we made the biowaste ready for fermentation together. This was declared to be a labour intensive and boundary pushing activity. We cut and mixed the biowaste with Bokashi starter by hand. Smells and textures of different one-week-old food remains excited people’s senses to the extreme now and then. However, the together part made it easier in many ways and even stirred interesting reflections. After all, being part of physical boundary pushing activities together creates mutual understanding and reliance on one another’s courage. Coming in contact with the waste like this is definitely memorable.

There was disappointment too in relation to the imperfections of the process, such as the chemical nature of the cleaning agents used to disinfect afterwards, or us still relying on plastics for certain containment. What’s interesting to me in particular is that such a practice, involving a biotechnique to grow a material (thus working with micro-organisms as technology) may seem so natural to us in some ways, as if the practice has always been around and no one had to think of it. This applies to our wide relation to technology too; the more a device is a black box that always works, the more our expectations of it grow higher and we think it could do the impossible. Culturally, we have developed low tolerance (and patience for that matter) to failure and imperfections. We tend to easily take things for granted. When enough information is absent we even tend believe in magic.

Disappointment should however always be allowed to be part of this journey too. In our organic waste processing session, talking about it brought up very interesting discussion about what is pro-active or counter-active ecological action, or how much perfectionism we may indulge with when experimenting with new things. It also brought back a shared sense of responsibility for the future that can at times feel paralyzing. Acting right is not always up to the small folk and this duality between trying and not being given the tools for it can affect one’s sense of optimism.

Kick-off: citizens & waste management

We kicked-off. This week I got to meet the Nijmegen citizens who will join me throughout the next months. We are a group of ladies. We talked about nature’s perspective, stepped out of our human shoes and asked ourselves how would other living beings look at our existence; how could empathy towards the natural world look like… A certain concern for the ecological future of the planet kept coming back. Another concern for future generations of humans came circling back too: we share a culture of thinking fast and short-term, but somewhere along the way we have to start to invest into the larger picture that lays further away from us.

I also paid a visit to DAR, the Nijmegen waste management facility. We went around the site and discussed the manners in which this city is dealing with their waste streams. With small differences comparing to other places, the impact created is large; the devil is in the details, they say. We discussed different scenario’s of citizen involvement, from zero - when waste magically disappears - to high involvement, and the aspects that come along the way.

After a week filled with learning moments, one thing stays in my mind: giving space and time to people to do the right thing. Change is slow and difficult and needs maintained effort to settle. How do we shape social policy that welcomes mistakes too as part of a process of change? How do we build patient policies?

Toekomstdenkers (AiR) in Nijmegen

For the next period, Nijmegen will be my home and workspace. As artist in residence of the program Toekomstdenkers (Eng. future thinkers), I’ll be working together with citizens of Nijmegen to develop and grow an object from household organic waste. It is the first time I approach the study at such a scale from the social perspective, with people’s involvement throughout the whole development. I start this journey with the question: Is the circular future one in which people can grow and bio-build goods within their community?

I’ve arrived here, in a fairly green city with a long visible history that spans back to the Roman times. In this context, human life looks like a micro-moment. I’ve been wandering the streets discovering the place and imagining future archaeology as what we want to leave behind for future generations.

The next period will be about what we can avoid living behind - biobased goods made to biodegrade - and what we do want to leave behind for the future - customs around how we could all bio-build a different type of living environment.

A LONG WHILE HAS PASSED...

Many experiments further, larger shapes have been grown.

Mission "rice waffles"

day 01

day 09

day 12

day 14

We've spent roughly five months in the lab so far trying to figure out if HOW (household organic waste) can become a material that citizens can engage with in their neighbourhoods. Through small-scale experiments we've run a whole lot of tests with HOW as a substrate for mycelium forming. In each experiment we would change parameters and conditions in the petri dishes to test our theory for different scenarios, such as: “what happens if the HOW composition is mostly animal tissue/waste?” or “could a HOW material be bio-formed in no longer than 2 weeks?”.

