RIce Brewing SIsters CLub

Rice Brewing Sisters Club (RBSC) is a collective of sisters who works with “social fermentation” as an artistic form. We think of fermentation as not only a biochemical transformation but also an open-ended process that traverses visual art, performance, cooking, creative writing, oral history, ecological thinking, and auntie wisdoms. Also by bringing in the element of “social” in various forms, we experiment with ways to connect the sensorial with the relational. While operating on a yearly membership, we aim to collaborate beyond the boundaries of a collective. This is done by hosting open-ended platforms, where rice eaters from many regions, dwellers of the past, present, and future, and other various human and non-human beings can meet and create synergistic networks.
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Miinju (2018)
Miinju is an ancient rice wine which uses human saliva as a fermentation starter. It was traditionally brewed with saliva of a virginal girl - she would chew rice grains and spit into the container, to be used for ritualistic purposes. Hinging on this story, we adapted the recipe in Ansan - the city with a high percentage of immigrant population - and asked the passersby to chew the cooked rice and spit it out. The rice wine that was eventually brewed out of such rice was served as a welcome drink at the opening of the exhibition Ring Ring Belt (2018, Seoul and Gyeonggi). 

Chew Chew Spit Spit
Residency, Workshops, Tapui Research
Date/Time: August 4, 2019/ 4PM-6PM
Location: HUB: Make Lab, Manila, Philippines
What does it mean to chew something and spit it out? This workshop takes the act of chewing and spitting as a metaphor of actions and cultural practices that involve changes throughout time, (unconscious) transformation, customs of eating and drinking, rituals, and vomiting [!]. Here, the participants create a pool-full mixture of chewed and spit things that are mixed with rice, yeast, selected local fruits, and water. Accompanied by the series of writing and bodily activities, they collectively step on the mixture to squeeze the chunks out and initiate the fermentation process.

A Jeepney Ride
Research, Ride, Workshop, Drinks & Food Sharing

Date: Sunday August 18th, 2019
Departure & Arrival Points:
5PM_Escolta Street [in front of 98B] → 6PM_Makati [Goto Lechon Know]
This workshop starts off by taking jeepney as a metaphor of not only the impressions we have
collected during our month-long stay in Manila but also the ways we work and create together.
Creatively fueled by what we have for what we don’t have, and not always so functional but
somehow functional in the end, jeepney is also a platform for actions and collaboration - that knits closely with our search for imaginative modes of “social fermentation.” The workshop invites a number of collectives, based throughout Manila and Los Banos, into a jeepney that travels through metro Manila. Each collective leads a 15-minute-session which interprets jeepney as a metaphor, while sharing the fermented drink made during the Chew Chew Spit Spit workshop.

​Bau Tanah; Mari Makan!
Residency, Workshop
​Workshop Date: October 15, 2019/ 3PM-5PM
Workshop Site: Jatiwangi Art Factory, Indonesia
Through the residency at Indonesia Contemporary Ceramics Biennale, RBSC hosted a social experiment of soil as an expression and exploration of ecological commoning, understanding, and togetherness. As a way of tracing land’s relationship to culture and life, participants were invited to touch, feel, smell, and partake in the making of various soil composition which responds to the discourse of our surrounding environment, community and the reclamation of our land.

*”Bau Tanah; Mari Makan!” means “food for the soil.”
**The compost recipes were made using the knowledge shared to RBSC by farmers in Kampung Wates: Bpk Diding Junaedi, Maman Sudirman and Kelompok Wanita Tani.

FermentCult
Group Exhibition Ecological Sense (Nam June Paik Art Center, Yongin, July 5 - September 22, 2019) 
Workshops: DIY NurukCapsule, Ferment Fiction, Jjal-pickers Social Fermentation LAB 
FermentCult is a project to rethink the fermentation culture in the age of the Anthropocene and imagine fermentation as alternative ways of living and interacting with non-human beings. Fermentation refers to a process through which organic materials change their properties through microbiome of yeast; when interpreted metaphorically, however, it can also denote trials and errors, unpredictability, organic changes, and the slow, porous temporality. Conceived under under the slogan “fermentation is the age-old future,” Fermentcult imagines a scenario in which humans relinquish their dominating presence on Earth and learns to
live with (and within) non-human beings. In addition to the installation, the work includes three
workshops each led by a microbiologist, an ecological novelist, and a media theorist.

click here to see the exhibition catalogue for ecological sense!
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