SOYA C(O)U(L)TURE can be found as a simple kitchen in the middle of the Post City’s Fashion District: The Indonesian female art collective XXLab works on a program to create fashion while dealing with environmental problems. In countries and cities with high soya consumption the wastewater from tofu and tempeh production is problematic for the environment. XXLab develops simple, cheap, and eco-friendly processes to turn it into useable biomaterials—bio-fuel, fertilizers, and leather-like materials. A simple kitchen is used as a laboratory to transform the wastewater into these biomaterials, and as an atelier to design clothes, accessories, and shoes. But their knowledge has to be spread: in their workshops XXLab enables citizens to combine basic kitchen equipment with free technology and open source software in order to upcycle everyday wastewater.
The SOYA C(O)U(L)TURE project is the winner of this year’s Prix Ars Electronica [the next idea] voestalpine art and technology grant 2015, a program within the framework of the Ars Electronica Residency Network.