Brot: Baking the future

Austrian Pavilion at London Design Biennale
1-25 June 2023

A loaf or slice of bread may seem simple, but there is a curious complexity to the matter of bread. From geopolitical contexts to microbiological processes to multi- sensory experiences, bread and bread making can open up a whole new universe and pathway for transformative design practices. Together with the curator Thomas Geisler, the design duo Chmara.Rosinke addresses and explores the complexity of bread in this year’s Austrian pavilion at the London Design Biennale 2023.

Bread is eaten daily in Austria and many countries around the world. This staple food is often a main source of nutrition. In the Global North, bread is usually taken for granted and food scarcity is rarely addressed – its geopolitical implications, or the impact on the social stability of individual countries.

In recent years, there has been a cultural surge around bread. Bakeries that look like sleek boutiques are popping up in urban areas, and home bakers are handling the subject of sourdough with almost scientific meticulousness, sparking a private war against the heavily industrialised production of bread. The psychological stress of the global pandemic lockdowns has only intensified the incipient hype of bread baking.

What can we learn from this complex and fascinating subject area in relation to the discipline of design? Education about fermentation is one – it has cultural and historical origins in bread and beer. This process is more widespread in the medical technology and food industry than we may think. In the form of precision fermentation, mankind is making even greater use of the capabilities of microorganisms and will revolutionise food and material production in the coming years. But above all, bread as a product and its production is emotionally charged.

The focus of the Austria pavilion is on the sensory experience of bread. The colour, shape, tactile properties, smell, and taste of a freshly baked loaf are just as important as the sensuality of the process. Dough processing and bread baking are multi-sensory experiences that have therapeutic qualities and can achieve a whole new significance in our time as a cultural technique and source of inspiration in a transformative design practice.





Three speculative scenarios : 
Our society, culture and therein specifically architecture is based on the fact that mankind has started to bake bread and brew beer. The three speculative scenarios we show in the exhibition "BROT: Baking the future" are by no means dystopian visions of the future, but rather alternative realities that put our own existence and the use of bread in a different light.

1. Bakers and Gatherers
The "Bakers and Gatherers" are a technology-critical society who, in a world affected by climate change and pollution, see the only way to restore balance in the world, is in gathering the ingredients for their bread. They live in small societies of 10-15people, where each person plays an important role in the process of gathering as well as baking. They are also strict about not having too many children so as not to upset the balance. The breads are seasonal and are prepared with water harvested from birch trees and thus purified. Other ingredients are mealworms, which settle in the flour anyway, and other insects they find seasonally. The insects enrich the bread with proteins. Since the grain for the flour is also gathered wild, many alternative grains such as buckwheat have to be used in addition to classic cultivated grains such as wheat or spelt. The incorporation of seasonal wild herbs such as wild garlic or dandelion and the temperature differences in fermentation bring great seasonal differences to the breads. The bread is worked in a circle with a small cut. Exactly this shape corresponds to the shape of the baked breads. The bread is baked in a solar oven with stone storage, so that bread can also be produced on sun-free days. Electricity and other newer technologies are only used in exceptional cases in the form of solar cells and a specific multitool. This multi-tool serves as a helper in gathering, cutting, chopping, but it also includes a scanner to check the food for parasites, which have become a greaterthreat due to climate change. Electronic components are obtained through bartering with the Cyber Yeast Society and the Brotonists.

2. Brotonists
The "Brotonists" is a quiet, somewhat conservative baking society that has a cult-like reverence for bread and the process of baking. Once a week, everyone lines up in front of the main building where the ingredients rye, spelt, emmer, wheat, water and salt are distributed. Each person receives the same ingredients. Nevertheless, the society is strongly characterised by hierarchies. Due to the differences in the microbiome of the people baking, different breads are produced with the same ingredients. Even if this can be influenced by therapies, these people are less respected. Status symbols of this society are the oven and the sourdough shrine. A piece of furniture to precisely temper different sourdoughs and maintain the perfect humidity.

