Artist duo Suzanne Bernhardt and Philipp Kolmann investigate the flavors of the earth, inviting us to engage through our senses with our environment.
Suzanne Bernhardt is an artist and researcher working with edible storytelling, tracing the routes and roots of foods. Her multidisciplinary practice starts at a specific location, following the journey of products back to their origins, discovering the transformations and connections that emerge along the way. By entering into dialogue with people, places, and understanding the ways they function, she questions our relationship with the entire production chain, from the land and products to our everyday environment. In this way, fieldwork, material try-outs, and experiments, as well as people’s memories and stories, form the basis for her work, which can be experienced by joining a dinner, visiting a pop-up bar, tasting a carefully crafted cocktail, or through film and photographs.
Philipp Kolmann is an Austrian chef, dairy farmer, and designer. He is interested in food-related topics, such as fermentation and the microbiological changes that products undergo throughout history. By researching and working with microbes, he creates different understandings about our direct environment through food, smell, and taste. With his work, he aims to expand our experiences of smells and tastes in order to be recognized as valuable, bodily and local cultural data. By collecting, archiving, and translating sensorial experiences from others as well as his own, he processes them into new works that take shape in installations and participatory workshops, as well as in the forms of soaps, essential oils, and scents.
The duo has been working together for the last four years. Previous site-specific projects include: Shelving Seasons at Ornamenta in Germany’s Black Forest in the summer of 2024, where they presented an interactive installation that offered an encounter with the seasons through brewed and distilled flavors of the Northern Black Forest, reflecting upon moments of scarcity and abundance during harvest; Riet/Land at Grasland Ezinge in collaboration with Sign project space (Groningen, 2024), where they researched traditional food production techniques and worked with reeds and local grasses from the Ezinge area, creating a Grass bar with drinks, snacks, and accessories made with grass; and several interactive workshops and tasting sessions hosted at the Food Art Film Festival and Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht during their year-long residency, among others.
