The exhibition Smells Like Kin opened at LABoral Centro de Arte on November 7, 2025, inviting visitors into a sensory exploration of fermentation.

Every day, we digest live microbial cultures—cheese, dough, yoghurt, cider—in the form of liquids and fermented foods.

Smells Like Kin is the result of artistic research into these traditional and laboratory fermentation practices, both inside and outside Asturias. The exhibition presents a sensory experience around the culture of fermentation that invites visitors to smell, touch, or listen to the elements present in the gallery.

The floor sculptures show the soundscapes collected by the artists: the vibration of pressing apples for cider, the decomposition of matter recorded with hydrophones, and narratives of people who engage in fermentation in Asturias, whether as daily work, festive ritual, or scientific experiment.

In the space, aromas move and settle, activating memories and bodily knowledge. The suspended silicone membranes—moulded on the concrete floor of LABoral—evoke the scoby, a living organism that ferments, unites and transforms.

Smells Like Kin proposes fermentation as a way of thinking and feeling the connection with the living, an essay on expanded relationships: bonds based on shared practices, mutual transformations and interspecies relationships, questioning inherited ideas of belonging beyond the blood family.

Artists: Dr. Lea Luka Sikau y Denisa Půbalová
Scientist: Felipe Lombó

Originaly published at LABoral Centro de Arte.