The reverence for the process of baking bread is evident in the beautifully crafted bread-making tools. Everything is crafted from silver fir, which has antibacterial properties, and hornbeam, which is also used to make gears for mills. The highest art form of this society is the scoring of the bread. Each loaf has its own pattern: cross, circle, curved line and the rye bread, of course, burst open. The art here lies in simplicity and perfection. Everyone is allowed to bake, but the ceremonial scoring is left to the head of the family. To relax, the members of this society listen to different bread crusts in their bread player or smell different mixtures of ingredients. The shape of the yeast is celebrated with vessels or ceremonial proofing baskets. Once a year, all bread doughs are put into the ceremonial "mother yeast" and fermented in it. The individual microorganisms and individual doughs partly mix in this process.

3. Cyber Yeast Society
The "Cyber Yeast Society" is a society of hedonistic loners. However, they meet once a day as a group in the "dough and sweat centre". Here they do fitness, while they work on dough, in the sense of multisensory experience and strive for physical and mental perfection. The time they spend changing clothes after training, showering and performing the prescribed sexual intercourse is enough to ferment and bake the enzymatically modified dough. Through regular genetic sequencing of their microbiome, an individual supplementary sourdough is mixed, enriched with various necessary microorganisms. The yeasts used in the sourdough are genetically modified and able to ferment microplastics from the environment into proteins. The wheat is Crispr modified to achieve the ideal texture and crust-to-crumb ratio, but also to provide vitamins and nutrients that are otherwise lacking in this bread diet. Depending on their social status, individuals in the society receive better or worse drugs in their sourdough, or may also earn extra green breads in some cases. Their standard bread is black and rectangular. They carry it in a bread box strapped to straps around their upper body. 



The installation is just the starting point of the materialization of a research project on bread and baking as a cultural and aesthetic practice.
We would like to grow our project over the next few years and create an interdisciplinary network that not only connects us through the fungi and microorganisms that live in symbiosis with us and help us make bread, but also provides potential for interdisciplinary work on the complex problems of our time in the context of ecologically responsible food security. 

We'd very much like to thank all supporters and partners of this project.

Curator: Thomas Geisler
(Design Campus, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden)

Main sponsor:
Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport, Republic of Austria

Support/Cooperation:
Austrian Cultural Forum, London
German Design Council
Goethe Institute, London
Design Campus, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
Oxford - UdK Berlin - Seedfunding for Creative Collaborations

Photo and film: Markus Zahradnik
Making of photo: Kuba Dabrowski
Photo no 1, 2: Taran Wilkhu
3D print: Tim Schütze
Sound: Mariano Rosales
Sculpture: Marek Elsner
General support : Marcus Naumann, Michal Pecko

“The Bread-Paper” ( project newspaper)
“The “Bread-Paper” has been initiated as part of the exhibition “BROT: baking the future”. This first issue includes interviews with key players from a broad range of different fields of knowledge, such as microbiology, psychology, agriculture, art, the bread-making industry, and geography. The objective of the “Bread-Paper” is to reveal the complexity of bread and bread-making. However, the “Bread-Paper” by no means lays claim to being complete; instead, it aims to present ongoing explorations of the intricacy of bread worlds.”

Editorial: Maciej Chmara, Dr. Hannah Varga, Anna Rosinke
Graphic design: Ortner etc.
Interviews with: Lisa Kappel, Helmut Gragger, Klara Czerniewska-Andryszczyk, Josef Weghaupt, Karl de Smedt, Friedrich Longin, Regine Schönlechner, Heinrich Grausgruber, Corinne Mynatt, Sang-hyeok Lee, Jessica Barnes, Charles Spence, Lexie Smith, Rob Dunn, Sudeep Agarwala

OFIS collection

A new collection dubbed OFIS – an acronym for office for important stuff (name of our Berlin studio) that came to life in times of Covid lockdown. For OFIS, we restricted ourselves to one size of square timber and plank and a very small palette of colours that have been reoccurring in our work over the past years. The geometry of the objects, defined by their proportions and spacial reduction to archetypal shapes, equally mark a return to earlier works of our studio. The OFIS collection is comprised of an office chair, a kneeling stool, a desk, a floor lamp and a chaise-longue.