Every time I would post a successful experiment on social media, people would ask if the petri dishes were rice waffles. I personally found this funny. I decided to keep the term especially because visually associating HOW – so mainly stinky waste – to something edible is already a positive shift in perception.

My “rice waffle” mission entry log is: it is possible to bio-form a material from HOW. Mission “rice waffles” continues and hopefully very soon we will go beyond the rice waffle shape.

RIP dear samples, go and become someone else

The other day I was in the bus with a friend. In the context of another conversation, he told me about a study he read somewhere about the human body. When a human baby is born – my friend said – there are hardly any other lifeforms inside that body. This gradually changes through nutrition and regeneration, and slowly, by around the age of 8, the human body becomes host for loads of micro-organisms and cells, none of them having been part of the original body. The study my friend was telling me about proposed that the mature body is in fact merely a symbiosis of billions of other microscopic lifeforms that assure its functioning, none of them originally part of the human. This, as if we'd be a giant sum of other life, with a giant mind of its own.

I don't know if this study is accurate, I have no way to verify. However, the idea is very interesting in relation to our sense of self, the way we perceive our individual identity, and the ways in which we relate to our environment.

In parallel and for immediate and practical reasons, I also buried half of our grown HOW (household organic waste) samples into the ground the other day. We are studying a new material synthesised from HOW. We care that this material keeps being organic and biodegradable. I buried the HOW samples to assess the rate to which they break down.

Somehow, burying these samples brought me back to my friend's story. The biodegradation process that I'll be now following is in a sense the death of the samples just as much as it is their transformation into something else. And in the same train of thought as my friend's story, one could even argue that the HOW samples – whilst disappearing – will become not something, but loads and loads of someone else's. All micro-organisms that we are now chasing around on a microscope in the lab will go travel, each discovering totally new worlds and other micro-organisms like themselves.

Is there a world beyond plastic?

“Plastic Ocean” by Tan Zi Xi. Photo credits © Verve Magazine; visit website

We had quite a few setbacks recently. This is never easy so, in between things, I had to remind myself why I wanted to do this study in the first place. Why all this search?

For the installation “Plastic Ocean” artist Tan Zi Xi gathered a significant amount of plastic that was drifting in ocean waters. After cleaning it up, she compiled this work for the Singapore Art Museum. This artwork illustrates a tremendous abundance of objects from all categories of domestic life hanging on top of our heads like a strange weight.

There is so much plastic around that we could build giant monuments with it. Our economies depend on it. Our comfort is built on plastics: drainage systems are plastic, our food travels the world for cheap because of plastic packaging, our devices are light and easy to produce because of plastic etc.. Plastic supports our current lifestyles. Take away plastic and you'd take away most of our current pleasures. Imagining a functional world without plastic right now seems impossible. However, I dare you to try: what would the world be without plastic?

There once was such a world, right after the industrial revolution. At the time, a handful of scientists and inventors were only discovering the first plastics ever. While the first standardized products ever were taking shape, no one could even imagine yet how plastic will ever serve the world.

Maybe we have the same problem now. As our world is challenged by what post-industrial automation brings along we have a hard time looking outside of our reality. Just how our fellow humans couldn't imagine the world beyond custom made services and handcrafted objects in the beginning of the 20th century, we cannot imagine a world without cheap and disposable products.

I started this study because I'd like to try to look outside this pattern.

Plastic is our recent history; a history that is very hard to index at the moment. But this only spans from the 1950s onward when PET was first adapted for mass production. Ever since then the presence of plastics everywhere came to be known as the success story of our civilised world. Yet now, when we have huge difficulties administering this story's consequences, plastic starts to look more like Tan Zi Xi's work rather than the extension of the modern human. We still linger on the 1950s' image of abundance. It's time to move on, don't you think?

HOW to...

We're still patiently searching for this answer, so we will not reveal here how you can turn your HOW into a material. Not just yet, in any case!

