An old garage within a former ear, nose and throat hospital, that is now lived in by property guardians, feels like pretty much the perfect place for Bianca Hlywa’s deftly brilliant new solo show, Mute Track. On the rainy February of my visit, St Chad’s Projects is cold and damp and hard to find. It’s not healthy. There are fucking mushrooms growing over in one corner, and I’m thinking – yet again – about Austrian artist/architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser and his 1958 mould manifesto:
“…when a wall starts to get mouldy, when moss grows in a corner of a room, rounding its geometric angles, we should be glad because, together with the microbes and fungi, life is moving into the house and through this process we can more consciously become witnesses of architectural changes from which we have much to learn.”
Which of course is the kind of thing that somebody would write who never actually has to live in a damp, mouldy home (or hospital or art gallery) and experience the deleterious effects on respiratory and mental health over a sustained period of time. I mean sure, fungi is a cute motif to wield against the rigid straight lines of Modernism, but despite the evocative language, Hundertwasser was really only ever a maker of images not a thinker of materials.
Bianca Hlywa, by contrast, is definitely a materials kind of artist. If you know Hlywa’s work, you’ll know it involves large installations made mostly of SCOBY, a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast used to make kombucha and sourdough, and which forms into fleshy masses of pallid grey beige with the sheen and tone of packing tape. Hlywa is not the only artist I know who has worked with SCOBY (Hestia Peppe produced a collaboratively grown SCOBY installation called Microbial Familiars for Nature Reserves, an exhibition I curated back in 2013) but she has been doing this a long time. Nine years now in fact. This current piece took the last six months to grow. Like all of her work, it is epic and gross and utterly beguiling.
When you see an artist working for so long with the same material, you get a better feel for the effects created by certain formal decisions. With a medium like SCOBY, there are obvious visceral responses – I still remember emitting an audible gasp when I walked around the corner into her MFA installation at Goldsmiths in 2019 (she’d been working with SCOBY for a good three years by then, not always to the delight of others in the studio or the university’s administration). Plenty of visitors took one look at the work, turned round and walked straight out again. I can also vividly recall the hot vinegary smell as I descended the stairs at Gossamer Fog for her solo show in 2022. At St Chad’s, that powerfully encultured instinct of disgust feels muted: partly I think it’s to do with familiarity (like, I know what I’m getting myself in for) and partly because it’s so fucking cold in the space that you can’t smell anything.
In Life Models, a work shown at The Barbican Arts Group Trust in 2019, large metal claws emphasised a feeling of violence. The contrast between the metal and the flesh read as a critique of industrial capitalism and tech-bro futurism. This is a continuous thread but reads more subtly in later works. At Gossamer Fog, the slow lifting of the SCOBY to the height of a human gave it a surprisingly reverential air and I wanted to study its surface right up close like a painting. Both of those works involved a container, from which the SCOBY was mechanically raised and lowered, and enabling it to stay moist throughout the exhibition.
Here, the SCOBY dangles from the ceiling. Its form is not shaped by an architecture of containment: it hangs in the air, touching the ground, maybe more free, certainly more messy, and the complex mechanical engineering that enables the thing to function is less visibly violent. It’s 180cm tall, my height pretty much. This is the first work by Hlywa that I’ve seen which eschews altogether what Roalind Krauss has described as the “base materialism” of the horizontal, but at the same time, because of the way it hangs down (as opposed to, as at Gossamer Fog, being raised up, as if for inspection or worship) it never quite attains the status of verticality that Krauss call “the axis of beauty”. This time, the SCOBY is triangular, stretching out and down like the tail of a disembodied kipper. The main thing Mute Track does is spin, occasionally quite fast – which is industrial but also rather fun.
I think this signals a subtle shift in agency. With no containing architecture, and the mechanical elements less violently visible, the power of the machine feels lesser (or maybe it’s more insidious). This means that the question of agency within the SCOBY itself comes more into focus. Since Lynn Margulis, evolutionary biology has taken a symbiotic turn, increasingly interested in mutuality and cooperation over the neo-Darwinist obsession with competition that suited a neoliberal political climate. But sometimes in these discussions, questions of power and agency are omitted. For in working together, in forming a culture (!) – whether it’s bacteria and yeast, termites and fungus, coral polyps and zooxanthellae, or the algae and cyanobacteria that form lichen – it is rarely clear what the hierarchy might be or whether we can speak of a genuine collaboration among equals. I guess the point is that symbiosis doesn’t necessarily mean everyone is having a good time.
Back to the gallery: you can’t really spend time with this work and not think about bodies. Depending on who you are, that might be something imbued with joy or disgust or both. Personally, I find there is a pleasurable challenge to confronting my own feelings of disgust. In order to create her large-scale structures, Hlywa attaches the fleshy SCOBY to a webbing substrate. Here, this is done with big rough stitches made of yellowish semi-transparent fishing wire. Suturing is always interesting – a form of violence in the name of care. I’m reminded quite viscerally of the dissolvable stitches left in me by a doctor after a childhood operation. These, I’m now reading, are made either of catgut (!) or various synthetically created polymers. Hlywa’s stitches are definitely those of a doctor, rather than, say, a tailor.
