The walk begins by eating one of the sourdough bread buns offered in the gallery space. With the bun, the audience member receives a note with instructions and a coin. Consuming the bread immediately creates a physical relationship with the walk. The bread is what will be guiding you on the journey you are about to embark on. A soft companion, present at once in both the physical and the imaginary realm; the key to entering the multiplicity of realities this walk is exploring. Multiplicity and entanglement were two important key-words in our process. To reflect what we learned through our research about how microorganisms affect our lives and the complexity of their world-making, we attempted to blend multiple narrations (in terms of style, information, reality, focus, temporality and size). Directions are woven within poetry, a story in the middle, an intimate relationship with the listener, a jumping between human and other-than-human voices, physical sensations from different times and places, all come together to ferment. Energia Kohvik We knew from the beginning that the “legendary'' cafe Energia would play a role in the work. And although we paid a visit to many “legendary” old cafes in Tallinn (what a nice source of research) we decided to settle with Energia Kohvik as it made geographically more sense and contained a vibe / sense of time that we strongly appreciated. We spend a long time there, observing the customers and their orders and sensing the bending of time and space that takes place in this cafe. It felt to us like a portal to a timelessness that is rarely found within a city. Our time there culminated into writing a letter for the audience member to read while taking a break from the walk, resting from the walking and the cold. It was important to exit the headphone space for a while. A return to the senses while still being held by the story. The letter was itself an attempt to capture this liquidity of time, space and materiality; A play with senso-reality and fantasy, a letter to a different time. (view script) The Attic Finding a place to host our exploration was perhaps the most challenging out of the practical tasks we had to face. It needed to be a space that reflects the permeability we were dealing with, as well as a space that both relates to the fermentation processes and at the same time, somehow, puts them out of context. After going through several places and searching for a home, we eventually were lucky enough to have access to the attic of yet another “legendary” building, a building from the Stalin era that used to be home to generals and other kinds of people that were deemed important at the time. Looking at that building from the outside one notices a big star decorating the top of it and right underneath that star, a single round window. That is the exact window one looks out from when inside the attic. Upon entering, we were met with the strong odour that comes from processes of decomposition. “Fermentation is domesticated decomposition; rot re-housed”. Therefore we felt this attic was an ideal host for our installation, our fermentations and stories sharing space with the decomposing pigeon remains, and it became the final destination of our walk: Upon completing the journey, the audience member is invited upstairs where they meet with a strange laboratory; our mythical sourdough, passed on from generation to generation and kept alive through practices such as “the sourdough facial”, quite literally feeding off of the skin of its human companion, the magic stick responsible for all viking fermentations (as well as a “real” photograph of the magical viking himself), the cave where we keep the sourdough warm and cosy, a video installation of bodies, sourdough and the building becoming sharing skin, and an opportunity to listen to yeast doing its magic in real time. The installation offered a landing for the concepts touched during the walk and allowed for a further physicalization of the experience. Story-telling In search for a surface for our findings to land on, and a way to enhance the practice of interweaving as well as celebrate the mythical/magical dimensions that yeast has taken over the course of its relationship with humanity, we moved towards story-telling. We were especially keen on the fact that a story simply unravels itself and its world without necessarily expecting a specific way of relating. So the desire was to spread the story out in the city, ground it in the architecture and in physical/sensorial experience, weave it with micro-biology and let it bounce back into the realm of fantasy.