Year: 2020
To order OFIS collection furniture pieces contact us via email 

Living a good life with bread 

// “On the Search for Deliciousness – Baking Europe”, Professor Charles Spence
// “Making and breaking bread during the pandemic – Baking Europe”, Professor Charles Spence
// “What is bread? – An attempt”, Maciej Chmara
// “I am standing in a grove of trees” Sudeep Agarwala
// “Breadcrumbs – an anthology of Polish lyrical poetry with the motif of bread”, Klara Czerniewska-Andryszczyk
// “Bread-interview with Giulia”, Maciej Chmara

“Living a good life with bread” is a research project developed within the framework of “Oxford x UdK Berlin. Seedfunding for Creative Collaborations”.

Project partners: Prof. Charles Spence (Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford), Maciej Chmara (Institut für Produkt- und Prozessgestaltung, UdK Berlin) Drawings: Ania Rosinke

“What is bread? – An attempt”

Text: Maciej Chmara

When you have a loaf of bread in front of you, it is obvious it is bread. But trying to define what bread actually is isn’t that easy.

Wikipedia says more or less the following: Bread is a traditional food baked from a dough made from ground grain (flour), water, a leavening agent and usually other ingredients. Bread is a staple food. So far so good. In the definition of its components, the article refers to the toasted aromas of the crust, which result from the Maillard reaction. This description is so broad that it actually applies to the majority of breads, but excludes many simple breads, such as matzoh, several Arabic and Indian flatbreads, and steamed buns. On the other hand, however, it includes sweet breads, which I personally would tend to classify as cakes. Although pain au chocolat has the word “pain”, bread, in its name, it is disputable whether it really is bread.

In May 2022, we were sitting in front of a couple of slices of bread at the Running Duck restaurant in Oxford , having a discussion with other bread enthusiasts. Two Brits, Charles Spence, professor of psychology, who thought, listened and rather kept to himself, his brother Simon, who runs the restaurant, baked the bread and has a profound knowledge of culinary history, an Italian friend, Simone, who, according to himself, never finished his PhD in psychology at Oxford because he invested too much time in baking bread, and two Austrian-influenced Poles, Ania Rosinke and myself, Maciej Chmara. We debated what bread really is and argued about which country bakes the best bread – usually the answer was the country of birth of the speaker. Charles' brother Simon had a very clear idea of what constitutes bread: gluten and yeasts (whether industrial or natural yeasts in the form of sourdough); to him, gluten-free bread clearly is no bread. The Italian colleague included banana bread, pain au chocolat, as well as Italian sweet pastries like pandoro. At this point, a heated discussion arose about where bread ends and cake begins. Is it the yeast? Then what about matzoh, soda breads or other yeast-free breads? It can't be the added sugar either, as many breads use sugar or malt to feed the yeasts – or is there a quantity limit?

I myself enthusiastically defended the exclusion of sweet breads from the term bread and the inclusion of gluten-free breads. I have often baked the latter for my father and find them pretty wholesome, when prepared properly. / I have often baked the latter for my father and rather enjoyed the taste and texture, when they were well-made.

The day ended with a few bottles of another fermented product and we still had no clear answer to the question of what bread actually is.

In the weeks that followed, I asked many people this question and received very different answers; many of them were connected to memories and full of emotion. I finally arrived at a definition that tries to explain bread on a different level, and not only by its ingredients per se.

Bread is a staple food, a base that, in the vast majority of cases, is not eaten plain. To test it, a slice of fresh bread might be enjoyed plain or with olive oil and salt or butter, but in general bread is used to spread, coat or dip in pastes or sauces. Bread is, to a certain degree, incomplete without other foods, like rice or pasta, and aches to be completed. For sweet breads, I like the Austrian name of „Mehlspeisen“ (flour dish), and I would tend to exclude them from the definition of bread, as they stand apart, are usually enjoyed without addition and are a complete dish on their own (usually as a dessert or for breakfast).