As well as bodies, I’m also thinking about narrative. Hlywa describes the work’s varying spinning rhythms as a choreography, which I like. I recently read a book called Meander, Spiral, Explode by Jane Alison (thanks Crystal for the tip) which is a loving and expansive analysis of the narrative structures of novels. Its starting point is that there must be more to life than the traditional – and unavoidably phallocentric – narrative arc of rise, climax and fall. Alison’s answer is yes, yes there is – a whole maritime cartography of lapping tides, wavelets, eddies, circles and spirals. I’m thinking about this when spending time with Bianca’s work. Because in one sense, it does follow that traditional narrative pattern: rise, climax, fall. As the speed of the rotation gradually increases, so does the pitch and volume of the grinding mechanical whir. I find myself drawn in close, pushed further away as the speed rises (and the perimeter splatter grows larger too). The SCOBY squelches a scummy circle on the floor like the stain left by a tea mug on a table you always hated.
The climactic moments come when the SCOBY is rotating at 8 miles an hour and feels like it is flipping back and forth in front of your eyes. I’m reminded of rotating kebabs and fruiting bracket funguses. Focus becomes impossible. It’s oddly hypnotic. Time stops or rushes on. The whirring sound is by now quite loud. Fleshy protuberances slap the floor. Then there is a sudden quiet as the motor stops and the rotating SCOBY slows – either to a proud and silent halt, or a sad, fleshy anticlimax, depending on your point of view. So far so phallocentric.
But there are a number of things going on with this choreography that extend or complicate such a reading. The first is that, after a short pause, the cycle repeats. The choreography is on a loop, which is theoretically endless (although the work is turned on each morning and off again at the end of the day). The fleshy SCOBY thereby follows not a human (male / sexual) narrative arc, but a relentless mechanised industrial rhythm, in which it has no agency. Automation, of course, was always a power grab. I’m reminded of Marx’s writing on train timetables and Derrida on the phallus as a kind of marionette. “And what if the phallus were bêtise itself?” Derrida asks in The Beast and the Sovereign (2002). Marx reminds us that new technologies of communication will never save us time; they will merely increase the urgency with which we are expected to respond.
There are a few other things going on here too. One is that over the course of the exhibition the SCOBY itself will change, drying out, becoming more leathery in texture. Another is that the SCOBY is quite fragile, and the faster it moves, the more quickly it will be torn apart. These slower rhythms chime with Jane Alison’s interest in other ways of modelling narrative, which can be doing several things at once. I’m also intrigued by the way the SCOBY itself moves, like the eddying waters of a river bend, at different speeds. Like any spinning object, the outside is moving faster than the inside (a basic fact that never fails to blow my mind). Moreover, various smaller parts, dangling down or poking out are also quivering and flopping in different directions and speeds. As the SCOBY rotates, it makes strange noises – gurgling, frothing, slapping little subsidiary micro-tails along the ground like some synthetic biology experiment to test the evolution of fractals. And these multiple movements will only continue to multiply as its form alters over the duration of the exhibition. This is not only a linear narrative of rise and fall but a proliferation of different rhythms across multiple scales at once.
Returning briefly to Hundertwasser, whose mould manifesto closes with the following statement:
“Only the engineers and scientists who are capable of living in mould and producing mould creatively will be the masters of tomorrow.”
For all his interest in the sinuous and organic, Hundertwasser reveals himself to be just like any other classical Modernist (male) architect – obsessed with domination and control, with being among “the masters of tomorrow”. What I love about Hlywa’s work by contrast, is the sustained subtle questioning of agential relations in the present: between living matter and the machine, between bacteria and yeast, but also – so obvious it’s only just occurred to me – between the artist and the material. For while most people manipulate SCOBY in the service of Kombucha or sourdough, it really feels like, for Hlywa, the SCOBY itself took control long ago. In this sense, SCOBY is maybe no longer a material for an art practice; maybe the practice has, for some time now, been operating in service to the material.
Mute Track has been extended until 12th April 2025 at St Chad’s Projects. It is then touring to Sismógrafo (Porto, Portugal from 7th June to 1st August) and Atoi Gallery (Bilbao, Basque Country).
www.biancahlywa.com
www.stchadsprojects.com
Postscript
After seeing Hlywa’s show, I went to the SOIL exhibition at Somerset House. There are some fab artists in there but swamped by the shiny science communications framing. All the interesting things that exhibition is trying to say – about decay and extractive capitalism and more-than-human entanglements and all that wonderful weird shit – are said by Hlywa with more precision, humour, sensitivity and a frankly heroic commitment to this long and squelchy SCOBY path. My suggestion would be that instead of spending an hour (and £18.50!!) going round SOIL, you spend an hour in a cold, damp, fungi-ridden garage instead.
