Tasting Tendrils
Group exhibition and public programme
Coordinated by Mathias Mu & Mixlab
14 – 17 May 2026
Part of the Antwerp (Academy) Art Weekend
Friday 15 May - 12:00-21:00
A public gathering featuring performative culinary interventions, artist talks and conversations
Tasting Tendrils uses the dining’s room table as a familiar entry point into what can seem like a more intimidating sphere to approach: the Academy’s Mixlab. Home to humming CNC-machines and 3D printers, spaces for digital fabrication alike might commonly evoke ideas of detached automation, extreme precision, expert-only software systems, or regimes of sterility and control. Mathias Mu, artistic researcher at the Academy, sought to loosen this aura and introduce some much-needed warmth into how these spaces are commonly perceived. The notion of food (which, at first, might seem to belong elsewhere than besides a computer) became a starting point through its association with sociability and forms of sharing. Tasting Tendrils tables the outcome.
Throughout the year, Mixlab hosted seven artists’ residencies exploring how digital fabrication techniques might fold novelty into their practices. Working with food as both medium and metaphor, the resident artists found themselves in messy material encounters with machines: printed plates, edible sculptures, moulds of many kinds, and ongoing material negotiations. Bringing these outcomes into view, Tasting Tendrils sets out on softer, stickier, edible impressions of technological fabrication. Since food ties bodies and worlds together, then making with machines may do so as well.
The exhibition brings together a series of projects developed through residencies, including:
- Justine Grillet: On the Puppet and What Spills
A staged puppet-cake performance, and everyone can share a slice of its sacrifice. - Nina-Joy Thielemans: Manuport: Basic Forms
Basic harbour forms from the polluted soils and fertile slips of Antwerp’s Manuport. - Nik Naudts: Home Cooking
Pressed words into pasta before they land in your stomach like a brick. - Ivania Carpio: Tension-finished receptacles
Casted glass tabletop “blobjects”, trays and vessels for a cherry and its stone. - Julia Tröscher: Saltz Kuh
A clay 3D printed salt cow, a layered figure from the mineral memory of the salt mines of Hallstatt, Austria. - Daan Peeters & Mathias Mu: Kalokagathia
Distorted digital archaeological archives, re-assembling pottery into dysfunctional object-collage ornaments.
As part of his artistic research project, Mathias Mu introduces Neo Seer: Vessels Unhold & Ewers in Tender.
The presentation includes collaborations with Anna Laganovska (Co-Curation), Saskia Smith (Texts), Vlad Boyko (Graphic Design & Publication), Arno Fleerackers (Fabrics), Ivania Carpio (Scenography), Marnix Van Soom (Neo Seer), Quinten de Cuyper (Sound & Speakers), Jouke Verlinden & Augmented Crafting Lab (UAntwerpen), and Pieter Van Der Donckt (Tech-connoisseur).
And contributions by Eline De Clercq and Luca Conte
FRIDAY 15 MAY: PUBLIC PROGRAMME
The public programme will present culinary interventions by Nik Naudts and Justine Grillet alongside two artist talks by Yemo Park & Luca Conte:
- 13:00-15:00 - Culinary Intervention by Nik Naudts: Home Cooking
- 16:00 -17:00 - Artist Talk by Luca Conte: Solve et Coagula - [What happened to the World? What happened to that Child?]
Presents an autoethnographic Performance-Lecture that will follow the four stages of transmutation: Nigredo; Albedo; Citrinitas; Rubedo.
Solve et Coagula is a process of alchemical development, a spiraling gesture that allows matter and thoughts to reassess themselves, revealing the inherent qualities of materials and their emotional charge. Through a combination of mind maps, symbolic pillows, and edible sculptures, Luca stimulates the embodiment of these transformations.
- 17:00 - 18:00 - Artist Talk by Yemo Park: Spit Spirit
Explores distillation as both a material process and a social ritual. Through three parallel experiments—each starting from a different form of ingestion, processing, and circulation: fermented chewed bread, marshmallow, and Coca-Cola.
Through a live demonstration, she walks the audience through the stages of distillation, from the first volatile compounds to the more drinkable fractions. As each batch runs, differences in smell, pace, and behavior become apparent and shapes how the process is experienced.
- 19:30 - 21:00 - Culinary Intervention by Justine Grillet: On the Puppet and What Spills
(Image: Graphic Design by Vlad Boyko)
(Text by Saskia Smith)