Bread is parted, whether by tearing, breaking or cutting, and it’s essential part is not the crust – there also are non-crusty breads – but the crumb, which, whether baked or steamed, is different from the dense consistency of pasta even in the case of heavy dark breads.

This definition, like many others, is certainly contestable: you might  for instance ask whether steamed buns really are bread, which complicates the whole thing: it would be much simpler to restrict my definition to baking. It is merely an attempt, and I am open to suggestions.

“I am standing in a grove of trees”

Text: Sudeep Agarwala

I AM STANDING IN A GROVE OF TREES in northeast India. Everything around me is absurdly green. In fact, I think it must be the greenest place I’ve ever been.

This land is fed by the Brahmaputra River, which comes all the way from Mount Kailash just north of Nepal. It sweeps through the Himalayas on the Tibetan side of the range, where it is known as the Yarlung Tsangpo. As it is about to hit the disputed border between China and India, it makes a sharp kink and floods into Arunachal Pradesh, down through Assam, only to run into its twin sister, the Ganges, in Golden Bengal. Here, the two rivers mix and form the fertile delta that is Bangladesh before passing on into the Indian Ocean.

My ancestors are from this land and—though my parents raised me far away, in America—I weirdly identify with it. The streets here evoke just enough of my summers spent traveling in Kolkata to make things feel familiar. I recognize the vast paddies of rice and fields of jute, the fruit sold on the streets, the color of the soil, even the smell of the cities. But the slight differences that arise start to make the valley seem uncanny. I hear people speaking Asamiya, which is close enough to Bengali that I feel like I should be able to understand it, but distinct enough that I can’t quite make out what is going on. Farther outside the big towns, I hear Sylheti, Chittagonian, even Rohingya being spoken, and I am out of my depth.

I see the occasional temple or vermillion-smeared roadside shrine, all dedicated to local gods I am hearing about for the first time. But soon, the Gods change more fundamentally. I reach a part of India where almost all men wear skullcaps on the road, where muezzins climb slender minarets and announce Fajr at first light. I constantly catch myself bringing my hands together mid-namaskar and pivoting to a clumsy salaam instead. I make do, but only just. In my defense, I am massively jet-lagged, and have been sleeping badly.

I am here on a work trip, inspecting agarwood — trees used for perfume and incense — but this mission seems preordained by older forces. Shortly after the partition of India in 1947, my Hindu grandfather changed our last name from Poddar to the more cosmopolitan Agarwala, rinsing us of our provincial Bengali heritage and evoking long travels to Rajasthan and the Punjab. To scholars of the Mahabharata, this new last name conjures images of King Agrasen and the Solar Dynasty. To everyone else, I am a mere merchant — Agarwala is literally, a peddler (“wala”) of incense (“agar-batti”).


Names portend everything, it seems. For the last 15 years, I have studied yeast biology and genetics, and now I engineer that yeast toward the production of rare flavors and fragrances that are slowly disappearing from the world. Who better to study the world’s most fragrant trees than a yeast-loving incense peddler? Somehow I have walked into a trap set by my family two generations ago.

My hosts collect me at Guwahati and divine within minutes that I am a Bengali from America. The rules of hospitality dictate that I must be made comfortable, and if there is one truth that is self-evident and obvious to anyone in India, it is that Bengalis love fish and must have it for dinner. The driver makes an urgent phone call to the house. I picture a clamor in the kitchen, a race to the bazaar, and try to object, but my kind hosts won’t hear a word of it. I give up, slowly zoning out for our four-hour journey east from Guwahati to the district of Hojai, picturing its sacred trees.

