Still: Microbiome Restaurant: Plural Tastings - POLYMORF

Microbiome Restaurant, the daring new immersive extravaganza served up by Dutch outfit POLYMORF, is a celebration of the trillions of micro-organisms that inhabit our guts, our mouths and our bottoms. They live on our skin, in our hair, or indeed on any other body part you care to mention. 

Eschewing the Western notion of Cartesian dualism, these beautiful microscopic communities profoundly shape not only our physical health, but also our emotions, and even the decisions we regard as the products of rational thought, or as emanations of our intellect.

Presented in collaboration with key academics, such as Anja Lok from Amsterdam UMC and the University of Pennsylvania’s Elisa Caffrey, the three-part Microbiome Restaurant experience invites visitors to explore these invisible worlds on their own bodies through boundary-pushing gastronomic encounters.

Plural Tastings invites partakers to share a meal with the microbes living on their skin. Haute Cuisine for the Rectum nourishes the gut microbiome with rectal snacks tailored to the “palate” of the lucky participant’s intestinal flora. And Living Memories, which will premiere after IDFA, takes the form of a cocktail bar for the brain.

“These performances are speculative in form, yet grounded in scientific research,” read the notes for the installation. “They offer a visceral encounter [in which] biological reality challenges long-held assumptions about human autonomy and reason—assumptions deeply embedded in Western, liberal, and colonial thought.”

For POLYMORF’s Marcel van Brakel, the project is of profound philosophical importance. 

“If we want to change the world, we have to get a step away from this human-centric position and these human-centric politics that is only concerned with our human welfare,” he tells SEE NL. 

“And we have to move towards more symbiotic, more global, thinking about these issues. Otherwise, we're kind of doomed. I don't see we will survive if we don't make that shift. But to make that shift, you must first challenge your own belief of being something else or something superior to the other life forms. That's why we focus on these ‘tiniest of the tiniest’ that are equally important within our lived experience.”

For obvious ethical reasons, direct “full performance” participants are anonymised as the dining event is in great part experienced by a wider audience. “You will be suited up with a suit that makes you anonymous, that exposes your ‘first mouth’ and your ‘second mouth.’ The five-dish dinner is designed as an audio experience, with food snacks fed both orally and rectally, throughout the experience.” The dishes are designed to help microbes flourish by upping the prebiotic and probiotic ante.

“With the intake procedure, because we worked together with medical professionals to enable ethical entry, people know what they are saying yes to,” van Brakel underlines the duty of care he and colleagues observe in presenting the installation. The general DocLab audience can observe the anonymised process in an exhibition in Amsterdam’s Droog venue. 

Van Brakel further bemoans our species’ inability to truly comprehend the needs of our bodies, these complex vehicles that carry us through our lives. “Since we understand that microbes and viruses can make us ill, we became very overprotective of the body. We want to seal it off. But it is an illusion to seal it off. It’s not designed to be sealed off, because the body itself is designed to invite these microbes and viruses in,” he tells SEE NL.

“When you are born, the first thing that you inhale is the faeces of your mother, and this implants the first microbial layers that will be beneficial for the rest of your life,” he adds.

“This idea of what is dirty, what is clean, the body that needs to be sealed off - that kind of stuff we want to challenge within the experience. That's why we also kept the rectal part in.”

“Understanding ourselves as ecosystems (as entities whose boundaries are porous, whose intelligence is distributed, whose well-being is inseparable from the health of the ecologies within and around us) opens a different kind of future,” he adds in his notes for the project. “One that’s designed not around the myth of the isolated individual, but around the biological reality of mutual dependence.”

Find out more about IDFA here.

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*Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund
**Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund and Production Incentive