By Jennifer Irving
When most people hear the word “community” in relation to an exhibition, they think about the surrounding people and places. They think of their neighbors, the spaces around them — those they see every day. But what if the community existed at a microscopic level? In their spring artist-in-residence show at the Visual Arts Center, Las Nietas de Nonó did just that with SCOBYs — the symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast used to make kombucha.
During the past 10 years, Afro-Boricua sibling duo Las Nietas de Nonó has evolved a creative process that evokes ancestral and communal memory through personal archives of the everyday. Their practice incorporates performance, found objects, organic materials, ecology, fiction, video and installation. The specific character of places and the people who occupy them are critical to their process.
Also known as the “mother,” a SCOBY is its own functioning community, a cellulose mat that reproduces a new “baby” SCOBY after each batch of fresh tea is fermented to make kombucha. Las Nietas de Nonó — sisters Lydela and Michel Nonó — have been working with the microorganism since 2016, and they enlisted the Austin kombucha community to provide them with enough SCOBYs for their solo show at the Visual Arts Center during the spring. In the exhibition, “the SCOBY is made three-dimensional. Their shape references a Taíno cemí that the siblings encountered as children, symbolizing community persistence through ancient and modern times.”
Arriving in 32-gallon trash cans, the raw SCOBYs are incredibly thick — often a few feet wide in diameter, depending on the container they were in during production. Preparators at the Visual Arts Center would sort the SCOBYs, washing them, wringing them out and laying them across tables in front of fans to dry. After several weeks of lying flat, the once-living SCOBY would become a dark brown but semi-transparent, leather-like material that could be cut, sewn and manipulated into almost any shape.
Las Nietas de Nonó used the dried SCOBYs in a multitude of ways, creating quilt-like shapes, covering objects in a hodge-podge fashion or even projecting multicolored lights onto a large piece with rough edges. Referencing images of their childhood, including their neighborhood basketball courts, the installation created in the Vaulted Gallery encompassed many aspects of community, including the microcosm of the SCOBY itself.