Meanwhile, I want to share this one step forward, see the pictures below. It's a small step but it really feels like a whole new world to us. The search for a HOW bio-conversion recipe that can be done in home conditions is sometimes a heavy hearted process. Not everything works and we don't always have new ideas. So when we get something right, it's like a party!

The pictures on the left are taken on the 12th of July, when this HOW batch was inoculated. The picture on the right is from today. Look at how much these fellows have been developing (said I, like a proud parent :-)!

Next step is to bury half of these little guys into a ground. It's bio-degradation time. Wondering how long it'll take until they're gone? Me tooooo!

12 July ‘19

12 July ‘19

12 August ‘19

Dried HOW smells like cigars

HOW (household organic waste) is definitely an interesting material! And as we are trying all sorts of things with it, we are discovering new things every day.

So far we tried to experiment with a little bit of everything that HOW may contain: remains of products that are rich in carbohydrates, meat, fruit, veggies, remains of cooked food, you name it. We normally bring HOW to a dry state to work with it.

In the previous post I took you through the smells of our processes. Here's one more such sensory experience. Have you ever been to a tobacco farm? Because dry HOW feels a lot like tobacco leaves drying. But ok, say you've never visited a tobacco farm. Here's something closer to urban life: the touch, feel and smell of rolling tobacco. That's a bit what dry HOW feels like: fibery, just a tiny bit moist, and smelling like cigars in a box.

Who's afraid of HOW's smell?

I need to debunk some myths: HOW smells much better than you imagine; it's not what you think!

Before we started this research we had a proof-of-concept phase in which we fooled around with different bio-processes just to see what suits this study. Many pre-experiments took their own turn instead of ours (it doesn't always turn up well, ya' know). It was then when I dealt with some funky perfumes, if you know what I mean! And it was also then when I developed what I call “a smell anxiety”. Smell anxiety means that once you know you are (or will be) in front of waste, you already imagine terrible smells and you start to make gross associations. As I bet most of you get smell anxiety as well at least at times when you see and read my posts, I must walk you through the scents palette of our HOW research, step by step.

Is fresh HOW all that fresh?!

Fresh HOW means for us HOW that's been gathered no longer than 3-4 days ago. You probably think: but fresh HOW is already old food. Yeah, but when you add 3-4 days to natural decay not that much changes.

And as we chop HOW when it arrives in the lab to speed up fermentation, all its inner juices come out. Remember, decaying still only happens on the outer layers at this time. So chopped HOW smells more like greens, fruit, veggie... whatever you have in there. Fresh HOW smells quite fresh I must say!

Where's that smell of pickles coming from?

If you ever fermented HOW with bokashi starter you already know it. The garbage juice that gets released through this anaerobic fermentation is also a great natural fertiliser and non-chemical sewage declogger. But most importantly, fermented HOW and its garbage juice smell like pickles. That's right, like augurkens.

Fibre got baked

Imagine you take something pickled and you cook it in the oven. Or imagine the smell of dried and seasoned fruit peel, like mango peel for instance. Imagine its sweetness, baked. And now imagine its been also pickled and baked. That's what incubated HOW smells like. And if you think of it, it is all sorts of peels dried, pickled and baked.

Wet leaves on the forest floor after the rain

If you close your eyes and remember the last time you took a walk in the woods after the rain, then you got it, it's that smell: a bit moist and mouldy. When we put deactivated HOW to bind with mycelium, we moisturise it a bit because moulds like to grow in wet environments. The smell that comes out in this mix is really just like that of the forest floor, but then in the lab ;)

Some time ago…

Some time ago we've started with a test batch just to see how the theory works in practice. We fermented HOW in four different ways. We deactivated the fermentation (bokashi) bacteria. And we tried to grow mycelium on the results. After quite a few failed experiments and hurt feelings, we’ve got the first sample to bind with mycelium. I am extremely happy to share the development of this sample.

We started here, cutting the HOW into tiny pieces

We fermented the HOW in different forms

This grew between 19 June - 1st July