Canteen Fermentation Social
An Art Project by Byungseo Yoo
Byungseo Yoo’s Canteen Fermentation Social is a social sculpture, a participatory cooking project that transformatively connects art, climate justice, and collective knowledge. As part of Art as Ecological Practice, Yoo transforms the exhibition space into a living fermentation laboratory equipped with a dehydrator, fermentation chamber, refrigerator, and open displays for sharing and archiving collectively developed knowledge. Workshops on kombucha and tempeh were held in advance, creating a network of participants, ideas, and experiences. The opening of the project combined performative cooking and communal eating with discussions about ecological resilience and non-extractive forms of knowledge transfer. Canteen Fermentation Social sees itself as an open framework – a ‘living score’ – that is reinterpreted and rewritten by its participants with each iteration. In an attitude of radical hospitality, fermentation becomes a metaphor and method for slow transformation, care and collective survival.