KITCHEN BATH: EMBODIED BACTERIA ENCOUNTERS Performance at Vienna Design Week 2020

As part of fellow Vienna Design Week Urban Food Design Prize Winners Anastasia Eggers  and Philipp Kolmann’s KITCHEN BATH – EMBODIED BACTERIA ENCOUNTERS project, Julian stepped up to perform the role of ‘cheese bather’ for an evening performance. He didn’t realise there would be around 50 people in attendance and he would have to get down to short shorts, but the bath was cozy and the microbes were great! It was a pity that by midnight his hair smelt unbearable! 

KITCHEN BATH, by Anastasia Eggers and Philipp Kolmann, combined the culture of the body with cheesemaking in the context of Urban Food & Design. Wellness treatments based on dairy products were already common in antiquity. In homage to Cleopatra’s milk baths, KITCHEN BATH creates a shared domestic setting for both culinary and cosmetic processes: The kitchen and bathroom become one, as a means of combining the effect of the bacteria that are used in food production and in connection with hygiene routines. For example, the protein created in cheesemaking is used to prepare baths, which supply activating lactobacilli to our microbiome (the entirety of all microorganisms that are naturally carried by a multicellular creature). Hence, at the ideological level, the project also automatically addresses the ever-stricter hygiene rules in food production, with its constant mantra of: more sterile, more homogenized, and less local. And yet, according to all those whose aim is to keep alive the century-old know how about bacterial cultures and trades such as cooperage or barrel-making, which is based on precisely this symbiosis of water, protein, and wood, this is all nonsense — or, as the Austrians say, «all cheese». The project was realized in cooperation with the Werkraum Bregenzerwald and the barrel-maker Peter Lässer.