Culture

Alex May developed Culture with Anna Dumitriu as one of the two main works he made for the wider Fermenting Futures project. The installation uses breadcrumb-encrusted architectural models, tiny screens, light, and soil-like ground to imagine culture itself as something shaped by fermentation. Drawing on research in which a non-fermenting Pichia pastoris yeast was given the ability to make bread rise, the work asks whether human settlement has always been less human-directed than we like to believe.

The small houses read like containers for accumulated life, but the yeast at the centre of the project shifts authorship away from the purely human. Culture extends May’s interest in memory by treating architecture as a record of cohabitation, where domestic space, microbial agency, and technological intervention are all involved in deciding what a civilisation keeps.

Additional notes

• Culture was developed with Anna Dumitriu within the broader Fermenting Futures project in collaboration with researchers at the Institute of Microbiology and Microbial Biotechnology, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna.
• The work was shown in the Fermenting Futures exhibition at Kunstlerhaus Wien, Vienna, in March 2022.
• It was later exhibited in Fungi: In Art and Science at the Nobel Prize Museum, Stockholm, from September 2023 to January 2024.
• Culture is also included in INVISIBLES. La vie cachee des microbes at Musee De La Main, Lausanne, which opened in June 2024 and continues into 2026.
• Together with Fermenting Futures, the installation reflects on how biotechnology can be understood through domestic, social, and architectural forms rather than through laboratory display alone.