The
Bureau of Slow Endeavours was a concept until Monique Besten was
invited to be an artist in residence at Schmiede in Hallein, Austria.
Schmiede has been organising a self assembling event for 23 years, a
peer-to-peer yearly festival about cooperation and spending time
together where artists from different fields and different corners of
the world get together to experiment, teach, learn, create and network.
It was the perfect setting for BurSe to present itself for the first
time, even more since this year the theme was “Sloth”, focusing on
slowness and its meaning. The open structure of Schmiede—providing
space, a basic tech infrastructure, a supportive team and 200 curious
and motivated practitioners—offers a breading ground for new ideas.
Monique
invited long-time collaborator Albert van Veenendaal to join her. They
drove a small army of scobys—symbiotic cultures of bacteria and yeast—
to Austria, not only to produce kombucha with the natural water from the
surroundings but also as muses and inspiration source for the community
of Smiths, as the participants of Schmiede are called.
They spent
three weeks in a huge former salt refinery on a small island in the
river Salzach and installed the Bureau in a corner of the building with a
view of the salt that has remained there ever since it stopped its
production. Albert, who is a composer and musician,worked on a 25 meter
long drawing and inspired by a box he found in the basement with the
words “all birds” printed on it, invited Smiths to imagine themselves as
a bird and make a little drawing. In the final presentation, his 10 day
drawing crossed one of the largest rooms and the birds formed a flock,
hanging in open space. He also embarked on a lot of small collaborations
and little interventions.
Monique was in charge of the scoby army,
gave workshops about making kombucha & other things a scoby can be
to you and found adoptive parents who used the scobys in a multitude of
ways. Some were mere companions, stood on desks almost motionless,
slowly producing kombucha, others were involved in experiments with
sound and movement, design, storytelling, virtual reality and so on.
During the public presentation on the last day of Schmiede the
collectively produced kombucha was tasted, some of it infused with
site-specific ingredients like rose petals from the inner courtyard.
Symbiosis was a keyword in the project and process: the symbiosis
between bacteria and yeast leading to kombucha was symbolic of the
symbiosis between the scobys and the Smiths, but also of the gathering
of many people from completely different fields exploring and working
together.
A lot of materials, stories and new ideas were gathered
during this working period and will be processed and given new shapes in
the coming time. The Bureau will contribute to a book about this year's Schmiede "Sloth" that will be published in 2025. You can read in more detail about some of the things
that happened on this weblog.
