Michel Blazy’s microbial art
December 18, 2008
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A pond of fermenting tea with fungal lily pads
The lacto-fermentation of cabbage wasn’t the only kind of microbial art and design going down in St. Etienne at last month’s biennial. Michel Blazy created a most beautiful live installation of Givernyesque pools of living kombucha colonies. For those not yet in the know, kombucha is a fermented tea, that folks east of Caucasus can’t get enough of. It’s made with a fungus that imparts such special health-giving properties that kombucha enthusiasts call it the ‘elixir of life’. Kombucha is a slightly soured, bubbly, probiotic drink.
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Blazy’s reflective pools conjure microbial Monet
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As a point of reference, Claude Monet’s ‘Nympheas’ at the Museum Marmottan in Paris, image obviously used without permission
Michel Blazy is a French artist whose sculptures and installations are process-based interactions between food materials and the direct environment. In the Palais de Tokyo in 2007 Blazy produced an aesthetically charged installation using sprouted lentils, yoghurt wallpaper and enormous pasta sculptures. Blazy’s work is sensually humorous but demonstrates a masterful materials synergy - productively harnessing the natural properties of foods and organisms. Think Roman Signer and Olafur Eliasson, but then with foods.
Growing kombucha fungi on a pond of green tea
For the ‘off-biennial’ venue of the Entrepôts Bellevue in St. Etienne, Blazy and his team made giant pools of tea which they fermented with a rainbow array of gelatinous lily pads, rubbery, macroscopic fungal colonies that lent the ponds their healthful properties and a bit of bubble. Thinking the 1% alcoholic content might not be sufficiently festive for a vernissage, Blazy spiked his kombucha tea with celebratory shots of vodka and the atmosphere at the Entrepôts Bellevue was magic.
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Pondering the depths, ‘Is it a pond or a pad?’
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Blazy’s multicoloured spent tea bags
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A greenhouse incubating kombucha offspring
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Master of mothers, Blazy tends to his colonies
- Michel Blazy, JUS DE NYMPHEAS, Entrepôts Bellevue, St. Etienne 11 bis rue de l’Égalerie – 42 100 Saint Étienne, opening 20.nov.2008 until ???
Claude Monet’s later paintings include the Nymphea or Lily pad paintings
It’s been claimed that Kombucha: increases longevity, cures cancer, cures rheumatism, improves vision, prolongs sexual appetite and performance, cures bronchitis and asthma, cures kidney illnesses, cures cataracts, cures cardiac illnesses, cures diabetes, cures diarrhea, takes away white hair, grows black hair, is effective against herpes, increases appetite and helps digestion, cures insomnia, lowers hypertension, reverses the symptoms of AIDS.
How to make Kombucha - you know you want to.
DAMn° Magazine writer Anneke Bokern on probiotic art
Superb (and hilarious) YouTube interview with Michel Blazy about his work - en Français.
debra at 12:44 | | post to del.icio.us