Before I know it, I’m out on the grove, leaves crunching underfoot. The air is still and hot, I am comically sweaty, and my handkerchief has long since soaked to the point where it only smears the gathering beads of moisture from my forehead across my face. It is hard, but I must focus. These trees have been planted and carefully manicured so that after a few years of cultivation, they can be treated with a controlled fungal infection, which rots the wood and lends it its trademark scent. The guide takes me to a bandaged tree and gently unwraps it: it has undergone an infection over the past few months. He picks up some of the agarwood that has turned darker — it is still hard, but comes off the tree with his pocketknife. He rubs it between his palms to release some of the fragrance and lets me smell. It is musty — earthy. It smells of compost more than anything else, but there’s a slight sharpness that seems hauntingly familiar.

As we wander the property, the guide tells me this tree is the only wood that was allowed to be taken from the Garden of Eden, that Adam and Eve wrapped themselves in its bark during their flight from Paradise. In the Hebrew Bible, Balaam uses this same tree to describe the beauty of the encampments of Israel — the tree that was planted by God Himself. The Psalms describe the coming Messiah as being anointed in the fragrance of the wood’s oil. The Prophet Mohammed later on fell in love with the same smell. To this day, its fragrance is mixed with water from the Zamzam well and is used to wash the Kaaba twice a year at the center al-Masjid al-Haram, Mecca, the holiest place in all of Islam. This scent is a conduit of revelation.

Later that afternoon, dozing in a wicker chair in an office next to a processing facility, I am presented with a distilled placed on the desk in front of me, and the facility director studies it closely to make sure the color is exactly right. He is concerned about changes to the process and what this may mean to the oil. He opens one vial and — as it’s too valuable to hand it over — wafts it towards me.

This is the fragrance of memory, my own and everyone else’s. This is the smell we have loved for thousands of years.

So this is the scent of History and Myth, of God and His Prophets. It is surprisingly personal and familiar — a faint memory from the other side of the mirror, somewhere in the land that feeds off the Ganges. I am young, six perhaps, on vacation in India with my parents. My cousins and I sneak into a sparse, tidy room that belongs to the house matriarch, the woman who raised everyone who grew up here, some of whom, like my father, moved away to start new lives in the United States. The room is small with a few chests, an almirah made of dark wood, and a small shrine to a God whose name I do not know. I am not supposed to be here, and my young heart is pounding. In that moment, a lasting association is built: the faint scent that hangs in the air of that private room turns out to be endlessly intoxicating.

It is here now, present in front of me, as I sit groggy in wicker furniture in a processing facility. This is the fragrance of memory, my own and everyone else’s. This is the smell we have loved for thousands of years, that has beguiled the generations, the people I know and love, my grandmother. The conspiracy initiated by my grandfather 70 years ago, perpetuated by scents in childhood and my studies in adulthood, has brought me to this strange, familiar grove, and I start to understand why now: I have to recreate this perfume in yeast.

This new mission leads me to a bigger question: will the scent I create in yeast be real?

I anxiously lay out cake forks and serviettes, and try to explain the problem I’m facing to my guest that afternoon.

An ancient story comes in handy. Theseus sailed to Crete with his army to slay the Minotaur and then sailed back to unite Attica under Athens. He was the hero of the ancient city-state, and for generations afterwards his ship was preserved by its citizens as a symbol of their heritage. So precious was this memory that every time a plank was slightly rotten-through or broken, it was carefully renovated. Centuries passed until all memory of the original vessel had faded. Plank by plank, nail by nail, the entire ship had been replaced by newer, stronger materials, again and again. This raises the question: if every single part of the ship has been replaced, is it still the same ship Theseus sailed to Crete?

There is a silence at the table, and I glance nervously at my guest, Ganesh himself, the god who has the body of a boy and the head of an elephant. I rarely have a deity sitting at my kitchen table for a meal, but in this instance, I am facing a historic conundrum and need all the help I can get. We have a friendly argument over who should be taking notes and decide that we both should: I have my fountain pen and steno pad, my guest sits tusk in hand among his sheaths of birch bark; we share a pot of ink.

