Ferment Arts & Culture Festival Kanazawa (2024)
From September to December 2024, we presented the “Fermentation Culture Art Festival Kanazawa,” which began at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture. Dominique was originally invited by producer Hiraku Ogura as a participating artist, but in the wake of the confusion caused by the Noto Peninsula earthquake, he was also asked to serve as co-curator. In that role, he curated newly commissioned works by six artist groups—a novelist, a design studio, a craft artist, a media artist, a musician, and a research team including Ferment Media Research. While conducting site visits to the earthquake-affected areas of the Noto Peninsula and researching Ishikawa’s fermentation traditions, all six works were created and exhibited outside the museum’s white-cube galleries—in active fermentation factories and historic architectural spaces.
Headquarter exhibition of local fermented food culture & history at the 21st Century Museum’s studio space. (Art Direction by Hiroki Takarabe)
Ferment Media Research “Kojiguraverse”. Kojigura means ‘house of Koji’, the place where the miso is crafted on a daily basis. We used the same sensing techniques used for Nukabot to capture the activities of the lactic acid bacteria, koji (aspergius oryzae), and yeasts inside the miso, to let the visitors talk to it (Misobot, top) and feel their presence through the movements of softrobotic avatars of the microbes (Kuratsuki bots, bottom)