This morning, it’s the first time I am making Kombucha since we have moved to this new apartment in Kreuzberg. While I get the good old routine back on track, I get a podcast running: I’m catching up on the fascinating Lecture Series for an Interdisciplinary Audience hold by our Cluster speaker Peter Fratzl at Humboldt, “Interdependence of Structure and Function in Biological Materials.” The visual insight hits me as I move the big glass mason jar from the top of the cupboard to transfer it into bottles, provoking a stir inside. While Peter replies to a question on cellulose, its structure, and intrinsic activity, the cellulosic material of my Kombucha culture starts dancing before my eyes. Captivated, I immediately bring the jar to the window and start filming it in action.
This is a rare phenomenon. Most of the time, most of the older cellulose tissues remain anchored to the top layers, their fibers intricately and inordinately weaved into the body of the mother. I had to separate again my culture in two jars to get it to thrive again in our new home. When transporting a kombucha culture from one vessel to another, or when starting a new one, part of the colored tissue usually lingers in the bottom of the fluid. However, if these aged tissues get activated again, the resulting carbonation provokes the formations of bubbles, some of which get trapped in the nets of fibers. Captured in the right moment, these bubbles look like the heads of anthropomorphic spirits in dresses of silk. Set in motion by a liquid spire, the tiny figures swing and whirl into a hypnotic dance. Straining my imagination, I can see them holding their etheric hands around the liquid column.
In his seminal text “Nubes cum Figuris”, Dario Gamboni points out the “interpretation of the clouds as a modern paradigm of the artistic perception and creation.” (2009): “The blurry and ambiguous contours of clouds make of them ‘weak forms’ (in the sense of Gestalt psychology) par excellence, all the more as they are subject to constant motion and change. The fact that they appear in the sky predisposes them to be interpreted as the images, the disguises (as in the myth of Ixion and Iuno) or the messengers of heavenly beings.” (2009, 247)
As Carlo Severi theorized, these ambiguous images are traps for the seeing and traps to the thinking: “pièges à voir, pièges à penser.” (2011) The clouds of this soon-to-be-ingested liquid atmosphere are kept standing up, hanging on their bubble pinheads. They appear to me as Asian figures drawn in loose golden ink strokes, as they go in a dignified other-worldly procession.
Kombucha makers are cultivating a certain intimacy with their microbiological partners in the craft. At some point, the velvet clothes of their mothership appeal to them as a friendly and delicate body without organs. Watching their fringes moving in the micro streams can provoke aesthetic emotions akin to that of looking at the clouds of the sky. Like sailors, Kombucha makers use all their senses to decipher the temporal shifts and changes of the bottled-up milieu, in order to navigate the process. This micro performance happens in the midst of the domestic stage – in the chaos of my kitchen on a Sunday morning. One of many weekly rituals to keep the home and its inhabitants’ microbiome ecosystems up and running. It meets in satisfying synchronicity the humdrum of epistemic epiphanies in material science delivered by Peter Fratzl, another ritual entangled with a knowledge ecosystem – “cellulose is the most abundant organic material on the planet,” he says. Kombucha produces one of the purest forms of that material that one can find in nature. The filaments procure to the colony a solid base to share and prosper, as well as fine garments to engage in mattering dances. Using text and video to “transduce” the energy of the dance to you and to “immerse” you in its fluid medium, I’m trying to convey the sort of intimacy which grows through years of practice – and the joy of the sudden insight.
Join our Ferment-Activity Club this Wednesday for a “refresher workshop”!
Poster of the meeting #1 of our fermentation club, following up on the “Shelf Life” workshop.
Highlight from the Kombucha Refresher session: Cluster PI Jörg Niewöhner happily shared with us his mixed feelings regarding his Kombucha brewing practice. With permission of Jörg Niewöhner.