What remains?

What remains? Memories, a lot of stories to be told, scobys that travelled with Smiths to different places and start a new life there, all the baby scobys that came into being in the Saline in the care of fellow artists and travelled with the Bureau back to the Netherlands. New ideas, new friendships, new collaborations, a determination to continue the Bureau of Slow Endeavours in different forms, with more people, and a desire to come back to Schmiede next year. 

The Bureau will continue to work with the materials and stories that were collected and contribute to a book that will be published in 2025 about the 2024 Sloth edition of Schmiede.

Looking from the outside

All the Smiths have left but the Bureau stays for another week. We’ve hardly been outside of the building and it is time to explore the mountains around Hallein. It is breathtaking, the saltworks, enormous when you are inside, look tiny from the Barmstein, 841 meters above sea level. There are reminders everywhere of the time when salt was still being mined, closed off mine shafts, overgrown rails leading nowhere and the actual salt mines on the Dürrnberg above Hallein, where the Celts started mining their salt 2.500 years ago. It is something like an amusement park these days, so we avoid it. The massive rain of the last week has caused small landslides along some trails that are officially closed, but we wander there anyway and collect clay, another material I’ve been interested in and who knows, might be something to explore next year: the Bureau will be back.

The Bureau at Schmiede Werkschau

 

 

 

Kin

 

By Jatun Risba

The Truth

Loungie, the Lounge scoby, as a medium in an installation alongside the video in which the founders of The Lounge reveal their secret. 

Scoby Spa

Reimagining Wealth, privilege, and the Redistribution of Luxury, "Scoby Spa" at the Schmiede Werkschau is an installation by the intercultural artist collective "Low Culture" (Ina Hanselmann, Gaston Gordon, Eva Esmann Behrens, Katharina Bacher), challenging societal notions of wealth, privilege and luxury. Through the care and pampering of a Scoby -a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast- the installation serves as a critical reflection on the districution of resources and access to comfort. It questions who is deemed worthy of luxury and who is excluded from it, exploring how capitalism perpetuates inequality by restricting access to well-being. By elevating a non-human organism to the center of the exploration, "Scoby Spa" redefines our understanding of value, care, and art in a world where wealth often dictates worth.

 

 

 

Albert's drawing & the flock of birds

 

10 days of drawing and a flock created by all the Smiths who imagined themselves as a bird. Watch the content of the long drawing "To be continued" here

Scoby prints

In the meantime ....

 ... scoby number 9 was at the centre of a pop-up sake bar that had opened the night before and had performed in a lightshow. I had missed the action but I heard it was spectaculair. David took number 16 to a gaming convention. The Drama scoby (11) showed bubbles after having been fed beer (unfortunately the microphones didn't pick up any sound) and Jatun (23) had managed to make their scoby produce the new pronoun "ki". Scoby number 12 had been transformed into a lamp and scoby number 6 seemed to be undergoing or waiting for exciting experiments.

Flying and floating

 Albert's drawing has grown to enormous proportions and the birds in the box are ready to fly (more here). We test out locations for the presentation on Friday.