He moves to speak, but I interrupt him. “Let me be glib,” I say. “I can solve this paradox by saying that there was no Ship of Theseus to begin with. As he travelled to Crete and back, the ship was constantly changing. It maintained its core property of constant change. The ship never was a stable entity in the first place. Either this Thing we call the Ship of Theseus has always been the Ship of Theseus, or it never was.”

Divinity aside, he looks up from his scattered sheaths of birch, dubious.

I explain to him where I stand now. That, if things go well and all the pieces align, I could create a new living organism that will create the same molecules that lend the trees in Assam its awesome fragrance. I am replacing the rotten wood that is distilled into perfume with yeast strains that can produce the same compounds.

I feel compelled to explain.

“I will take a sample of this amber liquid from the processing plant I dozed off in, and will identify the exact molecules that produce its fragrance. I will design snippets of DNA with encoded proteins that are capable of making this molecule. I will synthesize the DNA and introduce it into a fungal species — a yeast that we have exquisite experience and knowledge of how to manipulate. Using different sugars and growth conditions, I can then grow this new yeast organism that I have created by the liter, by the thousands of liters, in gleaming steel fermentation vessels. It will be the same as the perfume from the rotten wood, to the molecule, practically.”

“This could mean that someday we wouldn’t need to mow down these splendid groves to attain their precious fragrance. What’s more, we could make sure that this fragrance will be fixed for the rest of humanity for all time. We could divorce this oil from its various plant species, growth conditions, and processing technologies. We could democratize it so it descends from its station among prophets and Messiahs, and becomes available for everyone to know and love.”

Perhaps I have been talking too much. I look up to see the last of the sweets gracefully plucked by the elegant trunk. I know there’s a flip side here, and I must explain: the power of this process is one of the reasons I’ve not been sleeping. I worry that I may end up taking away something important and foundational from a scent that has been dear to the world throughout history.

“I know that it may all be fiction. It’s impossible to say whether the plant mentioned in the Bible is the same one that is written about in the Vedas, the same one so beloved by the Prophet Mohammed.

Who knows how that all relates to the oil in my grandmother’s room, or the ampoules on the production facility I traveled to? These experiences and these memories, both historical and mythological are superimposed on each other in a way that weighs on us.”

Perhaps I should stop myself there. Is it rude to tell my guest what a burden immortality is?

I hesitate to remind him of his own story: how he was created as a boy with a human head by his mother. How he was instructed to stand guard over her and protect her while she was bathing in a grove. How Shiva approached the two of them, and how, as a boy, he valiantly, but in vain, fended off the powerful god. How he incurred the wrath of the god and was beheaded by his trident, killed instantly. How his mother, grief-stricken and enraged, threatened to burn down all of Creation unless her beloved boy were brought back to life. How she demanded that he should be made immortal and worshipped as a god. How Shiva was chastened and feared her, immediately sending out his servants to bring the head of the first creature lying dead with its head facing north. How they returned with the head of the elephant demon Gajasura, whom Shiva had defeated in battle. How he was revived and attained immortality only after the gods spliced the elephant head onto the body of the boy. That this is how he, in his immortal form, sitting at my kitchen table, enjoying the final scraps of tea, came to be unchanging and eternal.

The break in the conversation grows longer. I remind myself that in the annals of Sanskrit literature, my elephant-headed guest is also known as Swaroop, the Lover of Beauty. We stare at each other silently, deep in thought.

The sun is setting on our garrulous Sunday afternoon adda. It’s almost dinnertime and my guest makes a polite excuse and leaves. I need to clean up the mess on the kitchen table. The fruit I had cut in preparation for this meeting has long since browned in the summer heat. All around the house the fresh-picked flowers I placed as offering and decoration have withered and will have to be swept up. Looking around the room, there are no more elegant plumes of smoke streaming upward from the incense that I burned to welcome him into my home. Now, in the lengthening shadows, there are only tidy piles of ash scattered around the table and floor. Their fragrance is fading away.

this article initially appeared at Growbyginkgo.com