Festival der Regionen, Braunau am Inn, Austria, 2025
Artistic Research project / culinary happening / Speculative Fermentation
Exotische Provinz — Frühschoppen was an artistic research project developed for Festival der Regionen 2025 in Braunau am Inn. Conceived as a culinary happening, social laboratory, and festive experiment in speculative fermentation, the project explored how food, taste, rural ritual, and collective gathering can produce situated imaginaries of cultural transformation.
The project transformed the Austrian Frühschoppen — a late-morning gathering around music, beer, food, and conviviality — into a glocal scene of future-making. Sauerkraut seriousness met tropical grooves. Local hops entered into dialogue with taste memories of the Global South. The food truck became a kitchen-laboratory; the meal became dramaturgy; the village gathering became a speculative device.
As part of my broader research into Situated Futures and the social life of imagined futures, the project approached the future not as an abstract projection, but as something cooked, brewed, tasted, performed, and negotiated among people.
Unfolding over several days, the programme combined workshops, conversations, absurd gastronomy, musical experimentation, and participatory culinary actions, including Berry Pleased to Eat You! and Deep-Fried Utopia: The Future is Fluffy. It culminated in a collective Frühschoppen with live Austro-Caribbean music and the premiere of Loco Loco, an exotic beer developed in collaboration with Privatbrauerei Pfesch.
AI-generated images and prompt-based visual experiments were used throughout the project to imagine fictional food futures, visual identities, and speculative atmospheres around fermentation, rural festivity, and glocal desire.
Developed within the long-term performative language of gula gula, the project treated food as dramaturgy, appetite as critique, and fermentation as a public form of imagination.
Invited artists, chefs, musicians, and collaborators included María Fernanda Ariza, Eva Fernbach, Sarah Stöffl, and Tanzlmusi Tropicale, directed by Daniel Bierdümpfl, with Iradi Luna, Martina Fuchsberger, Voland Székely, and Felix Brandauer.